Sixth, and final, batch. To reprise, I started scratching down names of books in a little notebook during my Detroit trip. I wound up spending a lot of time in bookstores: good place to find out what's going on, and a psychic balm to boot. Kept adding more when I got back to Wichita, and added some more on a trip to the library. Then I looked the books up, mostly on Amazon, correcting my scribbles and a little more info, which led to writing these brief notes. In many cases, I followed the related books links, adding to the list. Cut the resulting notes file into six batches of about 50 titles each, so figure 300 total. Not all are new, but the overwhelming majority were published (or reprinted) since 2006. To try to keep from repeating myself, I collected my old book browsing notes in a reference file, to which I've added the new notes. In some cases I wound up repeating myself anyway -- where the old note didn't say anything, or sometimes just by accident.

This has turned out to be a tedious, time consuming exercise, keeping me from doing much of anything else in the last week. At this point my eyes are kind of glazing over, but I got a pretty good idea of what's out there and what people are thinking about.

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Michael Ashby/Hugh Shercliff/David Cebon: Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design (2007, Butterworth-Heinemann): Textbook on materials science. I used to buy things like this just for occasional reference. This is a subject that still fascinated me, and looks like a good one.

Charles Barber: Comfortably Numb : How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (2008, Knopf): Author worked for 10 years in NYC shelters for the homeless mentally ill, so he may have some axes to grind: we spend less and less on mental health therapy, but more and more on drugs: the US accounts for 66% of the world market for antidepressants.

Bruce Bartlett: Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past (2008, Palgrave Macmillan): A brief on why blacks should never trust the Democratic Party, built around a long list of racist misdeeds by prominent Democrats (mostly but not exclusively Southerners). Much of this history is worth recounting -- Woodrow Wilson's extension of segregation is a case in point -- although Bartlett never knows when to let up (e.g., the KKK member FDR appointed to the Supreme Court was Hugo Black, one of the staunchest supporters of civil rights ever). Then there's the Republican Party's past, some of which isn't buried at all. Bartlett got in trouble a couple of years back over his attempt to attack Bush from the right: Impostor: How George W Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Maybe this is his penance?

Wendell Berry: The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (2005, Shoemaker & Hoard): The latest (I believe) of many short essay collections, some profound, some just cranky and contrary. His essay about the first Gulf War (see Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays) did as much as anything to convince me of the rightness of pacifism. There's also a recent biography by Jason Peters: Wendell Berry: Life and Work.

Arthur C Brooks: Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America -- and How We Can Get More of It (2008, Basic Books): One of the few right-wingers who still seems to be trying to come up with new ideas, although it's certainly possible that this reduces to some syllogism like having money makes people happy and only the rich have money so the way to make the whole nation happier is to give the rich more money.

Elisabeth Bumiller: Condoleezza Rice: An American Life: A Biography (2007, Random House): Winner of the 2004 Wimblehack sweepstakes for the most inane and obsequious reporting on the 2004 presidential campaign moves on to a subject worthy of her talents. I like the line about how Rice "has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer" -- shows you what a pro like Bumiller can do, whereas I'd just settle for describing Rice as a deceitful, shallow-brained psychopath.

Thomas J Campanella: The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World (2008, Princeton University Press): Urban planning professor looks at China's building boom over the last 20-30 years, creating a substantially new and often precarious urban landscape.

Lou Cannon/Carl M Cannon: Reagan's Disciple: George W Bush's Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy (2008, Perseus): Unfair, I'd say. Both authors have their reasons to belittle Bush (cf. cover for graphic illustration). Lou has built his career as Reagan's consummate biographer. Carl already co-wrote another book giving Bush's credits away: Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Architect of George W Bush's Remarkable Political Triumphs. Personally, I don't see Reagan as much of a guru, nor Bush as modest enough to be anyone's disciple. Bush had help but mostly he managed to screw up on his own, for reasons as intrinsic as his sick character. As for Reagan, people have been covering up his messes for nearly 30 years now. This book is another way of denying them.

Richard A Clarke: Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters (2008, Harper Collins): Reportedly "goes far beyond terrorism, to examine the inexcusable chain of recurring US government disasters" -- the examples range from Vietnam to Katrina. Question is how far.

Helena Cobban: Re-Engage! American and the World After Bush: An Informed Citizen's Guide (paperback, 2008, Paradigm): Journalist, especially expert on Middle East in general, Lebanese Shiites in particular; one of my favorite bloggers, not least because her pacifism is so firm. Recently wrote Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes.

Jonathan Cohn: Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis -- and the People Who Pay the Price (2007; paperback, 2008, Harper Perennial): Out in paperback now. This strikes me as the breaker in the glut of health care books -- the one to give someone non-wonkish who needs convincing. Meant myself to pick it up when it came out in paperback, but right now I figure I don't need convincing.

Gwyneth Cravens: Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy (2007, Knopf). Good rule of thumb is never trust a book that purports to tell you the truth. I am impressed that Richard Rhodes likes the book, but the author's numerous tours of nuclear power plants give off the whiff of Stockholm syndrome. It bothers me, for instance, when I read specious claims like: "A person living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant receives less radiation from it in a year than you get from eating one banana." Maybe true if the plant is functioning properly with no leaks and no waste moving toward your backyard, but factor in Chernobyl. Author starts with a Marie Curie quote: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood." I doubt that Cravens adds that Curie died of cancer no doubt due to her experiments. (Her husband died much earlier, unequivocally due to radiation poisoning.)

EJ Dionne, Jr: Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008, Princeton University Press): Part of the backlash against the equation of religion with the far right -- a matter of much concern to Christians with a sense of social and political justice, and utter irrelevance to the rest of us. Dionne has written some promising books in the past -- Why Americans Hate Politics; They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era; Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge.

Mark Engler: How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (paperback, 2008, Nation Books): Looks at the future of capitalism in a world where US leadership under Bush has been discredited. Read an excerpt in TomDispatch that didn't go very deep.

John L Esposito/Dalia Mogahed: Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (2008, Gallup Press): Results from a six-year study by Gallup's pollsters, some 50000 interviews, sampling the opinions of 1.3 billion muslims. Big surprise is that muslims are pretty much like everyone else. Who would have thought that?

Scot M Faulkner: Naked Emperors: The Failure of the Republican Revolution (2008, Rowman & Littlefield): Looks first at the 1994 "Contract for America" and the failure of the Gingrich Republicans to deliver on those promises, followed by the corrupt K Street racket.

Noah Feldman: The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (2008, Princeton University Press): One of the more dangerously misguided liberals around, probably because he can't distinguish between moral imperatives for individuals and political programs for nation states. Supported Iraq war. After it went sour he tried to guilt-trip us with What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building. He followed up with After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy and now this book, with a break in between to consider our own jihadis in Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem -- and What We Should Do About It. Not sure whether he's profoundly wrong, or just a fool.

Bruno S Frey: Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (2008, MIT Press): Economist, has written a couple of books on psychological factors in motivation, sums his research up here. Happiness seems to be the pivotal concept for consolidating work on non-material motivations, regardless of the second thoughts the more philosophically or sociologically inclined are having on the subject.

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore: Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (2008, WW Norton): Later on civil rights came to be seen as a liberal movement, but before WWII only radicals (principally Communists) stuck their necks out (at least among whites). That history needs to be told, because like the so-called "premature antifascists" who opposed Franco, they were right.

Mark Halperin/John F Harris: The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 (2008, Random House): A couple of insider political hacks playing up their insider grasp of the usual mechanics of prseidential elections. Probably the most instantly disposable book of the season.

Haider Ala Hamoudi: Howling in Mesopotamia: An Iraqi-American Memoir (2008, Beaufort Books): A cousin of Ahmed Chalabi, not quite an insider but something like that, making him a journalist with an unusual perspective on the US occupation of Iraq.

Chris Harman: A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (new edition, paperback, 2008, Verso): Brief for its subject (760 pages), tends in classic Marxist fashion to view everything as class struggle.

Jennifer Michael Hecht: The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today (2007; paperback, 2008, Harper One). Original subtitle: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong. History part digs into past/present ideas of happiness. Focuses on drugs, money, bodies, celebration. Not sure what she makes of them. My own view is that happiness is overrated as a pursuit, but nice when it comes along, especially if it doesn't take too much trouble. Author also wrote: Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.

Eric Hobsbawm: On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (2008, Knopf): Essay collection, plenty to write about, one of the major historians of the 20th century.

Thomas Homer-Dixon: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (paperback, 2008, Island Press): Big thinker, able to draw on a vast range of knowledge, but his skills at manipulating possible world scenarios ultimately reduces the world to simplistic models. Finding an upside to a downside is one such model, but not the only one. Previously wrote The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future, which I was impressed with but didn't manage to slog through.

Mark Jaccard: Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (2006, Cambridge University Press): Tries to clean up the reputation of fossil fuels by pushing for clean, zero-emissions technology -- not really sustainable, at least beyond a few centuries, and probably not all that clean either. Cover shows a dinosaur riding a bicycle -- the sort of image you can endlessly pick apart.

Joe Jackson: The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire (2008, Penguin): The story of Henry Wickham, who stole the seeds to Brazilian rubber trees on which the British rubber industry was based.

Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (2006, Penguin): The 1854 cholera epidemic, which led to a breakthrough in understanding how the disease is transmitted and what needed to be done to control it. Johnson has written a scattered range of books, including Everything Bad Is Good for You, which among other things claims that TV and video games make people smarter.

Don Jordan/Michael Walsh: White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (paperback, 2008, New York University Press): Authors claim more than 300,000 white English were sent to America as slaves over a 170 year period. This details how they were procured and treated, not much different than African slaves. I've always heard of such people as "indentured servants" implying that the servitude is limited to a fixed term, usually incurred due to debt.

Lieve Joris: The Rebel's Hour (2008, Grove Press): Belgian travel writer, in the Congo where the well-known Rwandan genocide spawned a secondary, in some ways even more horrific, war.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: America the Principled: 6 Opportunities for Becoming a Can-Do Nation Once Again (2007, Crown): Harvard Business School professor, wrote a famous management book I read back in the 1980s when I was into that sort of thing: The Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation. New book tries to apply some common business sense to rebranding America -- successful enough to lure blurb praise from Bill Clinton, David Gergen, Warren Bennis, Arianna Huffington, Donna Shalala, Alan Dershowitz. Gag if you want (#6: citizens should cooperate with government to do more for our communities; #3: companies should be more honest and transparent). Actually, all of the points are true, even if they fall far short of what's needed.

Markos Kounalakis/Peter Laufer: Hope Is a Tattered Flag: Voices of Reason and Change for the Post-Bush Era (2008, Polipoint Press): Two radio anchors associated with Washington Monthly interview various people -- don't have the list, other than: Ahmed Ahmed, Chris Anderson, Pat Buchanan, Joe Klein, Bill McKibben, Drew Westin. Title from a Sandburg poem. Hope springs eternal.

Mark Kurlansky: The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town (2008, Random House): Another fish tale from a historian who's recently been extremely prolific lately -- Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell; and my off-topic fave, Nonviolence: Twenty Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea.

George Lakoff: The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain (2008, Viking): Linguistics professor, has written a number of books on how the right frames its issues to sell them, and how progressives should do the same -- Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate is the short version; Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think and Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea are the long ones. The new book continues in that vein, although why he thinks we have 18th-century brains isn't obvious -- I'd say they're a good deal more ancient, which is why we're willing to follow frauds who look tough even in cases where tough isn't what we need (much less fraud).

Ervin Laszlo: The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads (new edition, paperback, 2006, Hampton Roads): Entire editorial review in Amazon: "We are at a critical juncture in history where we face global collapse or creation of a new world." The readers' reviews are wordier but basically say the same thing, emphasizing that Laszlo would prefer to create that new world. Laszlo has a bunch of fuzzy science books -- The Consciousness Revolution is a relatively straightforward title.

William A Link: Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (2008, St Martin's Press): Helms was the most extreme of the Republian Dixiecrats, the most unapologetic, the one guy who never tried to hide his racism or his viciousness. He rose with the right, and was lucky to do so, an embarrassment to his associates as well as his constituents.

Bjorn Lomborg: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007, Knopf): Lomborg's pushed his skeptical line on environmental issues long and hard, with this just the latest of a series of books. Admits global warming is real, but plays down its probable effects, while arguing that what effects that do exist can be compensated for more cheaply than it would cost to fix the root carbon problem. While I tend to be skeptical myself, I've never found his arguments all that convincing. Indeed, while it's fairly easy to cast doubts on the global warming climate models, most critics overshoot, winding up with arguments that are less credible still. One critic that looks somewhat plausible is Roy Spencer: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor. A pro-Lomborg book is Nigel Lawson: An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming.

Phillip Longman: Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours (2007, PoliPoint Press): The basic reason is that it's not a private sector institution with a lot of interests at cross purposes with its prime goal of providing quality health care to veterans. It helps that the vets are in the system for the long haul. Probably also helps that the VA is not part of the DOD, where graft is a way of life. That the VA fares so well in comparisons with private systems should put a quick end to all those anti-socialized medicine arguments.

Richard C Longworth: Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism (2007, Bloomsbury): Looks at how free trade and capital flows effect the midwest. Not pretty, and doesn't seem to be very sympathetic.

Roger Lowenstein: While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis (2008, Penguin): Former WSJ journalist looks into the pension mess. I'm reluctant to blame this either on too many people getting too old or on excessively liberal benefits, but it does show how changing economic dynamics catch up with people. One of Lowenstein's previous books is When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.

Meizhu Lui/Barbara Robles/Betsy Leondar-Wright/Rose Brewer/Rebecca Adamson [United for a Fair Economy]: The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (paperback, 2006, New Press): Well, the color is white, especially compared to black, with the wealth split far more extreme than the income split. Also looks at Asians, Latinos, and Natives in the US. Also important here is Thomas M Shapiro: The Hidden Cost of Being African American: Now Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, which among other things points out the disadvantage blacks have in building home equity.

Mark Lynas: Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2008, National Geographic): Celsius, so 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Book plots changes projected with global warming one degree per chapter. Author has been around this block before, with High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis.

Timothy J Lynch/Robert S Singh: After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (2008, Cambridge University Press): Hard to believe this isn't a joke.

Sandra Mackey: Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict (2008, WW Norton): Journalist, author of quite a few books on the modern Middle East, including at least one previous one Lebanon. They've never quite struck me as all that promising, but I suppose they're better than nothing. At this point I can't point to a single really good general history of Lebanon -- Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon sets a high standard for 1982-89.

Farhad Manjoo: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (2008, Wiley): Explores the question of what passes for truth these days -- "truthiness" is the oft-cited Stephen Colbert term for it. Philosophers have long had a critique of the subjective construction of truth; now it looks like even sociologists and journalists can measure its subjectivity.

William Martin, ed: What Liberals Believe: Thousands of Quotes on Why America Needs to Be Rescued from Greedy Corporations, Homophobes, Racists, Imperialists, Xenophobes, and Religious Extremists (paperback, 2008, Skyhorse): Comes to 768 pages. Possibly useful as a reference, but sampling Amazon's page scans isn't all that inspirational. Only really good quote on abortion was by Barbara Ehrenreich, not what you'd call an MOR liberal. On the other hand, a look at the index shows that Ehrenreich is quoted on 35 pages -- more than Martin Luther King Jr (30), more than John F Kennedy (27); second only to Bill Moyers (52). Karl Marx got one quote, same as Groucho -- but then so did Trent Lott and Rush Limbaugh.

William McDonough/Michael Braungart: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (paperback, 2002, North Point Press): Book on design, aiming at "eco-effectiveness" -- whatever that is. There are a bunch of innovative high-tech save-the-world design books floating around, hard to gauge.

Bill McKibben: The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces From an Active Life (paperback, 2008, Holt): A grabbag of 44 essays written over 25 years. The only McKibben I've read, at least in book form, is The End of Nature, which made some headway toward convincing me about global warming if not necessarily the title concept, but I have a couple more waiting for me on the shelf, like the recent Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, but not the activist Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community. McKibben has also recently edited the lengthy American Earth: Environmetal Writing Since Thoreau. He's turning into a reputable brand name.

Walter Benn Michaels: The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (paperback, 2007, Holt Paperbacks): I gather that the argument here is that efforts to promote tolerance of diversity box everyone up into identity groups, dulling and distracting our sense of cross-group commonalities, especially class. Don't know where he goes with this -- reviews suggest nowhere -- but it strikes me as a critique of how aimless liberalism wound up trivializing itself even as fundamental problems, like inequality, were growing. One could also delve deeper into the whole focus on identity and what psychological needs it satisfies.

Bill Moyers: Moyers on Democracy (2008, Doubleday): One of the few prominent White House aides to have gone on to a more notable and more useful post-political career -- Scott McClellan should take note, especially given that Moyers had to disseminate plenty of official lies in his time.

Omar Nasiri: Inside the Global Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story (2006; paperback, 2008, Perseus): European subtitle: How I Infiltrated Al Qaeda and Was Abandoned by Western Intelligence. Reportedly offers a good sense of Al Qaeda's culture and politics during the 1990s.

Susan Neiman: Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008, Harcourt): Heavy philosophical tome, meant for the left (or just plain decency) despite the right's rhetoric. I sort of recall a Michael Walzer quote on the cover, which at this point would be a troubling sign. Author previously wrote Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy.

Mae M Ngai: Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (new edition, paperback, 2005, Princeton University Press): Background for the current debate, a broad study limited to the 1924-65 period when US immigration was limited by a national quota system, which created America's first class of illegal immigrants.

David Orrell: The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction (2007, Basic Books): A fairly critical review and analysis of the methods and practice of scientific prediction. A similar, more specific book is Orrin H Pilkey/Linda Pilkey-Jarvis: Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future. Of course, even if you pile appropriate caveats onto scientific predictions, that goes nowhere toward establishing that any other event may happen.

Randal O'Toole: The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and Your Future (2007, Cato Institute): No doubt one could write a book on how government planning goes awry, producing inadequate solutions with unintended consequences that in turn create new problems, and of course there's always corruption and stupidity and the like. Don't know if this book does any of that, but its solution -- "repeat of federal planning laws and closure of government planning offices" -- is no solution, just blind faith in the market's ability to heal every problem.

Ron Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008, Grand Central): Unlike most politicians' books, this one came out at the end of the campaign, like the campaign was advance publicity for the book rather than the other way around. He represents the return of the pre-Goldwater libertarians, the ones who (unlike Goldwater) had no hankering for apocalypse.

Fred Pearce: With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change (2007; paperback, 2008, Beacon Press): Science writer, has a number of books on climate change, including: When the Rivers Run Dry: Water -- The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century; Keepers of the Spring: Reclaiming Out Water in an Age of Globalization; The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change; and, forthcoming, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff. Climate change writing veers wildly between complacency and catastrophe, and Pearce seems to be stuck on the latter. Hard to say whether he's wrong or right.

Charles Perrow: The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, & Terrorist Disasters (2007, Princeton University Press): Thinking about disaster preparedness, including a history of FEMA and why they're not thinking about such things. Argues for reducing risk by deconcentrating population and critical infrastructures. Previously wrote: Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies.

Jason L Riley: Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders (2008, Gotham): There are both right- and left-wing pro-immigration views. Figure this one's from the right: the author is a former Wall Street Journal editorial page writer, and the favorable blurb reviews come from Max Boot, Arthur Laffer, and Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey. One Amazon comment tags him as a "cheap labor cheerleader"; that isn't the best pro-immigration argument I can imagine.

Mary Roach: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008, WW Norton): Pop science writer, in a title rut after Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Reportedly a funny writer.

Alasdair Roberts: The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government (2008, New York University Press): An attempt at a balanced, nuanced view of the Bush disaster, focusing on institutional limits and how the political turmoil of the 1960s and later, including Reagan's low tax, small government mantra have circumscribed Bush's imperial aims.

Michael Rose: Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency (2008, Pegasus Books): I've found it more amusing that George W Bush is the third President George than that he's the second George Bush: the analogy to the imperious and daft George III seems most appropriate. However, Rose, a British general, goes one step further, writing a book comparing George III's blunders in the 1776 war with George III's blunders in 2003. He's not even the first to do so: cf. William Polk's Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq. Small world.

David Rothkopf: Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (2008, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Seems like a potentially strong analysis: I'm tempted to argue that US foreign and economic policy is run not for most Americans but for the small handful of top capitalists worldwide -- more and more not Americans. Not sure that he gets down to brass tacks here. Previously wrote: Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.

Peter H Schuck/James Q Wilson, eds: Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (2008, Public Affairs): Big (704 pages) collection of essays each encyclopedically focused on a big slice of the big pie -- e.g., Lawrence M Friedman on "The Legal System," Benjamin M Friedman on "The Economic System," Martha Bayles on "Popular Culture," Eliot Cohen on "The Military," Robert Wuthnow on "Religion," David Cutler and Patricia Keenan on "Health Care," etc. I figure most to be center-right, sometimes more right like Arthur C Brooks on "Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector."

James C Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (paperback, 1999, Yale University Press): Picks on some easy cases like Mao and Stalin, but doesn't seem to be exclusively anti-communist. Certainly, one can build an effective critique of overreach in social engineering. Scott has written several books on resistance to power, including: The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

Rick Shenkman: Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter (2008, Basic Books): Argues that the weak spot in American democracy is between the voters' ears. That's one way of looking at it, and I don't doubt that he's been able to find some evidence along those lines. A ridiculous amount of political discourse these days revolves around fear and flattery, both poor, anti-rational guides to action, one we are foolish to follow, even if they seem to be built into our brains -- which seems to be the argument of Drew Westin's The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Call that stupid if you want -- it certainly is once you realize you've been had, then let it happen again.

James Gustave Speth: Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment (2nd edition, paperback, 2005, Yale University Press): Co-founder of Natural Resources Defense Council, founder of World Resources Institute, sometime presidential adviser (i.e., not for Bush), worried man, points to grave and gathering threats, fundamental forces like population and affluence, and political apathy or resistance, especially from the US.

James Gustave Speth: The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability (2008, Yale University Press): An urgent brief for sustainability, willing even to dispense with such a political sacred cow as capitalism. I agree that trends that cannot be sustained will break sooner or later; also that it is better to change deliberately rather than when forced to by events. Our system, however, is geared otherwise, unlikely to move until it is moved. Speth probably understands this, which may be why his first target is the environmentalist movement itself. Could be a necessary book.

Kenneth R Timmerman: Shadow Warriors: The Untold Story of Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender (2007, Crown): Investigative journalist, right-wing nutcase section -- previous books include: Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq (1991); Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America; Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson; The French Betrayal of America; and Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran. On ther other hand, anyone who wants to attack the CIA (along with the State Dept., the traitors, saboteurs, and surrenderers in the title) can't be all wrong. (Or can he?)

Jim Webb: A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America (2008, Broadway): The most attractive of this election year's politician promos, given a competent writer -- Webb previously wrote Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, a competent pop history brief -- a timely message, and a rising political star. A fairly obvious short list candidate for Obama's running mate. If there really is a new political alignment coming, Virginia looks like it may be to the Democrats what Missouri was to the Republicans. (The most similar Republican analogue is Chuck Hagel's America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers. It seems impossible that McCain would pick Hagel for VP given the blinding daylight between them on Iraq, but otherwise they are very compatible, they share that Vietnam Vet thing, and Hagel would do much to soften McCain's probably fatal warmonger image.)

David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (paperback, 2008, Holt): One of the Cluetrain Manifesto guys, a would-be theorist of the subversive power of the internet. Hard to predict whether these ideas and observations are insightful or useful without picking through them one by one.

Eric G Wilson: Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosophical rumination for a new, and possibly quite bitter, century. Concern that we try too hard to be happy is reinforced by widespread use of anti-depressants. Not sure what the case is for melancholy, which has something to do with going with the flow.

Morley Winograd/Michael D Hais: Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics (2008, Rutgers University Press): Seems to be more concerned with periodic political realignments than with the highlighted technology -- specifically, they're expecting a "civic" realignment like in the 1930s as opposed to the "idealist" realignment that came out of 1968. Not sure what all these terms mean, but there is something in the air.

Robert Zubrin: Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil (2007, Prometheus): Argues that the US can end oil imports, and thereby end terrorist threats, by switching to alcohol fuels. Sounds nuts to me. Other books in a similar vein: David Sandalow: Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States' Oil Addiction; S David Freeman: Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How; Jay Inslee/Bracken Hendricks: Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy.