In the News
November 16, 2012
The Washington Post
Best of 2012: 50 notable works of nonfiction
By: Kurt Eichenwald
500 DAYS: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars
By Kurt Eichenwald (Touchstone)
An anecdote-rich, page-turning account of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, with almost all of his actions traced back to decisions made during the first 500 days after Sept. 11, 2001. — Dina Temple-Raston
ALL THE MISSING SOULS: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals
By David Scheffer (Princeton)
Written by the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice, the book describes the U.S. role in trying to make accountability for mass atrocities a central principle in international affairs. — Anthony Dworkin
AMERICA’S GREAT DEBATE: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union
By Fergus M. Bordewich (Simon & Schuster)
This stylish history recounts the Compromise of 1850, which managed to hold the expanding nation together. Bordewich breathes new life into figures who were giants in their day. — Donald E. Graham
AMERICA’S UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION: The Precedents and Principles We Live By
By Akhil Reed Amar (Basic)
This is a masterful, readable book that constitutes one of the best, most creative treatments of the U.S. Constitution in decades. — Ken Gormley
AUTUMN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
By Stephen R. Platt (Knopf)
Platt’s fresh and important argument refutes the traditional idea that China was unchangeable and not a significant factor in the world’s history in the 19th century. — John Pomfret
THE BOY KINGS OF TEXAS: A Memoir
By Domingo Martinez (Lyons)
Recounting the author’s tough upbringing in Brownsville, Tex., this finalist for the National Book Award joins a rich body of Mexican American coming-of-age narratives. — Valerie Sayers
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF JOE BRAINARD
Edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America)
A superbly engaging bedside book in whichnearly every page is mysterious, inconsequential and fun. — Michael Dirda
CONFRONT AND CONCEAL: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
By David E. Sanger (Crown)
Sanger’s immensely readable work shows that President Obama has been surprisingly aggressive on national security, mostly behind closed doors. — D.T-R.
CRONKITE
By Douglas Brinkley (Harper)
Brinkley reveals the legendary newscaster as an Odysseus-like figure — a man physically and morally courageous, but full of fears; ambitious for fame, fiercely jealous of rivals — who created around himself an aura of public trust. — Robert MacNeil
DEARIE: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
By Bob Spitz (Knopf)
A tasty retelling of Child’s privileged (but bland) childhood, her awakening to fine food and her delight in sharing it. — Becky Krystal
DOUBLE CROSS: The True Story of the D-Day Spies
By Ben Macintyre (Crown)
The idiosyncratic British spymasters of World War II were almost Monty Python characters, yet they helped secure the Allied victory. — David Ignatius
DRIFT: The Unmooring of American Military Power
By Rachel Maddow (Crown)
The author urges Congress and voters to become full partners in decisions to go to war and not leave them to their president. — Gordon M. Goldstein
ELSEWHERE: A Memoir
By Richard Russo (Knopf)
Novelist Russo writes candidly of his mother, who inspired and sustained his literary career but also was demanding and manipulative.— Marie Arana
EMBERS OF WAR: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
By Fredrik Logevall (Random House)
Logevall demonstrates that historical outcomes are driven not only by global political and strategic forces but also by the passion, frailty and determination of individual leaders. — G.M.G.
THE END OF MEN: And the Rise of Women
By Hanna Rosin (Riverhead)
The author paints a picture of how fluid gender roles and expectations have become. — Jennifer Howard
ENEMIES: A History of the FBI
By Tim Weiner (Random House)
Weiner’s thesis: Today’s counterterrorism campaigns echo the FBI’s earlier efforts to collar saboteurs, spies and terrorists. And the bureau’s overreaching then is mirrored by its occasional overreaching now. — D.T-R.
FREEDOM AND THE ARTS: Essays on Music and Literature
By Charles Rosen (Harvard)
One finishes any book by Rosen intellectually reenergized, eager to become a deeper reader, a more attentive museumgoer, a better listener. — M.D.
THE GENERALS: American Military Command From World War II to Today
By Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press)
The Army of today, Ricks argues, is an entrenched bureaucracy funded and protected by friends in Congress. Accountability of senior officers is what’s needed, and what’s missing. — Neil Sheehan
THE GREAT AMERICAN RAILROAD WAR: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Central Pacific Railroad
By Dennis Drabelle (St. Martin’s)
This well-written book details how two very different American writers launched attacks on the corporate graft and corruption of the Transcontinental Railroad. — James L. Haley
THE HUNT FOR KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed
By Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer(Little, Brown)
This well-reported book focuses on the three investigators who believed Sheik Mohammed was a more of a threat than Osama bin Laden — long before the Sept. 11 attacks. — D.T-R.
IMMORTAL BIRD: A Family Memoir
By Doron Weber (Simon & Schuster)
This memoir of a child’s grave illness is surprisingly joyful at times as the portrait of an extraordinary young boy emerges.— Reeve Lindbergh
INTERVENTIONS: A Life in War and Peace
By Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh (Penguin Press)
The world’s top diplomat recounts his years heading United Nations efforts to tend to the world’s ills.— Colum Lynch
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN IT LOOKS: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein (Basic)
This blunt book will invigorate some readers and infuriate others. Today’s Republican Party, it argues, has little in common with earlier versions of the GOP, which believed in government. Instead, it is holding government for ransom for political advantage. — Robert G. Kaiser
KILL OR CAPTURE: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency
By Daniel Klaidman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Focusing on President Obama’s counterterrorism policy, the author makes clear his view that the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki became a minor obsession and that the cleric’s American citizenship was deemed irrelevant when he was targeted for assassination. — D.T-R.
THE LAST PRE-RAPHAELITE: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
By Fiona MacCarthy (Harvard)
Burne-Jones’s perceptions and the lively art scene he inhabited allow a reader to happily live in this new biography for a week. — M.D.
LITTLE AMERICA: The War Within the War for Afghanistan
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran (Knopf)
Chandrasekaran shows that the war in Afghanistan was waged with no central guidance from the top, with the Army fighting one war, the Marines another, and the British a small and ineffective third. — N.S.
THE LITTLE RED GUARD: A Family Memoir
By Wenguang Huang (Riverhead)
The cultural landscape of Mao’s China in the 1970s is the backdrop to this tale of a family trying to honor its matriarch’s demands for a traditional but illegal burial. — Sarah Halzack
THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance
By Thomas McNamee (Free Press)
Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food editor for some 25 years, introduced Americans to foreign ingredients, and to Julia Child and New Orleans’s Paul Prudhomme. And all the while, he was turning restaurant criticism into a real profession. — Phyllis Richman
MANHUNT: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad
By Peter L. Bergen (Crown)
Even with all the media saturation, Bergen manages to make the story of bin Laden’s end sound new. — D.T-R.
MIDNIGHT IN PEKING: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China
By Paul French (Penguin)
This period tale is a good murder story, told with flair, that takes readers back to old China. — Joseph Kanon
THE OATH: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday)
This page-turner chronicles the human details about the court justices and their interaction with the Obama administration.— Jeffrey Rosen
ON SAUDI ARABIA: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future
By Karen Elliott House (Knopf)
House offers insights into the oil-rich kingdom’s fault lines — its one-note economy, its complex tribal and religious leadership, the squandering of most of its human capital. One can’t know if and when the powder keg will blow, but readers of this important book will know why. — Rachel Newcomb
ON THE EVE: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War
By Bernard Wasserstein (Simon & Schuster)
This complex book argues that Jewish culture in Europe was doomed even before the Holocaust because of Jews’ self-hatred and desire for assimilation. One disturbing notion: that a unified Jewish culture was rejuvenated by the attempt to wipe it out. — Gerard DeGroot
PAKISTAN ON THE BRINK: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan
By Ahmed Rashid (Viking)
Pakistanis see the United States as an arrogant superpower that views their country as a killing field. Americans see Pakistan as duplicitous and dangerous. Both are right, says Rashid, a preeminent Pakistani journalist. — Bruce Riedel
THE PASSAGE OF POWER: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
By Robert A. Caro (Knopf)
Caro’s fourth volume on Johnson barely gets to his presidential years and paints the senator, then vice president, as by turn heroic and venal. — David Greenberg
PATRIOT OF PERSIA: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup
By Christopher de Bellaigue (Harper)
This nuanced portrait of an enigmatic man provides context for the dismal state of U.S.-Iran relations today. — Tara Bahrampour
THE PLAYGROUND
By Terrence M. McCoy (Kindle Single)
In this brief e-book, McCoy delivers a gripping account of Chinese corporate rapacity in Cambodia. A tale of the dark side of globalization. — Steven Levingston
PRAIRIE FEVER: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890
By Peter Pagnamenta (Norton)
Blame it on James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales: By the mid-1800s, Britain’s then-1 percent were happy to send their 20-something sons to tour the Great Plains for sport and adventure, complete, as this deeply researched book tells us, with valets to dress them for the day. — Scott Martelle
THE PRESIDENTS CLUB: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity
By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy (Simon & Schuster)
This lively history of the personal relationships among America’s post-World War II presidents suggests that former chief executives have often put aside partisan concerns to help achieve larger national goals — though there have been plenty of times when the “formers” have gone rogue. — D.G.
THE PRICE OF INEQUALITY: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future
By Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton)
Instead of arguing “unfairness,” this Nobel-winning economist points out the consequences of allowing the nation’s wealth gap to grow, stating in effect that current business and government policies are not in the country’s best interest. — Dante Chinni
THE PRICE OF POLITICS
By Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster)
Woodward’s latest book is a highly detailed dissection of the nation’s debt-limit negotiations and how the hope of a “grand bargain” to reform the tax code and reduce runaway entitlement spending ended in recriminations and retrenchment. — Jeff Shesol
REPRESENTING THE RACE: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer
By Kenneth W. Mack (Harvard)
This tough-minded book goes beyond heralding the triumphs of early civil rights lawyers and argues that they succeeded by being as “white” as possible, forming a kind of fraternity of men whose “professional norms” allowed them passage across the color line. — David J. Garrow
THE RICHER SEX: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family
By Liza Mundy (Simon & Schuster)
Soon, says the author, women will be the top earners in households, causing “the Big Flip” in gender roles, to the benefit of all. But sometimes Mundy’s optimism exceeds the evidence. — Stephanie Coontz
RUNNING FOR MY LIFE: One Lost Boy’s Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games
By Lopez Lomong with Mark Tabb(Thomas Nelson)
A moving, well-told tale by one of Sudan’s “lost boys,” who turned his daily run in a Kenyan refugee camp into a sport that took him to high school and college in the United States and put him on the U.S. team in two Olympic Games. — Steven V. Roberts
THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTH
By Edward O. Wilson (Liveright)
This renowned scientist unflinchingly defines the human condition as largely a product of the tension between the impulse to selfishness and to altruism, individual selection vs. group dynamic. — Colin Woodard
SWIM: Why We Love the Water
By Lynn Sherr (PublicAffairs)
This appealing book explores all aspects of swimming, one of our oldest pastimes, one of our most crucial life skills. — Nicola Joyce
THE TENDER HOUR OF TWILIGHT: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age
By Richard Seaver (Farrar Straus Giroux)
The legendary book editor looks back on his literary life in Paris, where he championed Samuel Beckett and others, and then in New York, where he helped to establish the controversial Grove Press.
— M.D.
THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power
By Jon Meacham (Random House)
Despite the book’s subtitle, Meacham accomplishes something more impressive than dissecting Jefferson’s political skills — he explains the founding father’s greatness in this comprehensive narrative of his life. — Joyce Appleby
WAR ON THE WATERS: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865
By James M. McPherson (U. of North Carolina)
The aim of this compact book is to prove to modern students of the Civil War that naval superiority throughout the conflict — on the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Southern river systems — was an indispensable ingredient of Union military victory. — Howell Raines
WINTER JOURNAL
By Paul Auster (Henry Holt)
A raw, deceptively simple memoir of aging — of life’s physical injuries, of sexual encounters — told by a storyteller to “you.” Chaotic at the outset, profoundly beautiful by the end. — Marie Arana
