On the political front, it's been a year of hardball between the right and the left, the anti-Clintonites and the anti-Bushites, Iraq warriors and doves. So just who is slandering whom in readers' eyes? Ann Coulter accuses the left of Treason (Crown Forum), Al Franken says she's telling Lies (Dutton), and they both hit the bestseller lists (but will they sell a million copies, like Hillary's Living History [Simon & Schuster]?). Sidney Blumenthal defended his former boss in The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and David Frum defended his in The Right Man (Random). At year's end, the country's reading seems to be slightly left. And the battle promises to continue into the presidential election year.
A related hot-button issue was foreign policy—the war in Iraq, America's role in the world, the rights and wrongs of American empire. The fray was led off by Robert Kagan's controversial Of Paradise and Power (Knopf); Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom (Norton) was a surprise bestseller. The war on terror was advocated by thinkers of varying stripes, from leftist Paul Berman (Terror and Liberalism, Norton) to the more conservative Jean Bethke Elshtain (Just War Against Terror, Basic).
The bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase in 2003 brought a slew of books about that watershed event and the consequent expedition of Lewis and Clark. Listed below among our best books is Jon Kukla's A Wilderness So Immense; another noteworthy account is Charles Cerami's Jefferson's Great Gamble (Sourcebooks).
A plethora of titles attempting to take stock of the Iraq War appeared almost as soon as fighting tailed off, the most grounded being Murray and Scales's The Iraq War (Harvard Univ.), which takes a military historical perspective. A number of philosophical texts treated the underpinnings of war with mixed success, as in Willard Gaylin's Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence (Public Affairs), the most astonishing being William T. Vollmann's massive hybrid work, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeney's).
With the war, the subjects of journalism and reporting moved to the forefront of many readers' awareness. A fair number of memoirs by foreign correspondents—and not necessarily by journalists in the Middle East—made their way into bookstores. Among the standouts were Janine di Giovanni's Madness Visible (Knopf), Lynne Duke's Mandela, Mobuto and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey (Doubleday), Saira Shah's The Storyteller's Daughter (Knopf) and Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent's Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya (St. Martin's).
Russia and Chechnya were in the news and within the pages of such books as Khassan Baiev's The Oath (Walker), Andrew Meier's Black Earth (Norton) and T.J. Binyon's biography of Russia's great bard, Pushkin (Knopf).
Presciently, given the hoopla over the California gubernatorial recall vote, two esteemed writers penned worthy books on the state of the state: A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate by Marc Reisner (Pantheon) and Where I Was From by Joan Didion (Knopf).
Two major centenaries this year—the World Series and the first flight of Kitty Hawk—produced a number of titles in those categories. For the anniversary of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first flight, several coffee-table books hit the shelves, although strong narratives such as James Tobin's To Conquer the Air (Free Press) stood out. Of the many books on the World Series (including several wonderful illustrated books), there were a few standouts, including Autumn Glory (Hill & Wang/FSG) by Louis P. Masur. Elsewhere in sports, there were many sightings of equestrian titles inspired by and on the subject of Seabiscuit; football fans got an inside look at the NFL in Bloody Sundays (Morrow) by Mike Freeman, and at the Tampa Buccaneers' winning season in Jon Gruden's Do You Love Football?! (HarperCollins).
In music studies, pop ruled (though Chopin's Funeral by Benita Eisler [Knopf] stood out, as did Rebecca Rischin's For the End of Time from Cornell Univ.), with books on Eminem, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—but it was Sammy Davis Jr. who took the spotlight this year with two biographies. In film, Katharine Hepburn's death generated a flurry of books on the gifted actor. In addition to A. Scott Berg's blockbuster Kate Remembered (Putnam), there were volumes offering quotes (Harper Entertainment's Katharine Hepburn Once Said...: Great Lines to Live By by Susan Crimp) and photos (Life magazine's Katharine Hepburn Commemorative, published by Time Inc.). Among movie star bios, Olympia Dukakis penned a memoir (Ask Me Again Tomorrow, HarperCollins), and Patrick McGilligan deftly profiled Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (Regan Books).
In travel, the number of literary takes on geographic locales swelled. Colson Whitehead offered The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (Doubleday); Chuck Palahniuk shared Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (Crown) and Kathryn Harrison presented The Road to Santiago (National Geographic).
Gulag: A HistoryAnne Applebaum (Doubleday)
This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how a regulated, centralized system of prison labor gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution.
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's ResponsePeter Balakian (HarperCollins)
An essential, chilling account of the 20th century's first genocide—by Turks of 1.5 million Armenians—a virtual template for the horrors that followed.
The Constants of Nature: From Alpha to Omega—The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the UniverseJohn D. Barrow (Pantheon)
Cambridge physicist Barrow traces scientists' evolving understanding of natural constants, like the speed of light, in this erudite and enthralling work of popular science.
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American SlavesIra Berlin (Harvard Univ.)
While preserving the terrible complexity and diversity of North American slavery, Berlin offers a compact scholarly account of the transformation of a society with slaves into a slave society.
Franklin Delano RooseveltConrad Black (Public Affairs)
Sweeping and persuasive, barbed yet balanced, this is the best life of the 32nd president in one volume, or at any length.
The Los Angeles Diaries: A MemoirJames Brown (Morrow)
Novelist Brown mines the explosive territory of his own harshly complicated life in this gut-wrenching memoir. Juxtaposed with the shimmery unreality of Hollywood, these essays bitterly explore real life, an existence careening between great promise and utter devastation.
The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the SensesChandler Burr (Random)
Burr turns science into a literary and sensory delight in this buoyant portrait of a scientific original, Luca Turin.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks MatterTom Cahill (Doubleday/Talese)
An elegant introduction to the ancient Greeks—the same kind of majestic historical survey Cahill has previously offered on the Irish and the Jews.
One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and ClarkColin G. Calloway (Univ. of Nebraska)
The scope of this overview of Native American societies—from the Appalachians to the Pacific, in a time frame from prehistory to the 18th century—is staggering, but Calloway (First Peoples) masters it, demonstrating remarkable command of a broad spectrum of historical, ethnographic and archeological sources.
The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of HistoryJean-Pierre Chrétien, trans. by Scott Strauss (Zone)
Beyond the context of an ongoing human tragedy—at least 3.3 million dead in civil and regional wars—this comprehensive history of a part of Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, the eastern Congo, Uganda and western Tanzania) fills an enormous gap in the historical record with elegance and dispassionate firmness.
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917—1963Robert Dallek (Little, Brown)
A tour de force that breaks new ground; the benchmark JFK bio of this generation.
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling BrainAntonio Damasio (Harcourt)
Deftly combining recent advances in neuroscience with charged meditations on foundational 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, eminent scientist Damasio checks in with his third and fullest report on the nature of feelings.
Where I Was FromJoan Didion (Knopf)
California comes under Didion's captivating, merciless microscope in her controversial look at the greed and wasteful extravagance lurking beneath the state's eternal sunshine.
Madness Visible: A Memoir of WarJanine di Giovanni (Knopf)
In this devastating memoir of the Balkans, di Giovanni presents a harrowing, firsthand account of a region's spiral into madness.
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban BoyCarlos Eire (Free Press)
A vibrant, imaginatively wrought memoir of an idyllic 1950s boyhood in Havana and of being wrenched away post-Batista and shipped to the U.S.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American PilgrimagePaul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Four 20th-century writers whose work was steeped in their shared Catholic faith come together in this masterful interplay of biography and literary criticism.
Guston in Time: Remembering Philip GustonRoss Feld (Counterpoint)
In a moving memorial to a deep and supportive friendship, poet and critic Feld keeps a keen focus on Guston's work, especially the paintings of his last years; the results, informed by his intimacy with the artist, are near-definitive models of passionate clarity and explication.
City RoomArthur Gelb (Putnam/Marian Wood)
Gelb began as a copyboy at the New York Times in 1944 and retired as managing editor in 1990; his enthralling memoir shares a wealth of terrific stories.
City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade CenterJames Glanz and Eric Lipton (Times)
New York Times reporters Glanz (science) and Lipton (metropolitan news) deliver an intensively researched, meticulously documented and thoroughly absorbing account of how the World Trade Center developed from an embryonic 1939 World's Fair building to "a city in the sky, the likes of which the planet had never seen."
The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign LandsAdan Hartley (Atlantic Monthly)
A sweeping, poetic homage to Africa and a searing account of the troubles of a continent still emerging from colonialism.
In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.Wil Haygood (Knopf)
In this moving, exhaustive life of one of America's greatest entertainers, Haygood casts Sammy Davis Jr. as a man shifting between identities, between the worlds of black people and white people.
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily DickinsonJennifer Hecht (HarperCollins)
Elegant prose (Hecht is a poet) beautifully dramatizes the struggle between belief and denial, perfectly calibrating historical currents and individual wrestlings with the angel to weigh the history of uncertainty.
Mountains Beyond MountainsTracy Kidder (Random)
In this excellent work, Pulitzer Prize—winner Kidder immerses himself in and beautifully explores the rich drama that exists in the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Massachusetts native who has been working in Haiti since 1982.
Against Love: A PolemicLaura Kipnis (Pantheon)
A ragingly witty yet contemplative look at the discontents of domestic and erotic relationships combines portions of the slashing sexual contrarianism of Mailer, the scathing antidomestic wit of early Roseanne Barr and the coolly analytical aesthetics of early Sontag.
A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of AmericaJon Kukla (Knopf)
Rarely does a work of history combine grace of writing with such broad authority—this is the book to read for the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed AmericaErik Larson (Crown)
This book features everything popular history should: breathtaking narrative combined with a novelistic yet wholly factual approach, as Larson writes about an emerging metropolis, Chicago, and the ghastly killings it harbored.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the BronxAdrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner)
Politicians rail about welfare queens, crack babies and deadbeat dads, but what do they know about the real struggle it takes to survive being poor? LeBlanc spent some 10 years researching and interviewing one extended family from the Bronx to Troy, N.Y., in and out of public housing, emergency rooms, prisons and courtrooms.
Poker Face: A Girlhood Among GamblersKaty Lederer (Crown)
Centered on dead-on perceptions of the swirling needs, poses and cruelties of her family, Lederer's debut memoir is less Positively Fifth Street than an alienated New England version of The Liar's Club and ends up with some of the best of both.
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A MemoirJoe LeSueur (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
LeSueur shared four New York apartments (and dozens of famous friends) with the poet Frank O'Hara during the last 10 years of the poet's life. Sometimes chatty, sometimes incisive and sometimes not so sweet, this book links facts about the life to the poems they best explain, and is wildly entertaining in the process.
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?Bernard-Henri Lévy, trans. from the French by James X. Mitchell (Melville House)
With bold, daring journalism, French writer and philosopher Lévy traces Daniel Pearl's steps and surmises who murdered the journalist and why.
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy TerrorBernard Lewis (Modern Library)
The bestselling author of What Went Wrong? cogently investigates the roots of Muslim extremism in this taut and timely expansion of his award-winning New Yorker article.
Bull!: A History of the Boom, 1982—1999: What Drove the Breakneck Market—and What Every Investor Needs to Know About Financial CyclesMaggie Mahar (Harper Business)
Financial journalist Mahar offers a thorough and accessible history of the explosive 1982—1999 bull market that is illuminating as well as sobering from the current bear market perspective.
Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of ReadingNancy M. Malone (Riverhead)
An Ursuline nun with an omnivorous reading habit considers how her passion for books has affected the rest of her life in this erudite and beautifully written memoir.
They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967David Maraniss (Simon &Schuster)
Two intertwined narratives offer a fierce, vivid diptych of America, at home and abroad, bisected by a tragic war.
Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture 1947—1985James McCourt (Norton)
Swollen to bursting with essays on film, lists of essential gay bars, invented characters breaking into Compton-Burnett chitchat and much more, this book dazzles readers straight and gay with erudition, and possibly lists every important event that happened in gay Manhattan over a 40-year period.
A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870—1920Michael McGerr (Free Press)
This remarkable account explores the true dimensions of an explosive era, vividly weaving together an array of vignettes and themes.
Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. DouglasBruce Allen Murphy (Random)
Murphy's biography of the late Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas is as much a history of American politics in the mid—20th century as it is a portrayal of the man himself.
ReadingLolitain Tehran: A Memoir in BooksAzar Nafisi (Random)
Literature professor Nafisi writes about teaching Lolita, The Great Gatsby and 1984 in her native Iran. Her book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three.
The Boy and the Dog Are SleepingNasdijj (Ballantine)
Could the story be simpler? Man adopts dying child, child dies, man grieves. And yet, in the hands of Navajo author Nasdijj, this experience is a window into the larger question of what's really important in life.
The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis PresleyAlanna Nash (Simon & Schuster)
Using the cunning of a detective and the straightforward prose of a journalist, Nash, to the delight of Elvis lovers everywhere, answers some lingering questions while posing a few new ones about the man who made the King and then stole his crown.
What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical WorldDerrick Niederman and David Boyum (Broadway)
A mathematician and a public policy analyst show that quantitative competence is mostly a matter of simple habits in this light-handed and equation-free primer to probability, statistics and other useful calculations.
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo FrankSteve Oney (Pantheon)
Both dramatically compelling and historically exacting, with new and unsettling material, this is the definitive account of a touchstone of American intolerance.
Letters to a Young Therapist: Stories of Hope and HealingMary Pipher (Basic)
Even the most cynical psych snob will find this series of seasonally themed letters—to a fictional graduate student and describing psychotherapy from the inside out—refreshing, informative and insightful.
Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the MindDavid Quammen (Norton)
With equal parts lucid travel narrative and scholarly rumination, Quammen describes the fascinating past, tenuous present and bleak future of four supremely adapted predators who are finding themselves increasingly out of place in the modern world.
Branded: The Buying and Selling of TeenagersAlissa Quart (Perseus)
This book has spawned literally thousands of copycat articles on marketing to (and by) teenagers. Quart is brilliant on the world in which teens, "obsessed with brand names[,] feel they have a lack that only superbranding will cover over."
The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an EpidemicGay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury (Norton)
The Salisburys document a 674-mile dogsled journey to combat a diphtheria epidemic in upstate Alaska in 1922, with tales of total isolation, endless night, bizarre acoustics, unreliably frozen rivers and 60-below temperatures.
True NotebooksMark Salzman (Knopf)
In this provoking and beautifully composed account, Salzman, a volunteer creative writing teacher at a Los Angeles County detention facility for "high-risk" juvenile offenders, concludes that "a little good has got to be better than no good at all."
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the WakeCarol Loeb Schloss (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
A groundbreaking study of James Joyce's volatile daughter, whom he believed was a genius in her own right and who was a possible model for Anna Livia Plurabelle.
Schott's Original MiscellanyBen Schott (Bloomsbury)
Charmingly designed to resemble an old-fashioned farmer's almanac, Schott's diminutive volume of trivia contains a delightfully eclectic collection of facts, diagrams, quotations and symbols.
A Voice at the Borders of SilenceWilliam Segal (Overlook)
This rich, lavishly illustrated memoir of a life well lived, including rare and absorbing firsthand accounts of encounters with G.I. Gurdjieff, D.T. Suzuki and work in Japanese Zen monasteries just after WWII, is an important and inspiring contribution to the history of Buddhism and of spiritual search in America.
The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race TogetherMichael Shapiro (Doubleday)
Equal parts sports, history, politics and sociology, Shapiro's book is reminiscent of the works of Caro, Halberstam and Kahn, and belongs in every sports fan's library.
Frankie's Place: A Love StoryJim Sterba (Grove)
Rarely does a subtitle describe a book so well as this one encapsulates journalist Sterba's experiences at the Maine cabin of his sweetheart, Pulitzer Prize winner Frances "Frankie" Fitzgerald.
Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James CookNicholas Thomas (Walker)
Rich, vivid and deeply provocative, Thomas's work combines premiere adventure story with thorough history and intensive sociology.
Rising Up and Rising DownWilliam T. Vollmann (McSweeney's)
Nothing less than "a critique of terrorist, defensive, military and police activity," along with an attempt to construct a moral calculus for the human use of violence, the seven volumes of this work are designed to get ordinary people thinking about the role violence, even at a distance, plays in their lives.
Triangle: The Fire That Changed AmericaDavid Von Drehle (Atlantic Monthly)
Von Drehle's engrossing account, which emphasizes the humanity of the victims in the 1911 shirtwaist factory fire, brings one of the pivotal and most shocking episodes of American labor history to life.
The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870—1871Geoffrey Wawro (Cambridge Univ.)
The brief, seldom-discussed but crucial Franco-Prussian war gets its due in Wawro's gripping narrative history and analytic tour de force.
All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American MastersCraig R. Whitney (Public Affairs)
In this lively history of the pipe organ in America, Whitney, an amateur organist, weaves a tale of opposing ideas and colorful personalities.
An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of AmericaHenry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
An important and original study of the deep moral struggle that led Washington to the radical decision to free his slaves.
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883Simon Winchester (HarperCollins)
An erudite, fascinating account by one of the foremost purveyors of contemporary nonfiction, this book chronicles the underlying causes, utter devastation and lasting effects of the cataclysmic 1883 eruption of the volcano island Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia.
See our "best books" in the following categories:
