The Best Books of 2001

This year, the Los Angeles Times considered more than 1,200 books. As we revisited those reviews, we concluded that our contributors reserved their highest praise for 82 novels and short story collections, 23 children’s books, 25 mysteries and thrillers, 10 poetry titles, 13 books on the West and 85 works of nonfiction. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed. In addition, we have selected some of the year’s best art books to illustrate the issue.

*

ANDY WARHOL

By Wayne Koestenbaum

A Lipper/Viking Book:

224 pp., $19.95

*

Andy Warhol, spooky, off-the-wall, form-shaping avatar of blankness and cultural keenness, meets biographer Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, celebrity explicator and rollicking gay theorist. A lovely match. Warhol’s work, this writer argues forcefully, is about desire and the passage of time, a theme all the more unsettling when you realize that the artist has been gone for 14 years, indeed that this waif wayfarer was a child of the Depression, born in 1928. The story of his odd life and weirdly complex work feels remote and pertinent. Koestenbaum, author of “The Queen’s Throat” and “Jackie Under My Skin,” attacks it with care, thoughtfulness and leaping consideration. Koestenbaum draws on a growing mountain of research, plus gobs of personal interviews, to construct what is almost a model of the brief contemporary biography. With marvelous fluidity, he sets out the facts but never lets them get in the way of a brilliant apercu or an original bit of speculation about the meaning of the work. His book overall is restrained, smart, respectful and amusing. He gives us a Warhol who is ineffably sad but heroic, too; a man full of bravado, patience, energy and devotion to work, to making things. It’s a book that should tempt those generally familiar with Warhol and, even more, young people who have trouble imaging how popular art can challenge the status quo.

Bret Israel

*

AMERICAN CHICA

Two Worlds, One Childhood

By Marie Arana

Delacorte: 320 pp., $23.95

*

What does it mean to assimilate today? In a smart and well-written autobiography of her Peruvian American heritage, “American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood,” Marie Arana shows that it is an effort of memory and the imagination. Assimilation requires that the immigrant blend in with majority culture, and amnesia may play more of a role in this process than we would like to believe, but Arana’s stories contain the caution that to lose one’s past is to lose one’s self.

Yxta Maya Murray

*

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Writings From the

War of Independence

Edited by John Rhodehamel

The Library of America:

950 pp., $40

*

The American Revolution has never lacked interpreters. Many groups--Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Republicans, Democrats, slaveholders, abolitionists, Populists, Progressives, labor unionists, Supreme Court justices, militarists, pacifists, historians--have tried to specify the meaning of this formative event. None of them has ever won the debate, of course; but that does not keep them from trying to define what it means to be an American. “The American Revolution: Writings From the War of Independence” joins in this venerable enterprise. John Rhodehamel’s superb collection of documents from the period 1775 to 1783 will appeal to general readers. Its 120 documentary excerpts, drawn from the writings of 70 or so participants, follow the chronology of the struggle from Paul Revere’s ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord through George Washington’s resignation of his commission after the Peace of Paris. Every major event of the war makes an appearance, and the lengthy excerpts convey a marvelous sense of the human dimensions of a great military struggle. The documents illuminate not only battles but also less familiar topics--the effects of inflation on the war effort, the sufferings of Loyalists, mutinies in the Army, debates over the arming of slaves--and dramatic episodes that include Benedict Arnold’s treason and Washington’s finest hour, when he shamed his restive officers out of attempting a coup d’etat. All of these splendid sources permit the reader to understand the circumstances of little-known figures as well as the character of famous ones.

Fred Anderson

*

AQUAGENESIS

The Origin and Evolution

of Life in the Sea

By Richard Ellis

Viking: 304 pp., $25.95

*

What Richard Ellis has done in “Aquagenesis” is something more ambitious than providing a bestiary of marine life (although that alone would be worth the book’s price). Ellis adroitly limns scientific understanding of evolution at work in the sea--always a moving target. He places these magnificent creatures in their context of time and space, and examines the sometimes bitter scientific controversies they’ve bred. Remarkable in so many ways, this is what really sets Ellis’ book apart from similar works on animal evolution. Ellis is also a talented illustrator, and his fine drawings of the creatures under discussion help the reader appreciate the astonishing diversity of life over the long haul of marine evolution.

Osha Gray Davidson

*

ART IS WORK

Graphic Design, Interiors,

Objects and Illustration

By Milton Glaser

The Overlook Press: 240 pp., $85

*

The idea that work, at least in a semantic sense, might replace what we call art is what Milton Glaser sets out to consider in his latest book, “Art Is Work.” In his clear, if confessional, introduction, he offers a redefinition of “art” that repositions it, somewhat interchangeably, with “design” along the utilitarian axis of everyday life, thereby reinforcing its relative consequence and, by conjecture, its enduring value. Glaser then examines some of the more essential moral obstacles facing the graphic designer, such as the question of intention, the role of dignity and the definition of “design” itself (“anything purposeful can be an act of design”). What follows over the next 200-plus pages are more than 500 images drawn from Glaser’s eclectic portfolio that illuminate his process and help explain the resulting “work,” which, from the standpoint of quantity and quality, is considerable. Throughout these pages, the designer’s first-person captions analyze and reconsider his conceptual and stylistic choices. The writing here is refreshingly honest: Glaser is thoughtful and reflective, warm and open, occasionally self-deprecating, sometimes even self-critical as he tirelessly revisits his infinitely rigorous process. Glaser’s book is a celebration of idiom, in all its glorious media and manifestations. And ultimately it is this, more than the work-versus-art debate, that characterizes Glaser’s magnificent oeuvre and this impressive volume, demonstrating in the end that whether it is called art, design or just plain work, the combined strengths of technical mastery, creative enthusiasm and the restless power of an inquisitive mind can produce meaningful and, indeed, lasting impressions.

Jessica Helfand

*

THE ASSASSINATION

OF LUMUMBA

By Ludo De Witte

Translated from the Dutch

by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby

Verso: 224 pp., $27

*

This is a vivid and utterly compelling account of a nation strangled at birth by the West. It would be satisfying to report, 40 years after Lumumba’s murder, that the Congolese are now at last being allowed to develop their country in a way that suited their needs. But the truth is that “after” still equals “before”: Big business, foreign armies and an array of stooges are still trampling over the unfortunate population to be first in line to plunder and enrich themselves. If you want to know who to thank for this, look no further than Ludo De Witte’s “The Assassination of Lumumba.”

Ronan Bennett

*

AVA’S MAN

By Rick Bragg

Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $25

*

“Ava’s Man” is a big book, at once tough and sentimental. Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, broke into bestsellerdom with his “All Over But the Shoutin’,” a moving account of how his mother raised him and two brothers in extreme poverty in the Deep South. Bragg takes that story back a generation in “Ava’s Man,” which tells the story of his mother’s father, Charlie Bundrum, husband of Bragg’s grandmother, Ava. Long after Charlie died young (at 51) of drinking too much whisky, the grandchildren would ask her, as she sat rocking in her chair on the porch, “Grandma, you goin’ to get you a man?” The poor whites of the South--the men rough and often hellions, the women hard-pressed yet enduring--have not, until Rick Bragg, been much written about honestly and affectionately. “Ava’s Man” is a monument to a grandfather Bragg had not known and to a condemned group of disappearing Americans who, until now, have had no bard.

Anthony Day

*

BANVARD’S FOLLY

Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity

and Rotten Luck

By Paul Collins

Picador USA: 288 pp., $25

*

Here are the stories of those who dreamed big dreams and fell far short, or were trumped by time or who, like most of humankind, were only local heroes--famously forgettable. The 13 lives and times to which Paul Collins devotes his considerable scholarship and his manifest narrative gifts in “Banvard’s Folly” are the flash-in-the-pan, briefly notable and long-ignored ones-of-a-kind who remind us of the nobility and futility, the grandeur and begrudgery of our endeavors. Of Collins’ endeavor, however, we can proclaim our permanent thanks and amazement and heartiest welcome.

Thomas Lynch

*

BARRINGTON ATLAS OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD

With CD-ROM Map-by-Map Directory and Print Edition

of the Directory

Edited by Richard J.A. Talbert

Princeton University Press:

Vol. I: 746 pp.; Vol. II: 638 pp., $475

*

This atlas is an indispensable tool for historians concerned with ancient times. But it is also a source of great pleasure for the amateur, the lover of literature. Maps, as always, stimulate the imagination. In these luminous pages, you can follow Alexander’s zigzag march from Macedon to India, fighting battles and founding Alexandrias--more than a dozen of them--on the way. Across the Hellespont to the site of Troy, where he visits the tomb of Achilles, south to the Greek cities of Ephesus, Miletus and Halicarnassus, east along the south coast and then north into central Turkey to Gordium, where he cut the Gordian knot, onto Tarsus, where much later, St. Paul will be born, and then, after a great victory at Issos, down the Syria-Palestine coast to capture the cities of Tyre and Sidon. On past Gaza to Egypt, to found the first Alexandria and visit the oracle of a Libyan god at Siwah in the desert. Then north again through Syria to win another decisive battle at Gaugemala and south to the great cities of the Persian empire, Susa and Persepolis. Then north again to the shores of the Caspian Sea, followed by a swing south and then north again to the borders of Afghanistan, where he founded another Alexandria, and then finally to India, where, after a victory over the local king, he proposed to push farther east to the ocean, which in his mental map of the world encircled the whole central land mass of the Earth. But his Macedonian troops, who had now marched more than 11,000 miles in seven years of hard campaigning, wanted to go no farther, and he turned back to make his way through some of the most inhospitable desert in the world to Babylon, where he died in 323 BC. He was 32 years old.

Bernard Knox

*

BING CROSBY

A Pocketful of Dreams

The Early Years 1903-1940

By Gary Giddins

Little, Brown: 728 pp., $30

*

Gary Giddins has done his work diligently, cutting through the encrustation of myth and press agentry surrounding Bing Crosby in--and since--his lifetime, bringing welcome clarity to his rise as a singer, radio personality and movie actor and mapping his personal life with admirable objectivity. Giddins explores in convincing detail Crosby’s role as a trailblazer, a pioneer not just for his time but for all time, a singer who fused all he heard, whether Al Jolson or Cliff Edwards, John McCormack or Ethel Waters, into one supremely flexible and winning style. Giddins proves himself an alert, even trenchant, commentator and concludes: “No other pop icon has ever been so thoroughly, lovingly liked--liked and trusted.”

Richard M. Sudhalter

*

BIRTH OF THE COOL

Beat, Bebop and the American Avant-Garde

By Lewis MacAdams

The Free Press: 288 pp., $27.50

*

Lewis MacAdams is a dogged reporter and a generous guide. His book, reflecting the jazz which may be its chief inspiration, is a series of riffs, confessions and McLuhanesque probes. He’s OK with not pressing explanation too hard, even in his conclusion, which some might find related to the claims of advertising: “To use the word ‘cool’ well is to partake of a central ritual of global culture as profound and as universal as a handshake.” The result is a savory, smoky text full of gossip (social history) and sparing us hindsight prophecy in the form of judgment.

Herbert Gold

*

BLOOD AND HONEY

A Balkan War Journal

By Ron Haviv

An Umbrage Editions Book/TV Books: 192 pp., $40

*

We may understand through narrative, but we remember through photographs. A hundred years from now, when the wars of Yugoslav succession that Ron Haviv’s pictures capture with such terrible precision are no longer the stuff of living memory, and other, doubtless equally horrific, events are in the news, what happened in the Balkans in the last decade of the 20th century will be hard to truly assimilate. The best photojournalists have a unique ability to preserve the reality of the present for those who will be alive at a time when it will have become the past. Whether it is Robert Capa’s photographs from the Spanish Civil War or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of the Japanese invasion of China, to name two path-breaking instances, or Haviv’s extraordinary work in the former Yugoslav federation in the 1990s, images capture a truth that otherwise might be lost and communicate in a way that is intelligible not simply to someone already interested in, or at least open to, the subject but to anyone with a heart and a head. Haviv risked his life and psychic equilibrium to record this series of photographs. For that 10-year commitment, he is owed a great debt of gratitude, not just by those of us who care about the Balkans but by all who care about the truth.

David Rieff

*

BLUE FRONTIER

Saving America’s Living Seas

By David Helvarg

Freeman: 320 pp., $24.95

*

“Blue Frontier,” by David Helvarg, is about everything oceanic, and it rolls along at a pace that would do justice to the fastest fish in the ocean, which is probably the bluefin tuna. The book opens with Helvarg describing a California surfing experience in which he gets whacked in the neck by a longboard, goes to the hospital for a CT scan, thinks that 50 really isn’t too old to be surfing but realizes he’ll miss it and the Pacific because he has to move to Washington “for work and other reasons.” The “other reasons” seem to be interviewing absolutely everybody who has ever had anything to do with the ocean, any ocean, from Elliot Richardson (on the subject of “The Law of the Sea”) to Don Walsh (co-pilot of the Trieste, the submersible that set and still holds the record for deep diving--35,800 feet to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960) to Julie Packard (whose father, David, built the Monterey Bay Aquarium), and that’s only in the opening chapter. The subtitle of the book is “Saving America’s Living Seas,” and Helvarg addresses that subject (and myriad others), but before he does, he takes us on the ultimate wave, cresting and carrying us at breakneck speed, introducing one subject after another, bound together by two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. It’s a fast, watery ride, and you’re going to get wet before it’s over.

Richard Ellis

*

BOOK BUSINESS

Publishing: Past, Present,

and Future

By Jason Epstein

W.W. Norton: 188 pp., $21.95

*

Book publishing is in the throes of enormous change, partly because of a major shift in corporate structures over the last few decades, but mainly the result of new technologies whose cultural influence, in the words of Jason Epstein, “promises to be no less revolutionary than the introduction of movable type.... As the implications of Gutenberg’s technology could not have been foreseen in its own time, those of our own technologies are indistinct today, but they promise to be no less eventful.” Epstein, arguably the most creative and innovative editor-publisher of the last half century, has written a gem of a book: thoughtful, witty, genuinely self-deprecating and constantly provocative.

Richard Seaver

*

CARRY ME HOME

Birmingham, Alabama:

The Climactic Battle of the

Civil Rights Revolution

By Diane McWhorter

Simon & Schuster: 702 pp., $35

*

“Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution” is another invisible story from the front lines of the civil rights movement. However hateful and ugly, the perspective of the white business aristocracy that resisted, with all its power, every effort to change the class and race relations of its city is a much-neglected part of the story of the civil rights movement. Diane McWhorter uses the city of Birmingham to give us first-hand accounts of all sides that clashed in a climactic battle in 1963. As an investigative journalist, McWhorter returned to the city of her youth and, through history and personal memoir, reveals the collusion that existed between the city’s business establishment, public officials such as Police Commissioner Bull Connor and the klansmen who met nonviolence with ropes, bombs and guns. A daughter of Birmingham’s white elite, McWhorter was the same age as the four 10-year-old black girls killed by the bomb that blasted through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church basement in 1963. In the same year, she witnessed the series of battles that took place after King targeted Birmingham--then considered the most segregated city in America--as the last stand against American apartheid. Powerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter’s intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South.

Ruth Rosen

*

THE CHINESE

By Jasper Becker

The Free Press: 464 pp., $27.50

*

Jaspar Becker is a journalist who has been writing from inside China since the mid-1980s for the Guardian, the Economist and the South China Morning Post; he is the author of one previous book, “Hungry Ghosts,” the definitive account of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap. In his new book, “The Chinese,” he has transcended the obstacles and come up with an enduring portrait of modern China. Becker doesn’t try to establish some new stereotype, of the sort that may soon be outdated, about what 1.3 billion people all want and think. Instead, he describes the deeper problems with which its government has failed to cope, such as migration from the countryside to cities or the lack of a social safety net. The result is a book that is the best available introduction to China for tourists, business executives and anyone else curious about the country.

Jim Mann

*

CONSTANTINE’S SWORD

The Church and the Jews: A History

By James Carroll

Houghton Mifflin: 756 pp., $28

*

James Carroll was first inspired to write this book when he visited Auschwitz and came upon the cross which Pope John Paul II had planted in a field alongside the eastern wall of the camp during his visit in 1979. The pope had said Mass in this field for a million fellow Poles and had prayed for and to Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun whom he would later canonize as a Christian martyr, even though the Nazis had killed her for being a Jew. The pope also called Auschwitz “the Golgotha of the modern world” and expressed the hope that there would one day be a place of prayer and penance built at the camp to honor the Catholic martyrs and to atone for the murders committed there. In 1984, when Carmelite nuns responded to the pope’s call and moved into the old theater beside the field, where the gas canisters had been stored, Catholics were shocked by the vehement protests of Jewish groups throughout Europe, the United States and Israel, who were appalled that the church should try to Christianize Auschwitz and claim it as a Christian tragedy. When Carroll visited Auschwitz and saw the cross for himself, his gut reaction was that it did not belong in this place. “Constantine’s Sword” is his attempt to show why. The bulk of the book is concerned with the history of hatred of Jews in the Catholic Church. It is for many a tragically familiar story, but Carroll’s narrative is heartfelt and eloquent. Most important, he writes as a committed Catholic. He cannot be accused of hostility to the church or of anti-Catholic bias. Carroll understands the reluctance of his fellow Catholics to own up to this terrible legacy because he has made his own painful journey to acknowledgment of his church’s sins. His book could, therefore, do what the Vatican has signally failed to do: to help Catholics accept the truth, as a first step to repentance.

Karen Armstrong

*

THE COURTSHIP

OF SEA CREATURES

By Jean-Pierre Otte

Translated from the French

by Marjolijn De JagerGeorge

Braziller: 128 pp., $20

*

“Any experience with the sea is useless if it does not miraculously take us back to the universe of women,” writes Jean-Pierre Otte in this stunning little gem of a nonfiction meditation, one man’s commune with nature. The narrator is world-weary. His friends banish him to an empty house by the sea, where he watches sea creatures court and reproduce. Sea urchins casting gametes into the tide, cuttlefish and their voluptuous dance, crabs beating songs with their shells, lobsters in the missionary position, bivalves, gastropods and even seaweed. His language, deceptively scientific, then romantic, then philosophical, is reminiscent of Rachel Carson and Terry Tempest Williams.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

DAZZLER

The Life and Times of Moss Hart

By Steven Bach

Alfred A. Knopf: 464 pp., $29.95

*

From the Hollywood sendup “Once in a Lifetime” in 1930 to the “Camelot” of King Arthur’s court in 1960, Moss Hart was a prince of Broadway in its regal age. If, lamentably, his name is not immediately recognizable to some, then neither is the Great White Way that he personified nor the theater that was his realm. Movies have eclipsed the theater, and well-crafted plays have largely been replaced by extravaganzas or revivals. Hart lived in a time when playwrights were cultural heroes, and he was among the most revered. In “Dazzler,” Steven Bach superbly re-creates the world of American theater during what many consider its golden era and gracefully brings to life a man who was as dark and complicated as he was engaging and brilliant. Even if Hart has faded from memory, Bach neatly hauls him back to center stage and shows why he is worth remembering. Bach’s sensitive handling of the private and public man weaves a life that is balanced, whole and fascinating.

Eric Lax

*

THE DONALD RICHIE READER

50 Years of Writing on Japan

By Donald Richie

Edited by Arturo Silva

Stone Bridge Press:

288 pp., $19.95 paper

*

Donald Richie--film critic, novelist, travel writer, memoirist, essayist, reporter--has spent most of his life in Tokyo. Long enjoyed and admired for his film criticism and writings on Japan (and treasured for his style by a coterie of writing peers that includes Michael Ondaatje, Pico Iyer and Tom Wolfe), Richie’s best writing artfully transcends the object of his steady gaze: Japan. Reading Richie, you will learn about Japan, yes; but you will learn more about yourself. “What had terrified me,” he writes after dancing and chanting all night at a village Festival of Darkness, “now consoled me.” Ably compiled and lovingly assembled by editor Arturo Silva, “The Donald Richie Reader” serves as port of entry to Richie’s books and other writings, and as its own rich reward: an eclectic, fulsome American-style sampler of the man and his indispensable work.

Tony Cohan

*

THE DREAM OF REASON

A History of Philosophy

From the Greeks to the Renaissance

By Anthony Gottlieb

W.W. Norton: 352 pp., $27.95

*

Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason,” a survey of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, invites comparison with Bertrand Russell’s monumental “History of Western Philosophy,” which was a bestseller when it was released in 1945, but Gottlieb’s book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship. Perhaps it is too much to expect that in these days it might also become a bestseller, but it is certainly a book in the finest tradition of responsible popularization. Thales would be proud. “The Dream of Reason” is clear, well-explained, amply researched, smoothly written, dryly witty in places and infused with respect for the achievements of the past.

Colin McGinn

*

ECONOMIC SENTIMENTS

Adam Smith, Condorcet

and the Enlightenment

By Emma Rothschild

Harvard University Press:

354 pp., $45

*

In her brilliantly illuminating and compelling reinterpretation of Adam Smith and Condorcet, Emma Rothschild presents a view of late 18th century ideas through which we can ourselves re-envision the human realities of life in the market. In so doing, she has produced a masterpiece of the historical imagination. First and foremost, “Economic Sentiments” is a rich, profound and at times revelatory essay in the history of ideas which will undoubtedly become part of the academic canon. But it is also an inspiriting commentary on our own times, which can be read with profit by many outside the academy.

John Gray

*

EVE’S SEED

Biology, the Sexes

and the Course of History

By Robert S. McElvaine

McGraw-Hill: 454 pp., $27.95

*

“Eve’s Seed” is a bestseller waiting to be discovered: a package of sex, science and species’ vanity nicely wrapped in sparkling prose. In this provocative study, Robert S. McElvaine weighs the competing claims of nature and nurture in the shaping of human beings. What is provocative about “Eve’s Seed” is McElvaine’s refusal to take for granted male convictions of superiority over females; what is original is his search for the origins of this pernicious contemporary trait in the pre-linguistic past. McElvaine’s conviction that evolution has something to teach us sets him apart from the culture-is-all crowd (he criticizes them for their dogmatic faith in John Locke’s dictum that babies are born with blank minds). Moderating the stiff brew that absolutists of the opposing culture and biological outlooks would force us to drink, he builds his argument on historical choices. A scholar with a voracious intellectual appetite, McElvaine wants to abolish the distinction between prehistoric and historic times, conventionally marked by the introduction of writing. His colleagues, he thinks, ignore at their peril what that premier sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has termed the “deep history” of humanity that is also responsible for our present biological development. In other words, those who only know human history through written records don’t know it very well.

Joyce Appleby

*

EYE OF THE WHALE

Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia

By Dick Russell

Simon & Schuster: 688 pp., $35

*

Once in a while, a book comes along that redefines its subject to the extent that most previous works immediately become obsolete. “Eye of the Whale” is such a book. There is little about gray whales that Dick Russell doesn’t know, and after reading this book, you will be able to say the same. But why would you want to read a 688-page book about whales? For starters, you might want to know about an animal that was considered extinct and is now the subject of a multi-million-dollar industry. But that’s not really the point. “Eye of the Whale” is a marvelous book, filled with insights that go beyond whales and whaling, gracefully written and utterly enthralling. Even if you’ve never read “Moby-Dick” or seen “Pinocchio” or given a passing thought to going whale-watching, you ought to read Russell’s book. It will entertain you, and it will change the way you think about the natural world.

Richard Ellis

*

FACING THE WIND

A True Story of Tragedy

and Reconciliation

By Julie Salamon

Random House: 302 pp., $24.95

*

Most murder mysteries and true-crime stories end with the suspect apprehended, guilty verdict rendered, case closed. But Julie Salamon, a journalist and author of two previous nonfiction books, has more ambitious goals in writing “Facing the Wind,” based on a true tale of a support group of several mothers of blind and physically challenged children, and one family whose tragedy bound them in unsuspecting ways. Salamon, a television critic for the New York Times, has written a haunting re-creation of a family’s calamity that no parent wants to experience. In the process, she raises thought-provoking moral, legal and ethical questions about insanity and rehabilitation, guilt and reconciliation that are rarely addressed in most writing or filming of true-crimes stories, an oversight that could be corrected if editors, television or film executives learn from the critic’s subdued approach.

Paula L. Woods

*

FAST FOOD NATION

The Dark Side

of the All-American Meal

By Eric Schlosser

Houghton Mifflin: 356 pp., $25

*

“Fast Food Nation” is a passionately argued, incendiary polemic about a subject close to our hearts (and stomachs), and Eric Schlosser may be the Upton Sinclair for this age of mad-cow disease. With a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts, Schlosser’s tale of starch and fury ranges from the strategic-defense enclave of NORAD (where the Domino’s deliveryman gets instant clearance) to the grim interiors of meatpacking plants in towns like Lexington, Neb. (known as “Mexington” for its influx of Mexican migrant workers.)

Tom Vanderbilt

*

FAST-TALKING DAMES

By Maria DiBattista

Yale University Press:

366 pp., $27.95

*

The movies of the 1930s, mainly the fabulous “screwball” comedies, were jampacked with intrepid and high-spirited heroines who knew “that silence is not a natural state but a moral and emotional one reached through speech.” This is what Maria DiBattista convincingly illustrates in her fascinating book “Fast-Talking Dames,” which isn’t only about pictures in motion but the power and pleasures of speech. The author introduces an impressive gallery of treasured landmark comedies that would be unimaginable without the sparkling stars we’ve come to associate with sophisticated fun and outright hilarity.

Sabine Reichel

*

A FLY IN THE SOUP

Memoirs

By Charles Simic

University of Michigan Press:

144 pp., $29.95

*

“A Fly in the Soup” by Charles Simic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic, is more than a writer’s account of his formation; it is also the story of a man shaped by extremes of history, a story of displacement, war and exile--a central story of the last century and one that Simic, who never let horror deprive him of aesthetic and sensual pleasure, tells vividly. Simic is a natural storyteller, with an innate distaste for pallid truths, and his memoir is one of those books in which a life is so well-evoked that we recognize ourselves in experiences we’ve never had. We seem to know what it feels like to read all night long in the cavern of an apartment Simic lived in as a young man in Chicago, how it felt to ride the El to work at midnight, worrying about falling asleep, all the while constructing a life inside the mind that was never impoverished by the hardships of the outer world. “Mine is an old, familiar story by now,” Simic writes at the beginning of “A Fly in the Soup,” but he makes it new again--or, as he might put it, he gives us the whole thing again in the best possible sense.

Meghan O’ Rourke

*

GILLIGAN UNBOUND

Pop Culture in the Age of

Globalization

By Paul A. Cantor

Rowman & Littlefield: 256 pp., $27.95

*

Paul A. Cantor is a strange creature: a conservative professor of English at the University of Virginia who specializes in Shakespeare, loves pop culture and is flat-out funny (he once referred to Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” as “Lethal Bodkin”). In his new book, “Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization,” Cantor examines four of his favorite television shows--”Gilligan’s Island,” “Star Trek,” “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files”--and explores how they speak to America’s understanding of its place in the world. Cantor is a proponent of a thoughtful conservatism that should be interesting to liberals and instructive for conservatives, for he has the courage to say out loud that not everything on television is dross and that some of it is not only entertaining but significant as well. Cantor has accomplished something so rare that it seems phenomenal: He has written a conservative book on pop culture that is smart and felicitous. Cantor has laid out a blueprint for how conservatives should engage the culture in the future.

Jonathan V. Last

*

GOING UP THE RIVER

Travels in a Prison Nation

By Joseph T. Hallinan

Random House: 320 pp., $24.95

*

Every senator, congressman and state legislator, as well as every governor and the president, should read “Going Up the River.” They probably won’t: The book’s subject is the appalling growth and size of the American prison industry, and it seems that no one in public life today has any ideas about prisons except to build more of them. Joseph T. Hallinan, for some years a national reporter for the Newhouse chain, has written a book that could well have been written in cold anger. But it wasn’t. Instead Hallinan has taken a thorough, clear and calm look at how, almost unnoticed, the nation has created a $40-billion-a-year prison industry that employs 400,000 people. It is a system in which rehabilitation is nearly a forgotten goal, prisoners are treated most inhumanely in the most modern prisons and wardens talk as much about cutting costs as about devising ways to keep prisoners from repeating offenses. The U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation except Russia. Hallinan believes there are signs here and there of a changing attitude toward prison. But he is not hopeful that change will come quickly. A powerful, levelheaded book, “Going Up the River” may just, hopefully, accelerate the pace of change.

Anthony Day

*

THE GRAVES ARE NOT YET FULL

Race, Tribe and Power

in the Heart of Africa

By Bill Berkeley

Basic Books: 310 pp., $27.50

*

The African catastrophe gnaws and gnaws at the moral imagination of every decent person in the West. And for good reason. Put starkly, the bad news from the continent seems exponentially worse than that coming from any other part of the world, and the good news, such as it is, is in such short supply. In an era when, burst stock market bubble or no burst stock market bubble, the received wisdom in the rich world is that globalization will sooner or later make every part of the world better off, Africa seems to stand as the terrible exception. What Bill Berkeley has done, in a series of brilliantly reported vignettes, is to try to understand the deep underlying causes of the worst cases of ethnic and political strife in Africa--Liberia, Sudan, Congo, South Africa in the death throes of apartheid--and offer a way of thinking about these disasters that serves the cause of hope rather than of despair. “The Graves Are Not Yet Full” is a tour de force, and as reporting it is essential reading for anyone concerned with understanding Africa.

David Rieff

*

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

The Life of a Storyteller

By Jackie Wullschlager

Alfred A. Knopf: 490 pp., $30

*

Most readers think of Hans Christian Andersen less as the author of his stories than as their curator. The Ugly Duckling and the Little Mermaid, the Snow Queen and the Steadfast Tin Soldier are not characters like Lady Macbeth or David Copperfield; they are myths that seem to have existed always. Yet all these stories, and many more, were either invented or put in their definitive form by Andersen, a very modern literary artist and a very unhappy man. The artist and the man are vividly present in Jackie Wullschlager’s new biography “Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller.” Wullschlager, a journalist and the author of a study of English children’s literature, has written an exemplary book: informed, sympathetic, lucid. With scholarly diligence and critical insight, she allows us to discover the real Andersen for the first time. After reading Wullschlager’s book, one returns to Andersen’s fairy tales with deeper understanding and a new respect for the man who wrote them.

Adam Kirsch

*

THE HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE

How Scientists Peered Over

the Edge of Emptiness

and Found Everything

By K.C. Cole

Harcourt: 274 pp., $24

*

“If there was no empty space,” wrote Lucretius, “everything would be one solid mass.” In championing the concept of empty space, what the ancients called “the void,” Lucretius was going against the grain of mainstream Greco-Roman thinking; most scholars of the ancient Western world agreed with Aristotle that the very idea of nothingness was an abomination. Yet although this view held immense sway, the void has asserted a subtle power on human imagination ever since, constantly tugging, as Lucretius suggests, at our conceptual foundations. How can there be something unless there is nothing to stage it against? This search for nothing, for pure unalloyed emptiness, is the subject of “The Hole in the Universe,” Times staff writer K.C. Cole’s latest book. For those with a fair knowledge of physics, this will be compelling stuff; Cole’s book is packed with intriguing insights into the science of nothing.

Margaret Wertheim

*

HOME TO WAR

By Gerald Nicosia

Crown: 690 pp., $35

*

They were the enemies the White House had most reason to fear. Heroes twice over, they went off to Vietnam and won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts for their physical bravery and then came home and demonstrated a different kind of courage at the forefront of the antiwar movement. They became the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and the government’s abuse and slander of the other peace marchers sounded puny and unpersuasive when used against them. Anyone who saw the April 1971 photographs of veterans throwing their medals through a fence at the foot of the Capitol in Washington will not forget the rage and pain in their faces. In his essential new book, “Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement,” Gerald Nicosia re-captures that moment and gives us a comprehensive history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. A time may come when veterans must again unite to protest government actions they have witnessed that strike them as wrongheaded or inhumane. Nicosia has provided a detailed blueprint for how such a movement can succeed.

A.J. Langguth

*

HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE

The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy

Edited by Amanda Smith

Viking: 764 pp., $39.95

*

The Joe Kennedy who emerges from his letters, memos and diary entries--almost all made public here for the first time--is a man who invented himself several times over with a blinders-on determination. As revealing as the letters, memos and diary entries are about Kennedy himself, they simultaneously tell a personal story of the 20th century. The Kennedys were high-perched witnesses and participants in two world wars, the early years of Hollywood, the Depression, the New Deal and the road to Camelot. The self-created, multifaceted man presented here is a complex bundle of attributes and accomplishments. The good, the bad, the brutal, the generous, the desperate, the self-righteous, the astute, the incisive, the conniving and the spiritual are all jostled together on these pages. No life can be conclusively reconstructed, but “Hostage to Fortune” comes closer than we have seen in a long while and, because of it, no one will have an excuse to reduce Joseph Kennedy to being just “a bootlegger” again. Uncluttered by secondary excuses or analysis, “Hostage to Fortune” opens a unique window on history.

Cari Beauchamp

*

AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT

Memories of a Rural Boyhood

By Jimmy Carter

Simon & Schuster: 274 pp., $26

*

This memoir of Jimmy Carter’s boyhood in Plains, Ga., on the legendary peanut farm begins and ends in biblical fashion with the soil. Carter’s Depression-era eye for cost and detail (from the vitally important price of cotton on down) reminds one of E.B. White.

Susan Salter Reynolds

*

IF NIGHTS COULD TALK

A Family Memoir

By Marsha Recknagel

St. Martin’s Press: 272 pp., $23.95

*

The pleasures of reading Marsha Recknagel are manifold, especially that darkest of delights, the discovery that telling what you know is the exposure of a life-enhancing secret--in other words, that nights can talk. “If Nights Could Talk” is a book about the talk of many nights and a heroic exposure of many secrets, the lore of one more unhappy family extremely unhappy in its own way. Furthermore, it responsibly accounts for the heroic rescue of two members of that family--dismembered and quite literally remembered.

Richard Howard

*

I, MAYA PLISETSKAYA

By Maya Plisetskaya

Translated from the Russian

by Antonina W. Bouis

Yale University Press: 386 pp., $35

*

“I, Maya Plisetskaya” is the fascinating story of how this artist of implacable will confronted and defied the Soviet regime--and eventually had her way. “I, Maya Plisetskaya” has the virtues of candor and directness, and it has a real story to tell. She may have her vanities, but what star doesn’t? And how many stars have had to exhibit such an indomitable spirit? She insists that she wrote her book herself, and it reads as if she did--or, rather, as if she had dictated it into a tape machine. (It’s as if she was her own ghostwriter.) In Antonina Bouis’ energetic translation, she comes across as the same person we knew on the stage: glamorous, exciting, voracious. Larger than life. Not always pleasing but never to be ignored and certainly never to be trifled with.

Robert Gottlieb

*

IN THE BEGINNING

The Story of the King James

Bible and How It Changed

a Nation, a Language

and a Culture

By Alister McGrath

Doubleday: 340 pp., $24.95

*

The King James Bible of 1611 and the works of Shakespeare are the chief pillars of the English language. For four centuries, to this very day, they have profoundly affected native-English speakers and how they write, think and feel. “In the Beginning” is an engrossing (and handsomely printed) account of the making of the King James Bible and its consequences. Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford, nicely puts the Bible in the religious and literary context of its time. “Without the King James Bible,” McGrath writes, “there would have been no ‘Paradise Lost,’ no ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ no Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ no Negro spirituals and no Gettysburg Address. These and innumerable other works were inspired by the language of the Bible.” McGrath’s elegantly clear account is worthy of his great subject.

Anthony Day

*

IN THE NAME OF IDENTITY

Violence and the Need to Belong

By Amin Maalouf

Translated from the French

by Barbara Bray

Arcade Publishing: 164 pp., $22.95

*

This striking and pungent polemic, mostly as wise as it is brief, is so searingly pertinent, it confirms that there really is a history to historic events, that the mass murder of Sept. 11, while indelibly shocking, is not wholly surprising. It was not inevitable--better security may have averted these particular assaults--but it had a design and a logic. There is nothing fancy about Amin Maalouf’s book, no specialized vocabulary, no self-promotional bravado. He operates on two planes. First, he propounds grand generalities, then he focuses on Islamic fundamentalism. The fit between the two is imperfect. But the thesis is profound. Maalouf, the radical idealist, has the temerity to tell people how to think about their identities and their religions: “If the men of all countries, of all conditions and faiths can so easily be transformed into butchers, if fanatics of all kinds manage so easily to pass themselves off as defenders of identity, it’s because the ‘tribal’ concept of identity still prevalent all over the world facilitates such a distortion,” a distortion we cling to “through habit, from lack of imagination or resignation, thus inadvertently contributing to the tragedies by which, tomorrow, we shall be genuinely shocked.” Shocked we are and remain.

Todd Gitlin

*

THE INVENTION OF PEACE

Reflections on War and International Order

By Michael Howard

Yale University Press: 114 pp., $15

*

In Michael Howard’s brilliant essay “The Invention of Peace,” the greatest military historian of our time calmly and patiently lays out the real dialectic between war and peace both in European history and in our own time. His starting point is the remark of the 19th century British jurist Sir Henry Maine that “war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention”--the universal norm in human history. Howard is at pains to show how most human societies, though they varied in their bellicosity, were at least partly organized around war-making. In other words, there was nothing irrational about war; to the contrary, for millenniums it was inseparable from the social order. What Howard shows is that it is peace and not war that is, as he puts it, “artificial, intricate and highly volatile.” Howard cuts to the core of the wishful thinking of so many well-intended activists when he writes that “the establishment of a global peaceful order thus depends on the creation of a world community sharing the characteristics that make possible domestic order. [It] cannot be created simply by building international institutions and organizations that do not arise naturally out of the cultural disposition and historical experience of their members.”

David Rieff

*

IRVING GILL AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM

A Study in Modernist

Architectural Culture

By Thomas S. Hines

The Monacelli Press: 304 pp., $75

*

Without a degree in architecture, without travel to Europe or even much travel throughout the United States, with only the briefest of apprenticeships in Chicago, without major patronage beyond his middle-class clients, Irving Gill of San Diego (later of Los Angeles) took architecture into a new realm, stripping it of its dishonest Victorian and Edwardian rhetoric and superfluous adornment. The fact that architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933) was doing the same thing at the same time in and around Vienna, then arguably the cultural center of Europe, only compounds the mystery of Gill. As a deft psychologist as well as architectural critic, Thomas Hines shows us in his brilliant study how Gill had the courage of the autodidact, most obviously the ability of the self-taught genius to shed the intimidations of convention and pursue new pathways.

Kevin Starr

*

JAY’S JOURNAL OF ANOMALIES

Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Impostors, Pretenders, Sideshow Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular

Entertainments

By Ricky Jay

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

176 pp., $40

*

There are books that come along at just the right time. In a world that has become so sad, too savage, more somber than a species ought to inhabit without relief, the appearance of “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies” offers the wary and heartbroken and deeply vexed rest, if only momentarily, from the terrible news of the day. These are divertimenti, crafted by a master and perfectly pitched in luxuriant bombast. The immediate appeal of “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies” is that it brings to an ever-widening audience the irregularly gifted, hyperbolically self-challenging and extraordinarily multiticketed, multitasking spectacle of the sui generis Ricky Jay, whose one-man show (available in print, on film and forthcoming to the Broadway stage) and the secrets to its oddments and mysteries may age and die in the flesh someday, as others of his species are given to do with predictable consistency, but whose voice (thanks be to cinema and Farrar, Straus & Giroux)--its bombast and homage, hype and excitements, blather and wisdom--will live on in the gorgeously illustrated and acid-free pages of this companion volume to his earlier and much heralded, much prized, much reprinted cult classic, “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women.” Rolling Stone described “Learned Pigs” and its author as: “a dizzying encyclopedia ... a magician, lecturer, actor and library curator, Jay is the country’s leading weirdologist.” He is also a writer, the real thing. After all the brouhaha and braggadocio, it is language--lush, shimmering, abundant language--that floats the boat in which Jay stands on his head, juggling swords, dancing on his thumbs, pulling nickels from behind our ears and rabbits out of invisible hats. His imagination “reads” like one well-wrought run-on sentence in which the accumulation of detail and devise circles back on the reader like a great roundabout performance.

Thomas Lynch

*

JOHN ADAMS

By David McCullough

Simon & Schuster: 736 pp., $35

*

America’s moment of global preeminence would be a fine time for a John Adams revival. Not only does the second president deserve the recognition he has rarely achieved but, strangely enough, much of what the man had to say can be addressed to our own generation, the feckless children of this wildly successful United States. We’d do well to listen to the cranky old New England prophet of limits and responsibility. Now, right on time, a compelling new biography by the celebrated public historian David McCullough restores to life this wise and endearing American original.

John Rhodehamel

*

LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS

El Nino, Famines and the Making of the Third World

By Mike Davis

Verso: 464 pp., $27

*

The statistics are mind-numbing. Except for China’s horrific Taipeng Rebellion of the 1860s, which killed 20 million, more people in the tropics died in the late 19th century from famine and famine-related epidemics than in all conventional warfare throughout that century--as many as 50 million--and millions more were debilitated by malnutrition worldwide. The great famines of the late 19th century have remained a footnote to imperial history. Generations of historians largely ignored their implications and until recently they dismissed them as “climatic accidents” beyond the control of mere mortals. “Late Victorian Holocausts” proves them wrong. Mike Davis calls these disasters “the secret history of the nineteenth century” and argues that today’s poverty-stricken Third World was born of these staggering catastrophes.

Brian Fagan

*

LEONARDO’S INCESSANT LAST SUPPER

By Leo Steinberg

Zone Books: 318 pp., $43

*

Not only is Leonardo da Vinci alive and well nearly 500 years after his death, arguably he has never been better. Twentieth-century scholarly careers were dedicated to him, as were specialized journals and entire libraries. He has made the rounds of exhibitions, lectures, scholarly symposiums and the auction house. More, he is also in the artist’s studio, recycled by Warhol, Rauschenberg and many others. And lest we forget: Da Vinci is in the mother’s milk of pop culture. You want Da Vinci? You got him: T-shirts, popular songs, jigsaw puzzles and paint-by-number kits, novels, New Yorker covers, sundry ad campaigns, bawdy party cards and shower curtains. Leo Steinberg’s analysis is rigorously visual, his arguments based on what can be seen. In writing that is as taut as a medieval scholastic text, he constructs his chapters so that each builds inexorably on ones that have gone before. Nowhere, he writes, is the “Last Supper” unambiguous, and just about any proposition made about it is reversible. Meanings are layered, polysemantic, the visual means double-functioning at a minimum. This is not a book for intellectual sissies. It will fascinate people with a high tolerance for ambiguity, who relish intricate puzzles and appreciate the art of a tightly knit argument. Steinberg on Da Vinci is an intellectual tour-de-force and worth every minute, even if you find yourself in disagreement and lose sleep trying to figure out why.

Richard Turner

*

LETTERS: SUMMER 1926

By Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak

New York Review Books:

288 pp., $12.95 paper

*

“Letters: Summer 1926” is a portrait of the sacred delirium of art. There are three participants: a god and two worshipers, who are also worshipers of each other (and who we, the readers of their letters, know to be future gods). A pair of young Russian poets, who have exchanged years of fervent letters about work and life, enter into correspondence with a great German poet who, for both, is poetry incarnate. These three-way love letters--and they are that--are an incomparable dramatization of ardor about poetry and about the life of the spirit.

Susan Sontag

*

A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY

Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950

By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Houghton Mifflin: 684 pp., $28.95

*

An elegant and readable jewel reminiscent of Russell Baker’s “Growing Up” and of George F. Kennan’s graceful look back upon his critical place at the brink of the Cold War, “A Life in the Twentieth Century” reads like a warm invitation to a long chat with a gentleman scholar of forbidding accomplishments and patrician reputation, tempered by the abundant humor and wry style that make for good storytelling. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s memoir says quite a few things exceedingly well. His vivid firsthand images suck the dust off of history and let us see the past clearly. Whether he is writing about a Fourth of July parade in Xenia, Ohio, where gray-bearded Civil War veterans marched slowly to a Sousa band, or describing the sinister scream of a German V-1 rocket in wartime London, Schlesinger evokes an unquenchable intoxication for living, for constantly gulping down just one drop more of the passion and action of his times. “A Life in the Twentieth Century,” like his previous 15 books and countless lively articles, offers an indispensable series of engaging portraits of a turbulent age just past by America’s most gifted writer on history.

Douglas Brinkley

*

LITERATURE AND THE GODS

By Roberto Calasso

Translated from the Italian

by Tim Parks

Alfred A. Knopf: 210 pp., $22

*

“The gods are fugitive guests of literature,” the Italian virtuoso Roberto Calasso trumpets in the opening bars of his latest series of essays, “Literature and the Gods.” The author of “Ka” and “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” Calasso has sat at the table with the deities before, and there was never any question of who was carving and who was bringing the wine. In a series of eight chapters, Calasso leads his guests through a selective tour of French and German literature, from 1798 to 1898 and the death of Stephane Mallarme. Even when Calasso strays into displays of erudition that seem as parodic as any Woody Allen vignette--”K.O. Miller, who died of sunstroke in Greece after having introduced the term ‘chthonian’ into classical studies”--he is nothing less than entertaining. There’s a bit of Jack Benny to his Jascha Heifetz, a spritz of borscht in his Dionysiac flagon, that seduce a reader in search of ideas that entertain as well as edify, that make a reader want to catch Calasso live in the lecture hall--perhaps in the company of ladies looking for a chance to hear spoken Italian.

Jonathan Levi

*

THE MAN WHO FOUND THE MISSING LINK

Eugene Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right

By Pat Shipman

Simon & Schuster: 514 pp., $28

*

Alas, poor Eugene Dubois! No one knew him well. A paleontologist whose greatest joy was to hold a skull and discern its evolutionary place (he once noticed the prominent forehead and lantern jaw of a waiter in a Paris restaurant and exclaimed, “Look at that skull! What I would give to have one like it for my collection!”), Dubois was a total failure at connecting with people. But with bones he was a genius. He found what paleontologists now call Homo erectus , the missing fossil link in humans’ evolution from apes. To Dubois, it was Pithecanthropus erectus. Dubois’ story, long forgotten but now admirably unearthed by Pat Shipman and affectingly told in the present tense, makes the quests of Indiana Jones seem like a child’s stay at an adventure camp. Dubois was born in the Dutch province of Limburg in 1858, 18 months after the first Neanderthal skeletons were found in Germany--”the first tangible proof of human evolution,” Shipman writes--and the year before Charles Darwin publishes “The Origin of Species,” which “made the find comprehensible by placing it in a context.” Shipman, a paleontologist and fine writer whose other books include “Taking Wing” and “The Evolution of Racism,” was equally determined to find Dubois, not least because “he single-handedly created the conceptual framework now used in the analysis of all fossil humanoid remains,” and she has. “The Man Who Found the Missing Link” is true to the science yet accessible to a general reader, and it is a captivating story of an obsession that changed the understanding of our species.

Eric Lax

*

MARIE ANTOINETTE

The Journey

By Antonia Fraser

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday:

512 pp., $35

*

The Marie Antoinette who emerges from these pages is fully formed, a feat for which Antonia Fraser deserves much praise. That we find so much sympathy for a character who has so little in common with the travails of our time is to Fraser’s credit, too. She navigates the doublespeak and scurrilous journalism of the period with the skill of a master helmsman. Fraser writes that she has attempted to tell the story of Antoinette “without anticipating its terrible ending.” But the fate of the queen, indeed the fate of the French monarchy, lurks around every turn of this book. Antoinette “was a victim from birth,” writes Fraser in an informed, insightful epilogue about the queen. “Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.” Fraser suggests that Antoinette would have shone in the apolitical monarchies that dominated much of the 19th century. Instead, she was a casualty of the implosion of the 18th century political system she had tried for so long to resist.

Cara Mia DiMassa

*

THE MEDIC

Life and Death

in the Last Days of WWII

By Leo Litwak

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: 240 pp., $22.95

*

Deep in their ordinary lives, when they are free from harm, many men begin to rummage inside themselves to inspect the slime left by war because they want to write about it. It is an awful task. One of the most remarkable of these memoirs is Leo Litwak, a writer and a veteran of the European theater, who has written “The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII,” a book that should be given to every schoolboy in the country at age 13.

Gloria Emerson

*

MILOSZ’S ABC’S

By Czeslaw Milosz

Translated from the Polish

by Madeline G. Levine

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 314 pp., $24

*

“My time, my twentieth century,” says Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in this new, eccentric book of prose, “weighs on me as a host of voices and the faces of people whom I once knew, or heard about, and now they no longer exist.” In “Milosz’s ABC’s” those voices are allowed to spill out (in alphabetical order!) in a series of mini-essays, vignettes, portraits of people famous and humble and little philosophical parables. “Milosz’s ABC’s” captures what is perhaps most characteristic and attractive in Milosz’s entire literary output. His writing can be simultaneously a protest against the disappearance of people, objects and images from the physical world and a celebration of time’s unstoppable forward movement. At the end of his “ABC’s,” the author says that “we are all woven out of time,” as is our speech, our art and our whole civilization. There is something wondrous, sad, comical and possibly even grand in our noisy passage within the “inconceivable ‘now”’--something that deserves the effort and the pain of the journey. Few writers in our time can rival Milosz’s ability to render justice to the strange spectacle of the world. We should be grateful for the wisdom of his extraordinary life.

Jaroslaw Anders

*

THE MONEY AND THE POWER

The Making of Las Vegas and

Its Hold on America, 1947-2000

By Sally Denton

and Roger Morris

Alfred A. Knopf: 462 pp., $26.95

*

If even half of what Sally Denton and Roger Morris tell us is true--and their 392 pages of text are backed up by 60-plus pages of documentation--the journalism of Southern California and Nevada over the last 50 years has been a colossal failure. Journalists have been outspent and outgunned, seduced and intimidated, betrayed by their managements and bamboozled into chasing little stories rather than the big one taking shape right in front of them. Indeed, if, as is likely, most all of “The Money and the Power” is true, it’s one of the most important nonfiction books published in the United States in that half-century. Denton, a native Nevadan who has reported for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Morris, a National Security Council staffer in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, argue that Las Vegas has never gone straight. Instead, it has become the nation’s “shadow capital,” laundering untold billions of dollars in drug money. Organized crime--far transcending the stereotype of an Italian-accented Mafia--has controlled Nevada politics for decades and heavily corrupted national political parties and every recent presidency.

Michael Harris

*

MOTHER JONES

The Most Dangerous Woman

in America

By Elliott J. Gorn

Hill & Wang: 408 pp., $27

*

Asked to state her place of residence, the woman who called herself Mother Jones memorably replied: “I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly in what place, because I am always in the fight against oppression, and wherever a fight is going on I have to jump there ....My address is like my shoes; it travels with me wherever I go.” Like Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed, she made herself a legend. Certainly, she was a far cry from the “legends” who now flourish by offering up “secrets” of their private lives to a public hooked on triviality. And unlike our current “legends,” who work hard to seem younger than their age, Mother Jones actually lied about her birth date in order to present herself as seven years older than she