BEST BOOKS OF 2003

If all there was to reading this year was Madonna's "Is-this-a- joke?" children's book, Hillary Clinton's memoir and J.K. Rowling's newest (and wrist-snapping) installment in the Harry Potter series, we'd all have plenty of shelf space -- and a lot of soul searching to do.

Luckily, this year delivered plenty of marvelous works for anybody wishing to seek them out, not least among them novels by the latest Nobel laureate in literature (J.M. Coetzee) and a past one (Toni Morrison), and the first book in a three-volume autobiography of another laureate and one of the best novelists ever to draw breath (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). And that's just a tiny sample of the great stuff that came out in 2003.

What follows is the Book Review's selection of the best of the year, many of which are works that happen to have been written by Bay Area authors. It's all here: biographies, histories, story collections, poetry, essays, reportage, novels. The only thing missing is an arbitrary hierarchical ranking of the titles. Life's just too short, you know?

-- Oscar Villalon, Book Editor

American Woman by Susan Choi (HarperCollins; 369 pages; 24ドル.95): In her stunning, cinematic second novel, "American Woman," the author of "The Foreign Student" revisits '70s radicalism with a fictionalized story reminiscent of the Patty Hearst kidnapping and its aftermath. But the focus is on Jenny, who shares many similarities with real-life Symbionese Liberation Army member Wendy Yoshimura. As the book opens, Jenny has fled the Bay Area to the East Coast because she's wanted for the bombing of draft offices to protest the war in Vietnam. Using the alias Iris Wong, she leads a solitary, furtive existence, until an old comrade tracks her down and enlists her help to look after three younger fugitives, one of whom is the kidnapped granddaughter of a newspaper tycoon. The heiress later pledges allegiance to her abductors. Choi is a novelist of such depth and delicacy that she manages to sidestep the myriad dangers of fictionalizing an episode so familiar and so iconic.

Any Human Heart by William Boyd (Knopf; 486 pages; 26ドル): Boyd's intoxicating eighth novel is cast in the form of journal entries, from age 6 to the moment of death at age 85, of Logan Gonzago Montstuart. Another in a long line of internationals in Boyd's fiction, Logan is born of a Uruguayan mother and British merchant father. The turning points of his life conjoin neatly with the turning points of the century just past. In one of the very few studied effects in this novel, Logan manages to live, sometimes quite prominently, through every decade of that century. There's a fair amount of name-dropping: Logan covers the Spanish Civil War alongside Hemingway. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Frank O'Hara, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret all make walk-on appearances. Picasso and Ian Fleming are given slightly larger roles. It's an exhilarating ride, and sheer fun.

Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp (Counterpoint; 210 pages; 24ドル): This last book by Knapp chronicles her early battle with anorexia, which she referred to in "Drinking: A Love Story," her 1996 book about her battle with alcoholism. But "Appetites" is more ambitious than "Drinking." It is much more than a "body book." The denial of food is a metaphor to explore the difficulties women have coping with, or even acknowledging, desires of all kinds -- for sex, love and professional accomplishment. Knapp, who died last year of lung cancer at 42, brought wisdom and wit to the chronicles of her struggles with addiction.

The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara by Geoffrey Wolff (Knopf; 373 pages; 30ドル): Wolff performs the formidable task of endearing writer John O'Hara, the prickly, difficult author -- most famously of the novel "Appointment in Samarra" -- to his readers and himself in this biography armed with nothing but a host of superlative writing and interpretative skills. Wolff explains openly how he arrived at the outlook with which he views his subject. And because of Wolff's sincere desire to learn about his subject rather than condemn him, the reader witnesses a rare and beautiful thing: The writer himself seems to evolve as his stance toward O'Hara softens from frustration to a peaceful understanding.

As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002 by Clive James (Norton; 619 pages; 35ドル): Few critics could, without embarrassment, see nearly 35 years of their work collected under the heading "The Essential Essays." But the tribute fits Clive James like aftershave. Writing frequently for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the New Yorker and other periodicals, the Australian-born London literary critic has made himself a central voice in his field. Nearly all the 47 essays in "As of This Writing" will strike American readers as keepers.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Knopf; 320 pages; 24ドル): It is not unusual for the Western detective story to be transplanted into Far Eastern surroundings. But it is the rare novel that offers a seductive and engaging local protagonist of such a story, penned by a Westerner. This third novel from John Burdett ("The Last Six Million Seconds," "A Personal History of Thirst") does both with resounding success. Set in contemporary Bangkok, the novel opens with a horrific dual killing, one of the victims a Thai police officer. The story is narrated by the dead cop's partner, the complex Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who vows to track down and kill his murderers. Sonchai's Buddhist spirituality adds a dimension not typically found in the genre.

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase (Random House; 256 pages; 25ドル.95): A Bay Area science reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Chase here investigates the rat-borne epidemic that plagued San Francisco between 1900 and 1909, finding plenty of scurrilous behavior to go around among the era's newspapers, merchants and politicians. Her flavorful, consistently enthralling story charts how a few doctors and residents raced to contain, treat and ultimately beat the contagion, all the while working against a murderously shortsighted attempt by city boosters to preserve tourism and commerce in San Francisco.

The Big Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom: The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation by Wes "Scoop" Nisker (HarperSanFrancisco; 224 pages; 24ドル.95): The hippie history Nisker participated in has been described by many authors. But here the landmark events and trends -- to which Nisker often had a front- row seat, if not a place onstage -- are really the context for Nisker's book on how he evolved into a confirmed and renowned contemporary Buddhist figure. Nisker relates his brief, almost breezy autobiographical story of the past 40 or so years, mostly lived in the Bay Area, with skillful storytelling and self- deprecating humor.

Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona by Ryan Harty (University of Iowa Press; 158 pages; 15ドル.95 paperback): Don't look for Scottsdale's gated communities or Sedona's posh resorts in San Francisco writer Harty's story collection. "Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona" gives voice to fragmented families, abused children, war-weary veterans -- the people in the street. Any street, anywhere. But central Phoenix, with its shabby bungalows, blaring car alarms and unremitting heat, provides a fitting background for these gritty stories. Here, a hometown boy evokes bedraggled desert people with the authority of an eyewitness.

The Bug by Ellen Ullman (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 355 pages; 23ドル.95): In "The Bug," the whole world of computer programming peril and joy unfolds with the narrative force of a detective story. Ullman, a San Francisco writer, tells in her first novel the tale of an '80s computer engineer trying to reckon with a mysterious user interface bug called the Jester that brings his project and his company to the edge of disaster and eventually causes his life to crash.

The Calligrapher by Edward Docx (Houghton Mifflin; 360 pages; 24ドル): Jasper Jackson, the hero of British book critic Edward Docx's deeply enjoyable first novel, makes a living practicing the archaic art of calligraphy and is, by his own admission, a professional seducer. From the start of the tale, which Jasper tells in flashback, Docx slyly hints at dangers to come. As revelations and reversals befall Japser, it's a pleasure watching the young rake receive his comeuppance.

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile (Atlantic; 550 pages; 26ドル): Veteran CBS producer Crile focuses in "Charlie Wilson's War" on the irresistible tale of a tall cowboy congressman from Texas who did more than any other individual to turn the Soviet experience in Afghanistan into a demoralizing replay of the American debacle in Vietnam. As Crile details how the CIA through Wilson successfully armed and trained the Afghan mujahedeen, he equips us to do our own thinking about this crucial historical episode whose consequences are still being felt.

The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang (Viking; 496 pages; 29ドル.95): Iris Chang, historian and best-selling author of "The Rape of Nanking," makes a convincing case in her engrossing new book that throughout the 150 years of Chinese immigration to the United States, "success can be as dangerous as failure: whenever the ethnic Chinese visibly excelled -- whether as menial laborers, scholars, or businessmen -- efforts arose simultaneously to depict their contributions not as a boon to white America but as a threat." The Chinese Americans' struggle for success, its costs and tenuousness, are major themes in Chang's highly readable, panoramic history of Chinese American immigration from the Gold Mountain generation to the present.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus (HarperCollins; 295 pages; 24ドル.95): Kalfus' thrillingly intelligent first novel about the death of Tolstoy and the birth of public relations starts by recounting the writer's demise from the perspectives of an opportunistic British journalist, a pioneering Ukrainian pathologist and a callow newsreel cameraman named Gribshin. One is scheming to merchandise Tolstoy's likeness, one to embalm his body and one to put his final moments on film. As the second half of the novel begins, it's 14 years later, and Stalin has made Gribshin his minister of propaganda -- his "commissar of enlightenment." Lenin is dying in his dacha outside Moscow, and Gribshin is bent on stage-managing Lenin's death to maximum effect. That's the setup for a finish that ranks among the finest of any American novel in several years.

The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon (Viking; 405 pages; 24ドル.95): Gordon's third novel -- at once an intellectual, emotional and political thriller -- is about a divorced father attempting to explain to his teen daughter the events in the 1970s that caused him to go underground and then those in 1996 that caused him to emerge from his 20 years incognito -- and abandon her. A custody battle, several love stories and an adrenaline-pumping manhunt propel the story, all underpinned by the serious ideas that guided the radical Weather Underground in the Vietnam War era -- and remain relevant today.

Crabwalk by Gunter Grass (Harcourt; 234 pages; 25ドル): Tracing the circumstances and lives involved in the 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine -- resulting in 9,000 dead, most of them refugees, women and children -- this short yet sprawling novel serves as a reminder of Grass' myriad writerly gifts: his narrative exuberance, his fusing of the personal and political and his grappling with Germany's Nazi legacy.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (Doubleday; 236 pages; 22ドル.95): The protagonist and narrator of Haddon's novel, Christopher, is utterly logical, mathematically brilliant and totally unable to understand the complex emotional lives of those around him -- in short, he is autistic. Haddon's portrayal of Christopher's worldview is deeply sympathetic and insightful as he crafts an unusual and engaging novel of adolescence that combines elements from the coming-of-age novel, autobiography and, above all, detective fiction.

Curzon: Imperial Statesman by David Gilmour (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 684 pages; 45ドル): Gilmour's biography of the famous British politician and foreign secretary George Curzon is an authoritative account of a complex man and his life and career -- one that reveled in grandiosity and pomposity. Well researched, it is also clearly and skillfully written, making it a pleasure to read. This is one biographer who -- refreshingly in the current climate of skepticism about truth being either possible or desirable -- is scrupulous about accuracy.

Dancer by Colum McCann (Metropolitan; 356 pages; 26ドル): In his exuberant and exhilarating new novel, "Dancer," McCann hews fairly closely to real events, but his intention is not to document Rudolf Nureyev's life. Instead, he uses inspired language to convey what that life must have felt like -- to Nureyev himself and to those who came within his enchanted orbit. Using a patchwork of voices, McCann builds up a portrait of a person who was at once brilliant and infuriating.

A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate by Marc Reisner (Pantheon; 181 pages; 22ドル): In his new and last book, the late Marc Reisner, author of the landmark "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water," helps explain the seismic haymaker slowly gathering strength to floor our state. The first section provides a trenchant retelling of California's environmental history, from the era of Father Junipero Serra's mission system up to our own Bayshore Freeway; the middle section sets out in understandable language the fundamentals of plate tectonics; the third and longest section describes a hypothetical Big One that strikes along the Hayward Fault in 2005 and its likely consequences, most of them catastrophic. Written as Reisner was dying of cancer, "A Dangerous Place" becomes not just a benchmark in California environmental history but a profoundly emotional valediction.

Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin; 472 pages; 28ドル): In this account of his journey from Cairo to Cape Town, travel writer Theroux balances strong opinion with visceral detail, successfully wrestling Paul Theroux with one hand, the continent of Africa with the other. Theroux's energy is infectious, his curiosity omnivorous, his audacity, well, remarkable. Seemingly determined to cram the bulk and breadth of Africa into one book, he gives us everything -- "the lepers, hyenas, ivory tusks, and garbage; the complaining donkeys, the open drains in the cobbled alleys . . . the butcher covered with blood, raising his cleaver to split a furry hump and reveal the smooth cheese of camel fat" -- with a gusto that makes it well-nigh impossible to resist.

Death in Slow Motion: My Mother's Descent Into Alzheimer's by Eleanor Cooney (HarperCollins; 251 pages; 23ドル.95): Cooney's savagely detailed, no- holds-barred account of 18 months of trying to care for her beloved and once- vivacious mother might send you running for Valium or whiskey, but she tells her story with such panic-stricken speed and wicked humor that you are much more likely to find it immensely moving and terrifyingly funny. The battle Cooney relates is both hopeless and heroic.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson (Crown; 447 pages; 25ドル.95): This is as absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find. Readers will soon forget that Larson's work is nonfiction and, instead, imagine that they are holding a fictional page-turner. Larson chronicles the architectural achievement of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago -- what became known as White City -- and a parallel story of H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. The medically trained Holmes opened the World's Fair Hotel just a few blocks from the fair itself. The inn was a house of horrors for young, single women drawn to the city's fair in search of husbands and careers. After they fell in love with the dashing Holmes, they disappeared.

Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic by Meredith Maran (HarperSanFrancisco; 311 pages; 24ドル.95): Maran's exploration of youthful self-destruction, "Dirty," is wrenching as both advocacy journalism and parental confessional. Suffused with her own anguished guilt as the mother of a child who spent his adolescence flirting with prison or death, this passionate, affecting book reveals through the lives of three diverse Bay Area teenagers how eagerly many teens obtain drugs and how difficult and fraught it can be to help them stop.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer (Riverhead; 238 pages; 24ドル.95): Packer, a Jones Lecturer at Stanford whose title story here was included in the New Yorker's debut fiction issue in 2000, doesn't merely tell stories brilliantly. She also packs each of the eight in this collection with a right- between-the-eyes moral about issues of race and black identity. She has a commanding sense of character and setting, a captivating eye for detail and, most of all, a bold and often thrilling usage of language and style.

Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital (Norton; 401 pages; 24ドル.95): Superficially a thriller in the clever, Continental manner of John le Carre, "Due Preparations for the Plague" shows what can happen when a serious artist gets her hands on a fictional genre. Hospital ("The Last Magician," "Oyster") offers a very rough parallel universe to the events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- detailing the disastrous '80s hijacking of an Air France flight by Muslim terrorists and its long aftermath. Though the complex plot involving a hijacked flight is clearly fictional, Hospital's novel taps into the deepest fears and unanswered questions distilled by that day.

The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits (Putnam; 325 pages; 23ドル. 95): In Julavits' second novel, a dysfunctional makeshift family of sparring sisters, quasi-celebrities, academics and retirees finds itself hostage on a Moroccan Air flight hijacked by a blind man named Bruno, whose demands are never articulated. Suspenseful, energetic and literarily playful, the story is told by Alice (as in "Through the Looking Glass"), who relates a hostage crisis that is far from conventional.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee (Viking; 230 pages; 21ドル.95): Tired and arthritic at 66, Elizabeth Costello doesn't suffer fools gladly. When she appears in public, she finds herself unable to play the part of the genteel lady novelist. Instead, she harangues audiences on her pet subjects, which range from the existence of evil to the rights of animals. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's new novel, which is structured around a series of lectures, gives insight into the author's own diffidence toward the public while exploring the worth of fiction and the point of writing.

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes (Random House; 416 pages; 29ドル.95): During the 35 years from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, there were immense fortunes to be made by those who could develop, exploit and control the dazzling new technology of electricity. Jill Jonnes, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, chronicles the rush to bring electric power to the country through three fascinating and wonderfully rich characters central to the story: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. It is a story of the collision of business and technology, and Jonnes tells it well.

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben (Times; 271 pages; 25ドル): McKibben ("The End of Nature") believes we've come to a threshold with the emerging technologies of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology that will force us to confront deep questions about the meaning of human life. "Enough" challenges us to answer these questions courageously, making the case that in an emerging landscape of seemingly limitless possibilities -- such as custom-made, super-enhanced children -- perhaps the best solution is to declare our present lives sufficient.

A Faker's Dozen by Melvin Jules Bukiet (Norton; 268 pages; 23ドル.95): Bukiet may not be a familiar name for many fiction readers, but it should be. At his best -- and in this new collection of stories Bukiet is often at his brilliant best -- he is a match for the wittiest and funniest writers alive. "A Faker's Dozen" is a feast, not only of fakers, liars and fools on the make but of language itself.

Fanny by Edmund White (Ecco; 384 pages; 24ドル.95): Fanny Wright was a 19th century feminist and socialist. When she was introduced to Fanny Trollope in England, their friendship, and eventual bitter rivalry, began, carrying them both to America. White's novel about the pair is impressively researched and carefully constructed. He skillfully wields Trollope's pen and expertly mimics her voice as she exposes Wright's life and their relationship. In doing so, she inadvertently reveals her own life story. White leaves us entranced by two fiery feminists, enlightened by his informed historical insight and perplexed over the continued elusive nature of the American dream.

Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser (Houghton Mifflin; 232 pages; 24ドル): Like Eric Schlosser did in his brilliant "Fast Food Nation," Critser presents a collection of studies, theories and plainspoken observation that draws some dark lines between seemingly unrelated events -- simple changes in the formula for sweetening Coke and Pepsi, the permissive style of Baby Boomer parenting -- as he shows how 60 percent of Americans have become overweight. And as he considers all the consequences that come with this, Critser makes the case for obesity as the country's leading social issue.

The Fifth Book of Peace by Maxine Hong Kingston (Knopf; 402 pages; 26ドル): Bay Area writer Kingston had long wanted to reimagine the contents of ancient China's three Books of Peace -- instructions on how to avoid war and induce tranquility that, according to legend, were all deliberately burned by incoming emperors. She also planned to follow the further adventures of Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of her novel "Tripmaster Monkey," during the Vietnam War. She combined these intentions in a fourth Book of Peace that burned in the 1991 Oakland hills fire. She started work on it again, and finally there is "The Fifth Book of Peace," a wonderful, multilayered work that combines fiction and memoir, beginning with a section called "Fire" that sets up the thematic thread: Before they get to peace, many have gone through fire.

Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism by Scott Brown (New York University Press; 228 pages; 26ドル.95): Of all the vanguard organizations of the late-'60s black power movement, the cultural nationalist group US has received the short end of history, known mostly for a lethal 1969 shoot-out on a college campus. Brown's "Fighting For Us" is the first book exploring the turbulent history of US and the unique impact the organization had on an era, including creating the holiday of Kwanzaa.

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday; 470 pages; 26ドル): This magnificent, ungainly, genre-cracking new novel by the author of "Motherless Brooklyn" is about all kinds of things -- about the past 40 years in America, about popular culture as a salve for the unpopular -- but maybe most of all, it's about how whites and blacks misunderstand each other. In exploring this, through the relationship of two teenage boys in a mixed Brooklyn neighborhood, Lethem winds up confronting race in America with a specificity most white novelists since Mark Twain have been too chicken to try.

Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark by Jim Bouton (Bulldog Publishing; 354 pages; 24ドル.95): Bouton, the author of "Ball Four," offers this entertaining account of trying to save dilapidated old Wahconah Park in New England from the wrecking ball. Told in Bouton's humane and sarcastic voice, this book on the rescue of the country's oldest minor league park and all the politics that have battered pro sports is also a profoundly moving account of how the author copes with the intolerable grief of losing his daughter in a car accident.

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas (Villard; 208 pages; 21ドル.95) and Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon; 160 pages; 17ドル.95): The shadow of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 hangs over both of these books, but it cannot dim the zest for life in either. Dumas had to adjust to California when her family immigrated to Whittier after the revolution. Satrapi stayed in Iran and had to adjust to life under Islamist rule. But somehow both Dumas and Satrapi managed to keep their sense of humor. Perhaps it was the only defense against an ever more absurd world. Satrapi converts a childhood filled with secret police and a long war with Iraq into a comic strip both funny and dark. By being able to laugh at themselves and the world around them even when it turns upside down, Satrapi and Dumas reassure us that neither dour clerics nor xenophobic bigots can destroy the things that count.

Gazelle by Rikki Ducornet (Knopf; 193 pages; 21ドル): Ducornet's works frequently wrestle with passion, with dishonesty, with anger, with terror, but does so in calm, slowly swirling sentences. This novel of a 13-year-old girl's self-discovery in Cairo is no exception. Set at a dreamy pace that sometimes echoes an Alan Rudolph film, "Gazelle" is a sensitively imagined journey into a young girl's ripening soul, one in which Ducornet wisely tempers her rhapsodic gift with psychological wisdom.

Gearheads: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports by Brad Stone (Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; 14ドル paperback): In this lively account of the evolution of robotic sports entertainment, Newsweek's Silicon Valley correspondent, Brad Stone, introduces a colorful cast of innovators, litigators and agitators, all fighting for their piece of a once-lucrative pie. At the heart of the battle is the ill-fated business partnership between erstwhile George Lucas animatronics designer Marc Thorpe, who created "Robot Wars," and his original investor, Profile Record President Steve Plotnicki. But the true stars of the book, not surprisingly, are the "gearheads" themselves -- engineers, artists, mechanics and computer scientists -- as well as their fantastic creations.

Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt; 480 pages; 27ドル.50): It's a commonplace observation that biographers often fall in love with their subjects, dutifully airbrushing out the blemishes. Not so with noted biographer Caroline Moorehead, in whose skillful hands journalist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) comes off as utterly human in all her flaws. Moorehead has written Gellhorn's life as if it were a Greek tragedy. This sort of biography, pitiless in its truth telling and beautifully written, does real justice to Gellhorn.

Ghetto Celebrity: Searching for My Father in Me by Donnell Alexander (Crown; 288 pages; 22ドル.95): From sportswriting for independent newspapers to a paying gig for ESPN magazine, to this memoir, Alexander says he has been writing himself into existence, and "Ghetto Celebrity" is the proof. Entertaining, literate, immersed in pop culture and able to create believable, detailed stories, Alexander transfers all these qualities into his exploration of his life and his connection to his distant father, a small-time R&B singer.

Girls by Nic Kelman (Little, Brown; 224 pages; 22ドル.95): In Kelman's first novel, he presents us with a certain type of man: the affluent, ambitious but spiritually bereft middle-aged businessman who craves a much younger woman. Told through a series of vignettes by a variety of narrators, Kelman's book seems to suggest that it is not true love that is so improbable and artificial, but monogamy.

The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967: Volume Two: Political Turmoil by Clark Kerr (University of California Press; 427 pages; 34ドル.95): For those seeking the real man behind the warring reputations, the late Clark Kerr completed a memoir that recalls not just the view from the UC president's office of the biggest upheavals in the university's history -- the 1949-52 loyalty oath controversy and the 1964 Free Speech Movement -- but also the personal anguish, philosophy and dreams of this Quaker pacifist and son of a Pennsylvania farmer who found himself at the famous university's helm during its greatest trials. Kerr is by turn self-critical and free of false modesty in describing his accomplishments and accolades, while he settles old scores and forgives old enemies.

Good Faith by Jane Smiley (Knopf; 417 pages; 26ドル): Smiley returns to a theme she's already mined for both tragedy and comedy: the collision of agriculture with progress. Where "A Thousand Acres" turned the bequest of a family farm into "Lear"-like tragedy, and her novel "Moo" made comic hay of an agricultural university's uneasy accommodation with change, her new book looks at this same theme -- agrarianism on the skids -- through the eyes of Shakespeare's trusty third genre, history. This time, Smiley sets her pastoral story in the 1980s, and the novel ultimately shares some of that greed-addled decade's familiar assets and debits: great while the fun lasts, but we know too well how it's all going to end.

Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin (Atria; 408 pages; 27ドル): Born from the explosive convergence of youth culture, psychedelics, rock 'n' roll and outrage over the Vietnam War, the Jefferson Airplane was, for the late '60s and early '70s, at the forefront not only of "The San Francisco Sound" but also of a movement that saw saving the world from government intrusion and societal repression as not merely possible but mandatory. Tamarkin traces the band's history from the childhood of its members to the present, depicting the combination of shining innocence, glorious vision and potentially catastrophic cluelessness that often defined the band.

Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power by Lou Cannon (PublicAffairs; 579 pages; 30ドル): Nobody could ask for a better guide than Lou Cannon when spelunking, as Garry Trudeau put it, "in search of Reagan's brain" -- or Reagan's brain trust, the famed Kitchen Cabinet. Cannon has covered Reagan and his circle off and on for four decades, first as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and later for the Washington Post. Now he lives in Summerland (the idyllic beach town near Santa Barbara, not the Michael Chabon novel), and his curiosity about Reagan hasn't flagged yet. "Governor Reagan" stands above all others as the book that Gov. Schwarzenegger needs to read right now.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 278 pages; 24ドル): Hazzard's fourth novel, "The Great Fire," is her first since her masterpiece, "The Transit of Venus," appeared more than 20 years ago. Her new book is a worthy successor. In it, Hazzard returns to the broken postwar world, in which victors and defeated are equally devastated and demoralized. She tells her story through the lives of two men, one Australian and the other English, trying to make sense of their lives at the end of World War II.

The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth by Barbara Seaman (Hyperion; 336 pages; 24ドル.95): Seaman is to sex hormone manufacturers what rat terriers are to tug toys: She won't let go. In her 1969 book, "The Doctor's Case Against the Pill," Seaman warned of serious health risks associated with birth control pills. In "The Greatest Experiment," she tackles the marketing-embedded dogma that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a de facto stage in a woman's life -- despite its linkages to certain cancers, despite a dearth of proof for the claims that HRT helps prevent heart disease, Alzheimer's and colon cancer.

Gritos by Dagoberto Gilb (Grove; 247 pages; 23ドル): In this book of personal essays, "Gritos" (meaning in Spanish, literally, a series of yells, but also referring to the piercing, musical cries of the mariachi), one of the most frequent themes that arises amid his tales of a Chicano writer in a black and white world is the problem with representing authentic cultural identity. Gilb is a journeyman carpenter turned celebrated author who has published many articles in the New Yorker -- an amazing accomplishment for a writer west of the Hudson River, much less a Chicano from El Paso, Texas. "Gritos" is an intimate look at Gilb's growth as a writer grappling with a desire to stay true to his working-class roots and at the same time expose the powerful talent he has for penetrating, honest and emotional writing about cultural misconceptions, family relationships, manual labor and American literature.

The Guru of Love by Samrat Upadhyay (Houghton Mifflin; 290 pages; 23ドル): Upadhyay has written a story that is as much about his native city, Kathmandu, as it is about the desires and disappointments of his novel's protagonists in this tale of a low-wage math teacher living in a cramped apartment with his wife and two children who winds up with a "second wife," a young unwed mother who comes to him for math tutoring. "The Guru of Love" is a meditation on the exquisite difficulty of maintaining self-control in a modern world filled with temptations, and it portrays a Kathmandu as specific and heartfelt as Joyce's Dublin.

Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple (Knopf; 509 pages; 30ドル): We don't hold Nathaniel Hawthorne in our collective American memory the way we do Mark Twain or Walt Whitman. But Hawthorne deserves better. In fact, he's a vital writer for the same reasons that he's not a more paramount figure: His imagination dwells on the subtle contradictions in people, and his curiosity seeks the secret life behind the drawn curtain. Wineapple's meticulously researched and superbly written biography captures the novelist in high resolution. And she doesn't blot out his ambiguities.

Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin (Morrow; 320 pages; 23ドル.95): As a historical novel, "Hell at the Breech" is near flawless. An Alabama native who previously wrote about his home state in the story collection "Poachers," Tom Franklin explores the events leading up to the Mitcham Beat War, a bloody skirmish that erupted between townspeople and farmers in Clarke County, Ala., at the end of the 19th century. Franklin, who grew up in Clarke County, knows how to imbue a scene with period detail without slowing down the narrative or showing off. "Hell at the Breech" is more than a historical novel. It could just as easily be classified as regional fiction, a ghost story or a Western. But in truth it is a murder mystery, as the book opens with a death and closes, several twists and reversals later, with the revelation of the killer.

The Hooligan's Return by Norman Manea; translated by Angela Jianu (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 385 pages; 30ドル): If exile was one of the defining experiences of the past century, then Romanian writer Norman Manea ("The Black Envelope") has written a book for the times: an anatomy of exile and its discontents so attuned to cultural cliche, so resistant to the blandishments of retrospection, that it manages to uncover the inner landscape of displacement in all its complexity while routinely breaking our hearts. Mature, difficult, rich in irony and paradox, "The Hooligan's Return" peels back the facile like a pelt. It is a performance both excruciating and ferociously controlled. The result may well rank among the finest memoirs in a generation.

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer (Knopf; 226 pages; 21ドル): The best pieces in this first story collection by Bay Area writer Julie Orringer deal with adolescent girls at a juncture in their lives where they're old enough to know better, young enough not to care. These girls witness lives on the precipice and must decide whether they'll try to prevent the tumbling over or mutely witness the fall and breakage. In the finest stories, the protagonist stands at the lip of the chasm herself, scared and elated by her own potential energy. Orringer skillfully limns the ordinary, terrifying time between childhood and maturity.

How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science by J. Michael Bishop (Harvard University; 271 pages; 27ドル.95): This book is typical of UCSF's Bishop: modest, funny and insightful, and it offers an extremely clear and brief explanation of the basic scientific achievement that won the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for himself and his longtime colleague, Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In the most entertaining yet serious part of his semiautobiographical book, Bishop relates how he wound up as a Harvard medical student even though he didn't know where Harvard was, how he decided never to practice medicine and how Harvard taught him the true nature of being a scientist: "I learned the exhilaration of research, the practice of rigor, and the art of disappointment, " he recalls. Bishop's overview of the scientific enterprise is, like the man himself, totally honest.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by John McGregor (Mariner Books; 275 pages; 13ドル paperback): McGregor, a 27-year-old native of Bermuda who worked as a dishwasher in England while writing this novel, is fascinated by the magnificence of the mundane. Long-listed for the 2002 Man Booker Prize, this novel is Brueghel's "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus" come to life on an unnamed urban street in England. On a typical day, as people go about their business, something tragic happens that momentarily brings them all together; and in that moment, their attention is diverted from their own lives. As we wait for the moment when everyone will come rushing to the street, McGregor shows us that there is a secret universe behind every curtain, beyond every doorstep.

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri by Ciaran Carson (Granta; 296 pages; 22ドル. 95): This translation by the fine writer from Northern Ireland of Dante's "Inferno" -- the most famous, most exhaustive chronicle of human sinfulness in Western literature -- not only reminds us how modern Dante was; it reminds us, too, of how integral a part of our contemporary experience the "Inferno" is. Carson's underworld is no antiquated punishment chamber; rather, it is a hell for our times, and all the more spellbinding for being so.

Isn't It Romantic? by Ron Hansen (HarperCollins; 198 pages; 17ドル.95): Hansen's "entertainment" is the story of a French couple on the outs while on a bus trip across the United States, who land in the middle of Nebraska while they decide if they should marry each other. Like a classic Lombard-Gable comedy, Hansen's novel is built upon a ridiculous premise that gets sillier and sillier, resulting in a meringue of a book that is irreverent and laugh- out-loud funny and serves as a good-natured ribbing of America.

Jamesland by Michelle Huneven (Knopf; 384 pages; 24ドル): In Huneven's joyous novel about hunger -- for friendship, for love, for God -- spiritual nourishment can come from anywhere. Alice Black, a 30-ish biologist- turned-barkeep who is descended from Henry and William James, finds her life intersecting with an ex-chef (and failed suicide) and an earnest Unitarian minister in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz. As her characters struggle with their long-ingrained flaws, Huneven suggests that our mums and dads can't foul us up for good without a fight.

Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford (Scribner; 272 pages; 24ドル): In his excellent, sometimes brutal memoir of the Gulf War and life in the Marines, Swofford is unsparing in his depictions of himself getting turned on by the violence. We also sense his pride as he rises to the prestigious but cold-blooded job of sniper. Part of the book's strength is its ambivalence -- it finds value in military life but also depicts its brutality in gruesome detail. Swofford offers a vital documentary of his own transformation from a citizen to a warrior and most of the way back. It's a dark story, but it's undeniably a necessary document: a portrait of a young man in the bleakest of professions, a fitting memoir for bleak times.

The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman (PublicAffairs; 558 pages; 30ドル): Most people have probably never heard of Jim Boswell, and that's just the way he likes it. If not for years of shoe-leather journalism from Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, the Boswell agricultural dynasty might even now be a shadowy entity, known mostly through its gravitational pull on other bodies -- especially legislative ones. In this landmark and improbably entertaining book, the Boswell Co. now stands revealed for what it is: the dark matter of 20th century California history.

A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson (Norton; 352 pages; 15ドル. 95 paperback): Ron Carlson's first three story collections are included nearly in their entirety, and exhibit a dizzying range of protagonists, including teachers, sheriffs and psychics; a single mother raising her brood on an aircraft carrier; a baseball player whose foul tips have killed 11 spectators; and the owner of the tablecloth from the Last Supper. The stories alternate between straight realism about love and sex, acceptance and longing -- and implausible dark comedy. By the end of the book, one gets the impression that Carlson, who has also written three novels, can do just about anything. This is a writer who was good already and has simply improved story by story. His is a body of work to cherish and celebrate.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead; 324 pages; 24ドル.95): Hosseini's antihero Amir narrates this novel from the Bernal Heights home he shares with his wife. But Amir's childhood in Kabul still haunts him, specifically his mysterious inability to earn the love of his philanthropically generous but emotionally withholding father, and his guilt about failing to protect his angelic half-caste old kite runner (who assisted him in the sport of kite fighting) from a savage assault. When Amir receives a deathbed summons from his father's business partner in Pakistan, he sees a chance to redeem himself from the secrets that have left him psychically stranded between Afghanistan and the United States. Maybe we've seen similar immigrant stories before, but Hosseini imparts a delicacy here that transcends any mere topical curiosity about Afghanistan.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins; 416 pages; 25ドル.95): Using myriad sources, including eyewitness accounts, ship's logs, journal entries, telegrams, news articles and geological papers, Winchester ("The Professor and the Madman") gives an exhaustive picture of the events and discoveries surrounding the cataclysmic volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in what is now Indonesia. The tremendous breadth of knowledge the author exhibits could easily overwhelm, but Winchester is expert at relating the many, often long, diversions in his book, doing so in consistently vivid, visually descriptive language.

L'Affaire by Diane Johnson (Dutton; 340 pages; 24ドル.95): For her new novel of cross-cultural manners, Johnson borrows a structure often found in Hercule Poirot mysteries: Take a bunch of wealthy, attractive characters -- including dot-com millionaire Amy Hawkins from Palo Alto -- stuff them in a glamorous European locale, then lock the door and let the intrigue begin. In "L'Affaire, " the luxurious location is a ski resort in the French Alps, where an avalanche has left a wealthy Brit and his young American wife in comas and numerous offspring and ex-wives scheming for the estate. Johnson's forte and trademark are wry observation of cultural differences, primarily between the French and Americans, with truths and stereotypes flying out of characters' mouths on every page. And here she's added the English to the mix, making great hay with the centuries-old Anglo-Gallic rivalry.

The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters (Scribner; 177 pages; 23ドル): The 11 stories in this auspicious debut take place in Japan in the shadow of World War II, and their protagonists share an aching sense of Before and After. Waters provides a wealth of detail and a depth of empathy that makes readers feel the postwar Japanese mood as thoroughly as if they themselves had dined on rice substitutes made of yams or worried that new diseases were flourishing as wounded soldiers returned carrying "bacteria from strange, unsanitary lands. " Their particular sorrows come into focus largely because Waters makes each sentence the way a fletcher crafts an arrow -- into something that will fly straight and pierce true.

Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu (Little, Brown; 293 pages; 23ドル.95): With the help of St. Mary's College anthropology Professor Mathieu, Namu, a popular singer in China and sometime San Francisco resident, recounts the details of a childhood spent in what the Chinese call the "Country of Daughters" -- Moso country, in the desolate mountains of the Tibet-China border. Her discussion of the little- known Moso culture, which is structured by a matrilineal system in which women take multiple lovers, have children by various men and pass their property on to daughters, will come as a surprise even to hard-core fans of Chinese women's history.

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy (Scribner; 260 pages; 24ドル): Meloy's first novel traces the tumultuous lives of the Santerre family over the decades, beginning in California during World War II. Bittersweet, wise, with a fantastic sense of character and history told in prose that exists entirely to serve her tale, her book is about the bad things good people can do, even when they are trying to do the right thing.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 555 pages; 27ドル): This elegant, extraordinary book is a cohesive group biography of four diverse members of the Catholic community of modern literary saints -- Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper and social-work movement; Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton; fiction writer Flannery O'Connor; and novelist Walker Percy. Of nearly equal interest are the book's tangential characters (often also Catholic), whose lives intersected with the book's four subjects and who helped connect them with one another and helped advance their careers.

The Light of Day by Graham Swift (Knopf; 324 pages; 24ドル): This novel charts one day in the life of George, a divorced, defrocked police detective working as a private eye, and the woman he loves: Sarah, an English teacher serving jail time for the murder of her gynecologist husband. Because he originally helped Sarah get the goods on her husband's affair with a Croatian refugee, George feels complicit in the murder. Swift has shaped his meditation on fate and chance with a craftsman's hand. From first to last it's a story of patterns disrupted, expectations overturned.

Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano (Wiley; 248 pages; 27ドル.95): In part a memoir, "Limbo" examines the phenomenon of people born to blue-collar families who go to college and move into the white- collar world. Their achievement comes at a price. Often these people are fish out of water, and some become alienated from their own families. Lubrano, a veteran writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and an NPR regular, has crafted a great piece of nonfiction as he details how people cope when they no longer belong in the old neighborhood but don't exactly fit in with their new peers.

Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Knopf; 484 pages; 26ドル. 95): Having smelted the ore of his life into deathless fiction, Gabriel Garcia Marquez here melts it back into the gold it came from. One of many pleasures afforded by Garcia Marquez's newly translated autobiography, the first volume of a projected three, lies in watching the fledgling Nobel laureate somehow luck into just the right teachers, just the right book-mad friends, just the right journalistic gigs to speed him on his way. In what Garcia Marquez wonderfully calls "the world's raffle," some men are born great and have greatness thrust upon them.

Loot: And Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 240 pages; 23ドル): The characters of Gordimer's 10th collection of short fiction are guilty of one crime: They are looters. By virtue of living and breathing the air of South Africa, the people of this strange, diamond-sharp book steal from their nation's past. In the quiet of their own minds, they rob from South Africa's stash of bad deeds -- the racism, the plundering of national resources -- using such loot to buy themselves a good conscience. That was then, they try to think; this is now. In stories that vary from science fiction to thin vignettes, "Loot" dramatizes the anxiety of this relationship with the past, how it exiles one from memory and warps relationships.

The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir by James Brown (William Morrow; 200 pages; 21ドル.95): In this gemlike collection of 12 shapely vignettes, Brown, a fiction writer and alcoholic drug addict, seduces the skeptic with the sly, old- fashioned persuasions of the writer's craft. With neither pity nor self- pity, Brown tells his story: father an alcoholic, mother an alcoholic and probably crazy, three stranded kids who close ranks and then turn to the solace of alcohol themselves. This cheerless picture materializes in such delicate strokes that the emerging theme becomes one of almost miraculous forgiveness, any pain and rage all but hidden between the lines.

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio (Free Press; 568 pages; 35ドル): Perhaps nobody was more responsible for the successful March on Washington 40 years ago than Bayard Rustin, whose remarkable life is the subject of John D'Emilio's highly sympathetic biography. A socialist, pacifist and gay, the gifted but controversial Rustin brought considerable personal baggage to his work in the peace and civil rights movements of the post-World War II era. D'Emilio has given readers -- younger ones in particular -- an opportunity to discover Rustin's struggle to resolve the tensions between his personal and professional life and his inspiring contributions to social and racial justice in America.

Love by Toni Morrison (Knopf; 202 pages; 23ドル.95): In her pointedly titled new novel, "Love," Toni Morrison reframes the mythology of love in a dark light and comes away with a mesmerizing gem. The narrative terrain covered by Morrison will be familiar to her readers. It is the African American experience as seen through the microcosm of a family history, and it is a history with many claimants, including shadows and ghosts from the past. This is not to say that "Love" is a simple rehash of Morrison's earlier labors. There is new territory explored here. The most distinctive difference is that it is a story that, while concerned with issues of race, is not predominated by them. More than race, it is a story of class, friendship, envy, obsession and, most important, the machinations of love in an utterly efficient narrative.

Love After War: Contemporary Fiction From Vietnam edited by Wayne Karlin and Ho Anh Thai (Curbstone; 450 pages; 19ドル.95 paperback): Representing the stories of 45 writers, "Love After War" is the largest collection of contemporary Vietnamese fiction writers in English translation, and there is no word for it other than magnificent. This collection could easily hold its own alongside the work of the best literary entertainers from the New Yorker and Playboy. The comparison with Playboy is deliberate, because, contrary to the myths about communist countries, no topic is off-limits for these writers, least of all the multifarious, convoluted expressions of the human libido.

Robert Lowell: Collected Poems edited by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1,186 pages; 45ドル): For the first time since Lowell's death in 1977, readers have a volume of his collected poems. Thanks to the editorial direction of Bidart, this book traces the full span of Lowell's career with thoroughness and accuracy. An excellent poet in his own right, Bidart worked for several years as Lowell's first reader, suggesting changes to Lowell's poems and helping him to order the poems in his books. Bidart's introduction and afterword to this collection, as well as the notes that he wrote with his co-editor, David Gewanter, are impressive works of literature in and of themselves.

Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco; 225 pages; 22ドル.95): In Freudenberger's first and much-anticipated collection of short stories, the author seems particularly interested in the way Westerners interact with Asian cultures, with travel through Asia running as a common thread through these five pieces. Freudenberger creates a scene and its mood through exacting detail, and, quietly and stealthily, her insight has a way of sneaking up on the reader.

The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman (Atlantic; 442 pages; 24ドル): Holman's third novel, set in a small town in Virginia, revolves around three families and their struggles with life in the new millennium and age-old matters of the heart. Holman's ability to constantly create sharply turned phrases, and the honestly earned humor that she instills in the story, help balance the tragic elements in "Mammoth" and make this a memorable modern pastoral fable.

The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins; 400 pages; 25ドル.95): After World War I, a German veteran relocates with his new wife and stepson to North Dakota, where he becomes a small-town butcher. Also in town are a lovelorn sheriff, a gorgeous female embalmer, an eloquent drunk and, among others, a pair of acrobats. They cross paths amid the Great Depression, two world wars, the battle at Wounded Knee, first love, gay love and a triple slaying. Characters are borne along on the fierce momentum of plot twists and relationships all the fleshier and more plausible for their fragility and fanciful improbability.

McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales edited by Michael Chabon (Vintage; 480 pages; 13ドル.95 paperback): Published under Dave Eggers' local banner and smartly co-opted by Vintage Books, this story anthology reads like a night around the campfire at the starriest writers' workshop ever convened. Authors highbrow and low take turns trying to spook us and to top each other. If some of the writers evince a certain rustiness, others take to it like salmon returning to natal streams. Whether they spawn a counterrevolution or just the promised sequel, it's an auspicious and tonic experiment.

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King (Walker; 373 pages; 28ドル): King expertly wipes away smudges from the story of the Sistine Chapel ceiling painting to uncover the truth about its creation. As in his previous book, "Brunelleschi's Dome," King depicts the tumultuous world in which this great work came to be, underscoring the obstacles its creator faced. To read his tale is to marvel that the ceiling was ever begun. What emerges is a stirring portrait of the delicate and demanding art of the fresco, and how, against great odds, the world's greatest artist taught himself how to do it.

Middletown, America: One Town's Passage From Trauma to Hope by Gail Sheehy (Random House; 415 pages; 25ドル.95): Middletown, N.J., just 20 miles south of the Twin Towers, had the largest concentrated death toll from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks of any single community -- 50 people. Gail Sheehy spent 18 months conducting more than 900 interviews with scores of people directly affected by the World Trade Center attack. She also interviewed other victims of mass murder. The result is "Middletown, America," a sensitive, respectful, informative and moving study of recovery from trauma. It is a sad but ultimately hopeful book about the resilience of the human spirit and an important contribution to our understanding of the ripple effects and lasting reverberations of a national disaster.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 384 pages; 22ドル.95): In sentences as coarse and unforgiving as concrete rubble, Frey recalls the living hell of his personal rock bottom, a relentless consumption of hard alcohol, crack cocaine, inhalants and hallucinogens that ultimately landed him at Hazelden, Minnesota's world-renowned rehab center, at age 23. There are moments when the hard-core abuser's braggadocio about his bottomless appetite sneaks through, even a decade after quitting. But for those who read his book, the vicarious American tendency to romanticize drug and alcohol use will forever after leave an uneasiness in the pit of the stomach.

The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military by Dana Priest (Norton; 384 pages; 26ドル.95): In her timely new book, Priest argues that the United States relies disproportionately on its military and often the discretion of regional commanders to address problems that are largely political or economic. Priest, a distinguished Washington Post reporter, visited 18 countries and interviewed all levels of the military hierarchy to provide eye-opening descriptions of the armed forces in action in Washington and abroad. From courting allies in the Middle East to pushing for reform in Indonesia and nation building in the Balkans, Priest documents the extent to which the armed forces pursue tasks for which they are ill suited, untrained and sometimes only loosely mandated.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (Norton; 288 pages; 24ドル.95): Lewis' book about the Oakland A's innovative strategies for building winning teams while spending a lot less money than their competitors isn't just about baseball, any more than his "Liar's Poker" was just about Wall Street, or his "The New New Thing" was just about computers. At its heart lies a universal, almost Newtonian question that has nothing to do with baseball -- can talent be created or destroyed, or only altered? Even people who don't know their groin from their medial collateral ligament may appreciate it because Berkeley's Lewis is a five-tool reporter: He can think, joke, characterize, write for average readers and for powerful decisionmakers.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen (Norton; 515 pages; 26ドル.95): Quammen, the author of "The Song of the Dodo," travels around the world to find Indian lions, Australian crocodiles, Siberian tigers and other carnivorous creatures for his new book on how these "alpha predators" have captured our imagination. Along the way, Quammen traces our fascination through cultures, stopping off at the Beowulf saga, the biblical Leviathan and a dozen other long-surviving tales of humans and man-eaters.

Morning Dark by Daniel Buckman (St. Martin's; 229 pages; 22ドル.95): The ghostly horrors of Vietnam, and other American wars, hover over ex-paratrooper Buckman's third novel, a bleak, violent book filled with old soldiers of overlapping generations, trying to defeat, ignore or exorcise demons both foreign and domestic, external and internal. As Buckman unsparingly tells the story of an alienated vet who leaves his home and wife for something better, only to encounter a much worse world, it's the author's deep sympathy for his scarred characters that makes "Morning Dark" bearable.

Mortals by Norman Rush (Knopf; 715 pages; 26ドル.95): This long-awaited novel is a psychologically acute, meticulously written, ambitious piece of fiction. As a meditation on covert operations both geopolitical and romantic, the book should help console those still unreconciled to Graham Greene's death -- and tide over readers impatient for the next John LeCarre. "Mortals" is, in effect, a Botswana-set variation on LeCarre's best novel, "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," as retold by a version of his best character, George Smiley, and set in the early 1990s. It's a flawed work whose length does it no favors, yet it still brims with antic wit, rich characters, authoritative scene- setting and cunningly, thoughtfully paced dialogue.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder (Random House; 317 pages; 25ドル.95): What can one person do? How many of us could emulate icons such as Gandhi, Schweitzer, Mandela or other such heroes? Paul Farmer is one who does try, and the portrait of him in "Mountains Beyond Mountains" argues for his inclusion among the highest ranks of legends. Tracy Kidder, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for previous books ("The Soul of a New Machine," "House," "Hometown"), spent the past few years following Farmer around the world on his seemingly tireless mission to combat disease among the poorest people in Haiti, South America and Asia. Kidder contends that Farmer and the issues he confronts are the most important topics he has written about. He is right, and he's done so splendidly here.

My Cold War by Tom Piazza (ReganBooks; 245 pages; 24ドル.95): The narrator of this novel is John Delano, a self-proclaimed "Professor of History/Lecturer in Cold War Studies," is caught in the past, teaching seminars that are essentially self-indulgent lessons in his own childhood memories. Under contract for a book of what his colleagues dismiss as "history McNuggets," Delano is stuck, his mind wandering from his dissatisfied present to his past, when he was growing up in '50s Long Island and waiting for something bigger to happen. On the surface, it is all nostalgia and family episodes, but it becomes clear that Piazza is creating a genre that barely exists anymore: the American novel of ideas.

My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins; 198 pages; 23ドル.95): Called "an intimate memoir" by the publisher and "a commentary" by the author herself, this book unleashes a waterfall of recollections that washes over Chile, the beloved country of Allende's youth, and a capacious cast of eccentric relatives -- many of whom have made appearances in her fiction. Summoning memories of travels with her adored grandfather, she presents a grandiose landscape that embraces the most unforgiving desert and, at the tip of the continent, "a high, barren land of blizzards." Unflinching when describing cities (Santiago resides beneath "a dark sombrero of pollution"), she waxes sentimental when conjuring the countryside ("eggs the color of gold") and turns forthcoming and often hilarious on the subject of the national character. Generalizations about her erstwhile countrymen give rise to more specific musings on her own family, a cascade of stories about psychic aunts and organ-grinder uncles, grief and scandal, love gone wrong, then right.

Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir by Lillian Faderman (Houghton Mifflin; 356 pages; 26ドル): Faderman, a pioneer of gay and lesbian studies, renowned for such groundbreaking works as "Surpassing the Love of Men" and "Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers," boasts a personal history that proves just as surprising, multifaceted and clandestine as many of the subjects about w