As threatened, forty more. And not just leftovers; I'm finding a few more along the way.

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Amir D Aczel: Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry That Created the Nuclear Age (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Short book on early uranium research, focusing on the 1920s but extending more or less to Hiroshima.

Ken Auletta: Googled: The End of the World As We Know It (2009, Penguin): Author has written extensively about software and telecom industries, including critically about Microsoft, but he seems to have found something even more alarming in Google. I doubt that, but I do believe that the price we pay for advertising-sponsored services is much higher and far more perverse than we can imagine. I think Google tries to look at this pact benignly, asking how much useful service we can provide based on its advertising revenue stream, but I don't think it is so benign. Still, none of this exculpates Microsoft.

Louise Bardach: Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana, and Washington (2009, Simon & Schuster): Claims to have inside dope on Castro's medical condition, but is mostly interested in speculating on what happens to Cuba once he passes. I imagine she finds a lot of nonsense. Don't know whether she can (or wants to) sort it all out.

Michael Belfiore: The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (2009, Smithsonian): DARPA is the Pentagon's R&D arm, which often came up with useful inventions -- at least until Reagan redirected its attention to the Star Wars nonsense. Since then their reputation for reclusiveness has increased, probably for shame. Author also wrote Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space, which sounds pretty gushy.

Walden Bello: The Food Wars (paperback, Verso, 2009): A third world view of US agribusiness and its designs on what the world eats, how it is grown, and who profits.

Michael Bérubé: The Left at War (2009, New York University Press): Something on the US Left's response to Bush's War on Terror, possibly inching back to Clinton's Balkan wars; details "a left at war with itself," presumably between liberal hawks who have no sense of what war actually does, and those of us who do. Focuses on "Manichean" Noam Chomsky, "juxtaposing him with Stuart Hall" (whoever that is). Bérubé seems to be one of those self-appointed thought police who identify with the left just to muddle it up.

James Bradley: The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (2009, Little Brown): Author wrote Flags of Our Fathers, about his own father's experience in the war over Iwo Jima. Despite the broad subtitle, this appears to be a book about some specific mischief President Theodore Roosevelt and then-Secretary of War William Taft undertook in 1905 to fix US interests in the east Pacific by dividing up Asia.

Michael Burleigh: Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (2009, Harper Collins): A broad ranging smorgasbord of evil terrorists starting with 19th century anarchists, culminating in Al-Qaeda, most European or more/less directly tied to Europe. Lots of detail, but doesn't seem to have any overarching logic -- other than that terrorism is bad, of course.

Robert Cohen: Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (2009, Oxford University Press): Savio was the leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early 1960s, an interesting and iconic new left figure who largely faded from the spotlight from the mid-1960s.

Len Colodny/Tom Schachtman: The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama (2009, Harper Collins): Faces on the cover: Kissinger, Cheney, Nixon, Bush, Perle (I think), Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Obama. Only some of those are neocons, although Kissinger's usual exemption doesn't seem all that stury. Unfortunate that Obama hasn't been able to shake this association, especially given how completely the prime neocon movers had been disgraced under Bush. Foreword by Roger Morris, who knows his way around this topic.

Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace (paperback, 2009, John Wiley & Sons): Second sequel to The Case for Israel, which may be the most deceitful book I've ever read. He followed that up with The Case for Peace, which was a pile of rationalizations for anything but. That Dershowitz, and Israel at least in his mind, has not the slightest desire for peace should be clear from who he targets as Israel's greatest enemy: Jimmy Carter.

Jenny Diski: The Sixties: Big Ideas, Small Books (paperback, 2009, Picador): Something of a memoir from London in the 1960s, which keeps her slightly removed from parochial US concerns like civil rights and Vietnam -- allowing her to focus on the important things, like sex and drugs. Seems to conclude that the "big ideas" of the '60s led to the bad ideas of the '80s. Easy to argue that, but harder to prove culpability.

Timothy Egan: The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Follow-up to Egan's bestselling book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. Again he takes an event that was legendary locally and had some political repercussions that he makes the most of: a forest fire in 1910 that burned some 3 million acres, bringing Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot into play.

Charles S Faddis: Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA (2009, Lyons Press): Another 20-year CIA vet with the usual load of FUBAR stories, the only surprise being that the book is remarkably slim (192 pp).

Tim Flannery: Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future (2009, Atlantic Monthly Press): Short (176 pp) book by a natural scientist, wrote a good book on North America called The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples and, more recently, one on climate change, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. This attempts a broadside, but isn't terribly convincing.

Lloyd C Gardner: Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East After World War II (2009, New Press): No real idea what the title refers to, but up to WWII the Middle East was ruled effectively by Britain through proxy monarchs, ranging from Farouk in Egypt to the Pahlavis in Iran. By the 1970s, the US had supplanted the British, and that's the point of this book. This follows, or perhaps fills in the background for, Gardner's recent The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of US Foreign Policy From the 1970s to the Present (New Press).

Al Gore: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (paperback, 2009, Rodale): Gore's sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. Still practical, still optimistic. No doubt features outstanding charts and illustrations. Amazon reviews are divided between 28 5-star and 27 1-star. Young reader's edition available, although it's probably already as simple as it can or should be.

David Ray Griffin: Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): Short book (120 pp), but the author doesn't claim to know the answer, even though he raises plenty of doubts. Still, it would be nice to know whether you've bumbled into a snark hunt, getting bumped and bruised and wasting your fortune in pursuit of nothing.

Donald Gutstein: Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy (paperback, 2009, Key Porter): The argument here seems to be that politicians don't become stooges for business interests because they're corrupt so much as because they're brainwashed. No doubt true, but that hardly proves they're not "greedy, corrupt, double-talking, and unqualified" as well. Indeed, those conditions seem to go together quite agreeably.

James Hansen: Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009, Bloomsbury): The NASA scientist best known for pushing the science and issues related to global warming. This book raised some hackles by opposing the cap-and-trade schemes that politicians like -- at least the ones that take the issue seriously at all. Hansen is also the subject of Mark Bowen: Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

Tom Hayden: The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (2009, Paradigm): Claims Obama for the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements that brought Hayden to public attention. Seems like a stretch and a formula for disappointment, although Hayden was hardly alone in investing hope in Obama.

Martin Jacques: When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (2009, Penguin): Title indicates the fevered imperialist mindset. It's rather ridiculous to think that China could ever "rule the world" -- as well as presently unclear that China has any such intention. He means more like "when China corners the world's industrial capacity and stockpiles most of the world's money because China's the only country that invests in its labor." I suspect that even that will be self-correcting as other nations want to get in at the bottom, while the US is turning into a shell by getting out at the top, because the politicians here care more about profits than about workers.

John Lanchester: IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010, Simon & Schuster): I don't see the word in any of the review notes, but my impression is that this is about leverage. Politically convenient cheap credit has led to a mountain of highly leveraged investments that don't seem to be based on much of anything. Getting that money back is going to be difficult. Author started researching this for a novel, then decided truth is stranger, or maybe just more powerful, than fiction.

Yitzhak Laor: Myths of Liberal Zionism (2010, Verso): On the self-proclaimed "peace camp" Zionists, such as Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, a group that invariably rallies for each new Israeli military offensive, only to bemoan it once things go awry. Short (128 pp), probably scathing. The core problem is that the Liberal Zionists are more concerned with proving their Zionism than their commitment to peace or justice -- concepts that are disallowed by the very nature of Zionism.

Charles M Madigan: Destiny Calling: How the People Elected Barack Obama (2009, Ivan R Dee): Looks like this tries to move the election dynamics back to the grass roots, which would be a lot more refreshing and hopeful than, e.g., David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win.

Robert W McChesney/John Nichols: The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (2010, Nation Books): An Amazon ranter: "They insist that intelligent journalism will soon come to an end when the NYTimes goes belly-up." Looks to me like the NYTimes has become an example of the death of intelligent journalism. On the other hand, depending on corporations for basic info necessary for democracy has never worked very well. The authors have some ideas to move on, which probably don't involve the ranter's charge that they want a government-run Pravda.

Paul McGeough: Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas (2009, New Press): Starts with an event in 1997 seen as backfiring against Israel and promoting Hamas to prominence. Not sure why this vs. the 1996 assassination of "The Engineer" which led to Hamas retaliation that is generally regarded as tipping Israel's elections from Peres to Netanyahu, with disastrous results for the Oslo Peace Process.

Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (paperback, 2010, Picador): Starts with Oscar Wilde quote: "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." This distinction between price and value leads to many ideas that could upset the conventional apple cart of economics. Previously wrote on food, Stuffed and Starved. Naomi Klein raves about him.

Ami Pedahzur/Arie Perliger: Jewish Terrorism in Israel (2009, Columbia University Press): They backtrack to zealots in Roman times, and look at the Zionist use of terror in Israel's 1948 war, but there are contemporary examples as well -- efforts to solidify Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and to derail any peaceful accommodation with Palestinians.

William R Polk: Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, from Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyrus to Ahmadinejad (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): Historian, longtime US diplomat, wrote a similar book primer Understanding Iraq a few years back, as well as a valuable comparative history of the pitfalls of occupation called Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq. A lot of people are sorely in need of such a book.

Peter Richardson: A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (2009, New Press): I don't know that I'd say that Ramparts changed America, but it was a big part of my life during my later teens, with nearly all of the issue covers on the cover clearly memorable. A lot of solid reporting, also a lot of attitude that wasn't always sound -- for one thing, we now realize that David Horowitz has long been mentally unstable.

Doug Rossinow: Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (2007; paperback, 2009, University of Pennsylvania Press): Covers 1880s-1940s, as various progressive and pro-labor strains merged into Rooseveltian liberalism.

Amartya Sen: The Idea of Justice (2009, Belknap Press): Indian economist, perhaps an important philosophical thinker as well. Not sure what to make of it, and unlikely to try to tackle it head on. I have a copy of Development as Freedom, which has set unread on my shelf for quite a while now. Probably a good book.

Frederick J Sheehan: Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (2009, McGraw-Hill): Well, Greenspan's reputation didn't take long to drop into the toilet.

Ned Sublette: The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans (2009, Lawrence Hill): I'd rather he write that promised second volume of Cuba and Its Music, but I have his musical history of New Orleans awaiting my attention on the shelf, and I imagine he finds interesting things to say about recent (pre-Katrina) New Orleans as well.

David M Walker: Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility (2010, Random House): A popular book with the establishment: I see early rave reviews by Paul Volcker, Ross Perot, Bill Bradley, Paul O'Neill, Carls Hills, and Robert Rubin. "Nonpartisan, nonideological, and filled with a love of the country its esteemed author has spent his life serving." Among his nonideological "bold ideas": "control spending, save Social Security, dramatically alter Medicare, and simplify the tax code." Works for the Peter G. Petersen Foundation, in case you think you've heard all this before.

Ethan Watters: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010, Simon & Schuster): Argues that part of the cultural baggage we dump on the rest of the world includes our notions of mental illness and how it should be treated -- i.e., how we treat it. For example, he follows US trauma counselors to tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka, and psychopharmacologists everywhere, marketing diseases as well as drugs.

David Wessel: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (2009, Crown): The 2008 financial panic seen by focusing on the Fed. Don't know whether this makes Bernanke out to be a hero, which was the usual theme with Greenspan until the dam burst. Bernanke didn't choose this war; it was thrust upon him by the banking industry's self-inflicted collapse. Still, the fashion of making heroes out of Fed chiefs -- which goes back through Greenspan to Paul Volcker -- strikes me as dangerous, not to mention dishonest.

Richard Wolff: Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): Given the title, could have used a slightly grosser cover illustration -- the one they have shows a stack of Franklins scattering in the wind. Wolff is a Marxist economist, so he's in his moment.

Julian E Zelizer: Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security -- From World War II to the War on Terrorism (2009, Basic Books): Big history of US foreign policy, actually going back before WWII to include movements toward internationalism under McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson. Looks to me like it should focus more on arms sales, but that seems to be a secondary issue.

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John Lanchester: Bankocracy: Looking up info on Lanchester's IOU: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, I ran across this review of two books about the Lehman Brothers failure. Good summary, worth noting.

I usually hold up these brief new book notes until I get 40, but sometimes don't notice until I get considerably more. This time I find myself with more than 40 left over after publishing 40 yesterday. Hence the double dose. More politics yesterday, since that's generally the focus, but I'm inclined to note any nonfiction that strikes my broad interests. Still have 54 left, so maybe a third part will follow.

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Dean Baker: False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (paperback, 2010, Polipoint Press): Cover photos of Bernanke, Greenspan, and Paulson, although I doubt that it ends there. Baker was one of the first to understand the bubble and what its collapse would mean. This looks to be a little more developed than his slim Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.

Robert J Barbera: The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing our Economic Future (2009, McGraw-Hill): Seems like a fairly establishment guy to go around badmouthing capitalism like that. Hyman Minsky follower, learning lessons from one bubble/panic to the next. Evidently a good deal more readable than Minsky's own recently reprinted Stabilizing an Unstable Economy.

Phyllis Bennis: Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer (paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press): I saw this as a pamphlet several years ago, but at 208 pp. most likely this has been updated. Bennis has a bunch of primers like this, including Ending the Iraq War, Understanding the US-Iran Crisis, and most recently Ending the US War in Afghanistan (with David Wildman). She's very good at getting to the point.

Peter Berger/Anton Zijderveld: In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (2009, Harper One): Sociologists, authors respectively of The Social Construction of Reality and The Abstract Society, seek moderate, measured grounds on which to base contingent beliefs. I'd like to think I do this already, but I'm not so sure about everyone else.

Piers Brendon: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2008, Knopf): Big book (816 pp), natch. Nice to see that he dates the decline from the American Revolution: nice to think that we started off by doing something right. Most Brits note that the empire achieved its greatest growth later, but the hideous effect the British had on their subject peoples makes it all look like decline in one sense of another.

James Carroll: Practicing Catholic (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Son of an Air Force General, ordained as a Catholic priest, long-time Boston Globe columnist, has written major books on the Pentagon (House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power) and Catholic anti-semitism (Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews) -- deeply ingrained stains that he was evidently able to overcome without losing his religion.

David C Cassidy: Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb (2009, Bellevue Literary Press): A follow up to Cassidy's 1992 Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg with more info, especially on Heisenberg's controversial role in Nazi Germany's atom bomb project.

Lizzie Collingham: Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (paperback, 2007, Oxford University Press): A history of Indian cuisine in India and the world, with various comings and goings, compromises and coups. Less exploitative, more complex than an economic history.

Graham Farmelo: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (2009, Basic Books): One of the pioneering figures of quantum mechanics. I doubt that it's right to call him a "mystic," but I wouldn't bet against strange.

John Farmer: The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 (2009, Penguin): A pretty detailed chronology of 9/11/2001, likely to be useful as reference if not much more. Author was involved in the official 9/11 report, so I'm not sure how much "untold" he has left to tell.

Howard Fineman: The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country (paperback, 2009, Random House): Who Is a Person? Who is an American? The Role of Faith; The Limits of Individualism; What Can We Know and Say? Who Judges the Law? Debt and Dollar; Local versus National Authority; Presidential Power; The Terms of Trade; War and Diplomacy; The Environment; A Fair, "More Perfect" Union. Mixed reviews on this, but sore losers abound.

Gary Giddins/Scott DeVeaux: Jazz (2009, WW Norton): This takes a bunch of famous jazz performances and tears them apart measure by measure, sometimes note by note. The technical level is way too much for me, but Giddins is one of the essential critics of our age, so I figured I had to pick up a copy. The records are also available in a 4-CD, evidently drawing on the Sony catalog, running about $60. I'd be real surprised if there's anything there I don't have somewhere, so it might be a good mixtape project -- when/if I get the nerve to delve deeper.

Louisa Gilder: The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (2008, Knopf): Focuses on the further implications of quantum theory which started appearing with Bell's Theorem in 1964, the work of David Bohm, etc. Some fascinating science there, but I've never made much sense out of it, and too often it gets spun into a weird form of mysticism.

John Michael Greer: The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (paperback, 2008, New Society): Archdruid, organic gardener, peak oil blogger. Not clear, but I suspect he sees the descent as future rather than already done, and that he sees it happening slowly as people adapt to alternative lifestyles like, uh, organic gardening. Similar: Sharon Astyk: Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front; Pat Murphy: Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change; Lyle Estill: Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy; David Holmgren: Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change; better known is Bill McKibben: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Ralph Hassig/Kongdan Oh: Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom (2009, Rowman & Littlefield): Not much else available on this subject. We tend to reduce what little we learn into cartoon form -- South Park is a good example. Also new: Barbara Demick: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009, Random House).

Hendrik Hertzberg: ¡Obámanos!: The Rise of a New Political Era (2009, Penguin): New Yorker political columnist, looks like he's recycling old essays and wrapping them up to look like something new. Includes something on "Palinopsia," which was probably his alternate title if McCain won. "Brouhaha" was about Clinton. I guess he had it covered.

Alexandra Horowitz: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (2009, Scribner): One of those topics you wonder about now and then. Seems like a good idea for a book, but how do we know that the author knows what dogs know? And even if someone knew all that, could it be communicated over an epistemological that is no doubt pretty broad?

Arif Jamal: Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (2009, Melville House): First thing to understand is that Kashmir is the bee in Pakistan's bonnet, and almost everything that Pakistan's security sector does is done with Kashmir (and India) in mind -- and it's tough to wrap your mind around that because it often makes little sense. The Kashmir conflict is little known, little understood -- well, it doesn't help that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense either.

William Kamkwamba/Bryan Mealer: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope (2009, Morrow): Story of a 14-year-old boy in Malawi who built his own windmill, bringing electricity, power, and freedom to a small patch of the third world.

Robin DG Kelley: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009, Free Press): Likely to be the essential book on Monk, never a very straightforward subject.

Tracy Kidder: Strength in What Remains (2009, Random House): I've read two of Kidder's books: The Soul of a New Machine and House, both of which showed great skill at explaining technical challenges. His other work is more scattered, hard to characterize. This is the story of a student from Burundi who fled the mid-1990s war there (and more famously in neighboring Rwanda) for New York. Most likely a powerfully human story.

Jen Lin-Liu: Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China (paperback, 2009, Mariner Books): Chinese-American journalist tramps around China, attending cooking schools and checking in on the food industry. Includes some recipes.

Barry C Lynn: Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010, Wiley): Argues that the most dangerous trend in American business is the persistent move towards greater monopoly power. I think he's basically right here, and that this may be an important book. Author previously wrote End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, which I have on my shelf but unfortunately haven't gotten to.

Barry W Lynn: Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom (paperback, 2007, Three Rivers Press): Author is a minister in the United Church of Christ, concerned both about the politics and theology of the right-wing rush to make this a Christian Nation whether we like it or not.

Margaret MacMillan: Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2009, Modern Library): A short (208 pp.) book on how to lie with history, or how others have lied. A perennial favorite topic.

James E McWilliams: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (2009, Little Brown): Some backlash against the local foods movement, basically arguing that industrial agriculture isn't that bad -- at least that it has some useful economies of scale, and that there's some upside to genetic engineering.

Stephen L Melton: The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward) (2009, MBI): On the faculty at Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, which is why he sees his job as finding "a way forward." Otherwise, he's pretty effective at showing how nothing the Army is doing these days in Iraq and Afghanistan or pretty much anywhere else has a chance of working. Phrasing this as an argument with Clausewitz is rather obscure, perhaps to obfuscate the core point that the US Army has no worthwhile role in the modern world.

George Packer: Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Wonder how interesting they'd be if he actually understood them?

Ron Paul: End the Fed (2009, Grand Central): In the great debate between freshwater and saltwater economists, Paul sides with the Austrians, who'd gladly forego any kind of water in favor of heavy metals. I like Paul on some issues, and I'm not a fan of the Fed, but I find it really hard to take this seriously.

Scott Rosenberg: Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters (2009, Crown): A history of the blog, or weblog for long, sort of a metablog. Author previously wrote Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, which seemed likely to be close enough (maybe too close) to its subject matter (but then I've run a lot of code through my dreams).

Jeff Rubin: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (2009, Random House): Economist and energy consultant, made his reputation predicting skyrocketing oil prices, and doubles down his bet here. Another new book in this vein is Christopher Steiner: $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. A hard change is coming.

Richard Sale: Clinton's Secret Wars: The Evolution of a Commander in Chief (2009, Thomas Dunne): When you do the math Clinton engaged in overt and covert wars about as often as the Bushes before and after, although not as flamboyantly as the latter. Sale concludes that by the end of his term Clinton was a "tough-as-nails" commander in chief "in the same vein as Ronald Reagan" (who did more saber-rattling but less actual warmaking). Instead of rolling back the cold war, Clinton kept the military and the CIA back in play, setting up the precedence and expectations that G.W. Bush capitalized on. This is ugly stuff, but probably not a critical writer.

Michael J Sandel: Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosopher, hacks his way through the long history of thinking on ethics and justice. Looks like a reasonable presentation, worthy of some thought.

Dan Senor/Saul Singer: Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (2009, Twelve): Senor, you may recall, was the US Army PR flak in charge of bullshitting the media about the US occupation of Iraq. Now a "senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations," he's got a new client and a new line of . . .

Bill Streever: Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (2009, Little Brown): First-person experiences in extreme cold places, a physical state that is surprisingly alien to our experience. How well this works depends on how well he ties it all together, but one hint is that global warming shows its most profound effects in the cold.

Tristram Stuart: Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (2009, WW Norton): Looks all over the world food industry to see how much waste there is, and why. Much as the cheapest way to salvage energy is conservation, a good part of dealing with future hunger may be in wringing the inefficiencies out of our current vastly wasteful system.

Terry Teachout: Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009, Houghton Mifflin): Major new biography of Armstrong, always a subject of interest and fascination.

Ann Vileisis: Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back (2007, Island Press): The loss has much to do with food processors acting as increasingly opaque mediators between farm and table, a business shift advanced by urbanization. The interesting thing here will be explaining why it matters.

Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009, Basic Books): One of many books trying to sort out the differentiator that distinguished human evolution -- another is Derek Bickerton: Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. Probably more interesting for its analysis of how cooking changed eating. Closely related: Francis D Burton: Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution.

Leonard Zeskind: Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Focuses on Willis Carto, William Pierce, and David Duke, who don't strike me as all that mainstream (although other names I see, like Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson, are more so). Author knows this stuff and has written a fat (672 pp) book on the subject.

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Previously mentioned books (book pages noted where available), new in paperback:

HW Brands: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008; paperback, 2009, Anchor): Actually, missed this one earlier, but bought it and read it, so I figure I should note it. Big book (912 pp), but I also recently read Ann Hagedorn's big book on 1919 (Savage Peace) and Adam Cohen's book on FDR's first 100 days (Nothing to Fear), and can attest that Brands covered the overlap with remarkably accurate succinctness. Filled in a lot of background I lacked, both on FDR's early interests in politics and on his dedication to plunging the US into WWII. I gather that Jean Edward Smith's FDR covers the same ground and detail equally well.

Tony Horwitz: A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America (2008; paperback, 2009, Picador): Seems like one of those writers who tells a good history yarn by tracing his travels the various spots -- cf. a previous title, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. [book page]

Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance of the Middle East (2009; paperback, 2010, Beacon Press): Shows how the US imposed its neuroses onto the Middle East -- a paranoia over communism that put us in bed with Islamic jihadists, a messianic embrace of Israeli and apocalypse that put us on the outs, an obsession with oil and money, and with our own military omnipotence, no matter how often it failed. [book page]

George E Lewis: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008; paperback, 2009, University of Chicago Press): Most likely a major book on the development of avant-garde jazz in the 1970s, told by a major figure in his own right.

Michael Pollan: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008; paperback, 2009, Penguin Press): Big bestseller, consolidating his arguments from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Overdue for a books post. Actually, I have enough material for two, so this is the first installment, with another soon. Some emphasis on politics and money this time, but I certainly didn't bag them all.

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Dan Balz/Haynes Johnson: The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (2009, Viking): Looks like this 2008's The Making of the President. Given that it was just about the only political story of 2008 that was adequately (indeed, excessively) covered in real time, I doubt that they have much to add.

William K Black: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry (paperback, 2005, University of Texas Press): A couple years old and looking back on several scandals ago, but the title is as true as ever, and the lessons evidently still haven't been learned.

Taylor Branch: The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009, Simon & Schuster): The great historian of the civil rights movement sat down with Clinton 79 times to keep a contemporary record of Clinton's sense of his own history. This book is evidently not the verbatim tapes but Branch's comments from each session. Not quite primary sources, but not far removed either.

Christopher Buckley: Losing Mum and Pup (2009, Twelve): The author's famous parents died 11 months apart, triggering this memoir. As mine died three months and three days apart, I can relate, although our sets of parents had nothing at all in common. The Buckleys were born filthy rich, and spent their whole lives in fervent ideological celebration of their good fortune. The son somehow found a sense of humor in this, which sometimes helps him overcome his upbringing.

John Cassidy: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Another book on the financial collapse of 2008, focusing mostly on the shortcomings of conventional economic theory -- all that stuff about robust, rational, reliable, all-seeing and benificent markets. What he calls Utopian Economics.

Kathleen Christison/Bill Christison: Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (paperback, 2009, Pluto Press): Short book with 50 photographs depicting life in the Occupied Territories.

Stephen S Cohen/J Bradford DeLong: The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money (2010, Basic Books): Well, China, for instance, as opposed to the US, which used to be the world's banker but isn't even its own these days. Short book (176 pp.), simple point.

David Cole, ed: The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (paperback, 2009, New Press): Given the intellects involved, I wouldn't call what they did unthinkable; shameful, of course, and unconscionable, criminal even. Seems like a lot of these memos have made the rounds already.

John Derbyshire: We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009, Crown Forum): Author has previously tended to write about math, although he also wrote a novel about Calvin Coolidge. Attitude here is refreshing in a world which has been, in Barbara Ehrenreich's term, bright-sided. I wouldn't have any trouble taking the same theme and running it from the left. Still, I'd be missing out on some inadvertent humor. For instance, Amazon's "frequently bought together" pairs this with Sarah Palin, Going Rogue: An American Life. Customers also bought Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous, and for that matter, Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Rosemarie M Esber: Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians (paperback, 2009, Arabicus): Another in-depth (448 pp.) run through the Palestinian disaster of 1948-49, drawing on details from both sides. Ilan Pappe covers similar ground, more briefly, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009, Metropolitan): Surgeon-writer, has written a couple of good books and some good essays on practicing his craft, especially on learning to do it better. Argues that checklists not only help but are essential for not screwing up, especially in complex, harried tasks, which include but are hardly limited to surgery.

John Gibson: How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History (2009, Harper Collins): Funniest book title of late. I especially love the list of things the left misrepresented Bush on: "his response to 9/11, the Iraq War, warrantless wiretapping, enhanced interrogation techniques, the Surge, uranium from Niger, the number of deaths in Iraq, the federal response to Katrina, and much, much more." Gibson claims that "Bush's performance was much better than most people now believe." Imagine that.

George Gilder: The Israel Test (2009, Richard Vigilante): Do you have what it takes to uncritically support Israel? Can you write: "Tiny Israel stands behind only the United States in its contributions to the hi-tech economy. Israel has become the world's paramount example of the blessings of freedom." Or do you prefer "murderous regimes sustained by envy and Nazi ideology" and "a Marxist zero-sum-game theory of economics [which] has fueled the anti-Semitic ranting of Hitler, Arafat, bin Laden and history's other notorious haters"? I mean, if you have any second thoughts about Israel, how can we be sure you'll line up for all the other Middle East wars we have lined up?

Richard N Haass: War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (2009, Simon & Schuster): A realist functionary in both Bush administrations, a fan of the first Iraq war, a critic of the second, unable to see the connections, e.g., how the first war led to the second.

Victor Davis Hanson: How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security (2009, Encounter): One of a series of short "broadsides" (this one is 48 pp.) slandering Obama. I just picked this one out because it's probably the most vacuous. Others include: John Fund: How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections; David Gratzer: Why Obama's Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster; Stephen Moore: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting the US Economy; Andrew C McCarthy: How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice; and, of course, Michael A Ledeen: Obama's Betrayal of Israel.

Ron Haskins/Isabel V Sawhill: Creating an Opportunity Society (paperback, 2009, Brookings Institution Press): Haskins was a Bush staff adviser on social policy, since moved on to Brookings. He also wrote, Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill. Sawhill, also at Brookings, has co-edited a book with Alice Rivlin, Restoring Fiscal Sanity. So I figure these for pretty conservative types, but Yglesias recommended this, arguing that how can you study inequality without moving to the left?

John Heilemann/Mark Halperin: Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010, Harper): Dirt on the campaign trail. It's not like you really thought any of these people were normal.

James Hoggan/Richard Littlemore: Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (paperback, 2009, Douglas & McIntyre): I basically accept the global warming hypothesis, but what I'm more certain of is that the disinformation campaign of business and political interests is way off base, so this book at least should be on relatively firm ground.

Asgeir Jonsson: Why Iceland?: How One of the World's Smallest Countries Became the Meltdown's Biggest Casualty (2009, McGraw-Hill): Interesting case study, although both the extreme boom and the bust were exaggerated by the tiny size of the economy.

Antonia Juhasz: The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry -- and What We Must Do to Stop It (2008; paperback, 2009, Harper): Easy enough to paint the oil industry as evil, especially if you go back to Rockefeller and cram it all into 480 pages. Author previously wrote The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.

Zachary Karabell: Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It (2009, Simon & Schuster): Historian, last two books focused on the Middle East, but before that he did books on Chester Arthur and Harry Truman, so he jumps around. The idea of looking at China and America as one co-dependent economy is interesting, and a good history would be useful.

Richard Kim/Betsy Reed, eds: Going Rouge: An American Nightmare (paperback, 2009, Health Communications): A rip-off, of course, the most obvious difference from the bestseller it mimics is the gloomy sky behind Palin's crazed gaze into space. Note that at least two other books hit on the same title: Bob Silber's Going Rouge: A Candid Look Inside the Mind of Political Conservative Sarah Palin and Julie Sigwart's Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book. Still, when I googled the book title, the search engine served up "going rogue" instead. I've seen it suggest more common alternatives, but never substitute one before.

Amanda Little: Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells -- Our Ride to the Renewable Future (2009, Harper): A travelogue of sorts through how we produce and consume energy, realistic enough to recognize the big problems, optimistic enough to think we can handle them. I wouldn't want to say she's wrong.

Frank I Luntz: What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears (2009, Hyperion): Republican pollster, strategist, weasel worder -- previous book: Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. Could be a useful book if he manages to explain what really drives people to the right as opposed to the mostly idiotic ideologies they find once they get there.

Alfred W McCoy: Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009, University of Wisconsin Press): Big book (672 pp) on the US experience in the Philippines, starting with 1898 and the counterinsurgency from then to 1913 then returning periodically as the Philippines required further imperial policing, with side glances at what all that meant for democracy at home. Author has also written: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Alfred W McCoy/Francisco A Scarano, eds: Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (paperback, 2009, University of Wisconsin Press): Scattered papers, many on the Philippines and Cuba, where the US first got used to the idea and perils of empire, with occasional nods toward Iraq.

Charles R Morris: The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets (2009, Public Affairs): Author of one of the better books on the crash, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (doubling the tab for the paperback edition). I'm rather tired of putting finance people on pedestals, although these three are a bit off the beaten path. Still, two of them are primarily known for the basest of reasons: obscene riches.

Greg Mortensen: Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009, Viking): One-time mountaineer, saw a need and starting building schools in rural Pakistan, leading to the book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. This updates the story, including a massive earthquake and the political upheaval of the Taliban. I've always been leery about charitable efforts inside US war zones because they inevitably mix up the messages, although I don't doubt that what he's doing there is more appreciated than Richard Holbrooke's contribution.

Bethany Moreton: To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009, Harvard University Press): Places Wal-Mart in the framework of right-wing Christian movement -- don't know how far it does into other businesses, but there is room to explore how Wal-Mart can get away with its business practices.

David Owen: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability (2009, Riverhead): New Yorker writer, Connecticut suburb dweller, has written a bunch of books on housebuilding (marvelous) and golf (who cares?). Seems to argue that the bigger the city the better. Conversely, he points out that green-tinged pastoralism doesn't really make much difference.

Robert Palmer: Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (2009, Scribner): Posthumous anthology, edited by Anthony DeCurtis. Not sure what all is in here, but Palmer is one of the more important historian/critics of early rock and roll and its precursors -- Palmer's Deep Blues is one of the best known books on the subject.

Michael Pollan: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (paperback, 2009, Penguin): After his important, and bestselling, food book The Omnivore's Dilemma, he seems determined to reduce the essential points, first in In Defense of Food and now in this 112-page "pocket guide." Also has a recent children's edition of Omnivore's Dilemma. Also has a recent reissue of an old book, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, that strikes my fancies much more.

David Ransom/Vanessa Baird, eds: People-First Economics: Making a Clean Start for Jobs, Justice and Climate (paperback, 2009, World Changing): Contributions by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Susan George, Walden Bello, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Evo Morales.

Wayne Allyn Root: The Conscience of a Libertarian: Empowering the Citizen Revolution with God, Guns, Gambling & Tax Cuts (2009, John Wiley & Sons): Uh, drugs; you forgot drugs. Gotta have drugs to be free, not to mention solvent.

Arundhati Roy: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009, Haymarket): Essay collection, mostly on Indian politics, which is troubled on several accounts.

Joe Sacco: Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (2009, Metropolitan): The history of a couple of incidents in Gaza under cover of the 1956 Suez War, one leaving 111 Palestinians dead and casting a long shadow on the subsequent occupation. Sacco has been doing this sort of thing for a while. He has a previous graphic "novel" called Palestine, and others, including Safe Area Goradze: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves (2009, Viking): Most likely one of the more important histories of the financial debacle of 2008, focusing on the politics of Washington basically in thrall to Wall Street.

Joseph E Stiglitz: Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010, WW Norton): Been waiting for him to weigh in on the global meltdown, and this is it. Reading a long review at Amazon it looks to me like he caught just about everything.

Benjamin Tupper: Welcome To Afghanistan: Send More Ammo: The Tragicomic Art of Making War as an Embedded Trainer in the Afghan National Army (paperback, 2009, Epigraph): I don't usually post these soldier chronicles, figuring the soldiers are the most ignorant and least interesting people writing, so take this with a grain of salt, but be free to wonder how all this is supposed to work out. I've lost count of soldier books on Iraq, but Afghanistan is more sparsely documented. Some titles include: Mark W Bromwich: Captains Blog: The Chronicles of My Afghan Vacation; Jeff Courter: Afghan Journal: A Soldier's Year in Afghanistan; Joe LeBleu: Long Rifle: A Sniper's Story in Iraq and Afghanistan; Platte B Moring III: Honor First: A Citizen-Soldier in Afghanistan; Craig M Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education; Mike Ryan: Battlefield Afghanistan; Doug Stanton: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan; Regulo Zapata Jr: Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier; more grandiosely, Dalton Fury: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man; also, Vladislav Tamarov: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story; and, what the hell, Ali Ahmad Jalali: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters.

Ben White: Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide (paperback, 2009, Pluto Press): Short (144 pp), case is pretty straightforward, don't you think?

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Will do paperback reissues next time.

Matthew Yglesias: The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson. I'm reading Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919, which hasn't had much to say about Wilson in the first 100 pages, but no doubt will. Meanwhile, much of what I know about Wilson was gleaned from Walter Karp's The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered the Political Life of the American Republic (1890-1920), which depicts Wilson as a pseudo-reformer and an inveterate two-faced schemer, especially in his efforts to plunge America into World War. (Actually, I'm sure I've read more on Wilson, especially William Appleman Williams, but that was long ago. James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong also features Wilson, practically on the first page.) Still, this post is a good precis, even though it leaves out a lot of details -- like two wars against Mexico. (Pershing's slog through Mexico in search of Pancho Villa is a pretty close precedent to the fruitless search for Bin Laden. Villa, like Bin Laden, had attacked US territory [a town in New Mexico]. Wilson, like Bush, responded with a massive retaliatory invasion, which never found Villa, and eventually returned empty handed. The only difference was that Pershing was so inept he didn't even manage to destroy Mexico. That was more the point of Wilson's Veracruz invasion, but that ultimately accomplished nothing either.)

You can make interesting cases comparing Wilson to two later US presidents. Like Clinton, he won a first term with the Republican Party split, then leveraged his incumbency for a second diastrous term. Even though Clinton got impeached, Wilson was actually far more unpopular: only Richard Nixon had a more disastrous second term. Like Nixon, Wilson implemented, or preëmpted, much of the other party's reform proposals, while administratively doing his best to undermine them. Like Nixon, Wilson had grandiose designs for foreign policy. Like Nixon, those designs involved all sorts of surrepetitious military adventures, massive propaganda, and major efforts to undermine civil liberties. Wilson's reputation today is based mostly on his usefulness to FDR and his cold war successors in turning American foreign policy from isolationism to interventionism: Wilson symbolized a path not taken, which supposedly would have changed the course of history, preventing a second world war and all that came with it. That's a fantasy which is hard to sustain once you look at what Wilson actually did, which is why so much of his record is forgotten, and should be recalled.

I've been reading a series of books that started in Afghanistan then led to Pakistan and finally to India. One of these is Ramchandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. It's a big book on a subject I know a little but not a lot on. There's an interesting chapter on Nehru's foreign policy, which was determinedly neutral in the Cold War, which is to say it completely failed the then-current version of Bush's "you're either with us or against us" test. We learn that Dean Acheson despised Nehru, and John Foster Dulles regarded him as yet another enemy. Then the following Nehru quote pops up, from a letter to industrialist G.D. Birla in May 1954 (p. 169):

I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another. . . . They think that they can solve any problem with money and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.

The only thing wrong with that statement today is that you need to adjust the timespan out to about sixty years, although the last five or six (or eight) are easily the worst. What's striking here is not the judgment but the reasoning. We're still trying to settle everything with money and arms. We still can't understand why people resent doing our bidding, and resent our attitude that the only concerns that matter are ours. Nehru was a smart guy, but he didn't figure that out because he was smart. He recognized the pattern from coming of age under the British Empire.

One curious thing is that more often than not the Americans didn't have a clue what they really wanted, nor any idea what would come as a consequence of their actions. The US had already made fateful moves in Vietnam, in Iran, and in Pakistan, but who in the US had any idea how those moves would blowback? Nehru may not have understood that far in the future either, but he was completely right that what we were doing was wrong.

Time for another quick list of 40 more/less new books of likely interest if anyone had that kind of time. Last time I did this was September 23. The whole kit and kaboodle is here. Probably have enough left over I could post another sooner rather than later.

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Karen Armstrong: The Case for God (2009, Knopf): Probably the best recent writer on the history and historical abuse of religion, she's long hinted that she sees religion as a deep-felt human need. Most likely that's her case, and the history will, once again, be impeccable.

Campbell Craig/Sergey S Radchenko: The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (2008, Yale University Press): The real roots are slightly deeper, but the atomic bomb was one of the initial sticking points in US-Soviet relations. Covered from both sides, as it needs to be.

Campbell Craig/Fredrik Logevall: America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (2009, Belknap Press): Argues that American war planners were unable to shake an insecurity complex which led them to distorted and perverse cold war policies. No doubt that there is something to this, but it's also true that at ever stage the US had dominating firepower and was able to aggressively project and assert that power far around the world. American insecurity was more psychological than anything else, perhaps rooted in fears about the viability of capitalism.

R. Crumb: The Book of Genesis Illustrated (2009, WW Norton): Reportedly favors a very literal translation, consistent with straightforward illustration, as much as may be possible with the source material, which has always struck me as, well, a little weird.

Mark Danner: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (2009, Nation Books): A collection of essays (656 pp) covering a couple decades of war reporting, from El Salvador and Haiti to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he paid special attention to Abu Ghraib.

Morris Dickstein: Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009, WW Norton): Big survey (624 pp), but a big subject, especially with all the music and literature. Helped that the New Deal made a point of supporting artists, and that they managed to do it while getting and giving relatively little flack.

Morgan Downey: Oil 101 (2009, Wooden Table Press): Runs 452 pages, the first 30 "A brief history of oil," then on to crude oil assays, components, chemistry, exploration, production, refining, standards, finished products, etc., plus 100+ pages on markets and prices. Looks like it hits Einstein's dictum of being as simple as possible, but no simpler than it has to be. Doesn't seem to have any agenda. Reportedly essential.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009, Metropolitan): I suppose you could call this "The Bright Side of the Dark Ages." One problem with positive thinking is when it functions as denial; another is how it personalizes problems. In some ways this seems trivial, but Ehrenreich is a profound critic of this sort of thing -- indeed, of most sorts of things.

Marc Ellis: Judaism Does Not Equal Israel: The Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic (2009, New Press): Another in what's quickly growing into a bookshelf of books trying to put some distance between Judaism and Israel. Ellis sees this as a loss of Jewish sense of a "prophetic mission" to a narrative based on the intoxication of power, from the Holocaust and the Israeli military state.

David Hackett Fischer: Champlain's Dream (2008, Simon & Schuster): The key figure in the French discovery of America, regrettably omitted from Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange, although Horwitz wrote a review quoted on Amazon's page. Found the book a bit dull, which is too bad given that Champlain and France had a distinct approach to the Americas.

Aaron Glantz: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (2009, University of California Press): Follows US veterans home after previously writing Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations, and before that How America Lost Iraq, which I recall as the first book to figure that out.

Michael D Gordin: Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Another look at the Soviet Union's first atom bomb test, more concerned with its political ramifications than with the technical details.

DD Guttenplan: American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone (2009, Farrar Straus and Giroux): One of the things I did as a teenager that formed my politics was to subscribe to IF Stone's Weekly, so I always regarded Stone as some kind of saint. Seems like these days people like to harp on Stone's complicated handling of the Sovet Union as if it's still important to score points against anyone who wasn't staunchly anti-Stalin. Given how destructive American anticommunism turned out, I find it hard to nitpick.

Steven F Hayward: The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989 (2009, Crown Forum): Second big (768 pp) volume under that rubric. Don't know whether a third volume is in the works: Reagan was pretty much done even before he left office, but his cult has never let up in their campaign to beatify and deify him. Hayward is part of that cult, clearly show in a previous book title: Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders. (Another memorable Hayward title: The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry.)

Richard Heinberg: Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (paperback, 2009, New Society): One of the most persuasive authors on peak oil and what it means, especially why alternative energy sources are at best a limited answer, takes on the biggest and blackest: coal. Should be a very dirty read.

David Hoffman: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (2009, Doubleday): Not sure whether this is a general history of the arms race and its bizarre mentality or whether it just focuses on the "untold" parts, which seem to have a lot to do with chemican and biological weapons. Either way, likely to be useful for understanding the waste and folly of the cold war.

Alistair Horne: Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year (2009, Simon & Schuster): Actually, the crucial year will be the one Kissinger spends in the Hague.

Fred Jerome: Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East (2009, St Martin's Press): I've long known that Einstein turned down an invitation to Israel, settling in New Jersey instead. This fleshes the story out further. Jerome previously wrote Einstein on Race and Racism.

Fred Kaplan: 1959: The Year That Changed Everything (2009, Wiley): Evidently takes the view that the 1960s started a year earlier and hinged on crucial events in 1959, specifically citing birth control pills, microchips, and the first US soldiers killed in Vietnam, but also noting "Kind of Blue" -- Kaplan is something of a jazz critic on the side, his main beat being the military-industrial complex.

Steven D Levitt/Stephen J Dubner: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (2009, William Morrow): With a huge bestseller setting expectations, they've gone back to the well for more profitable contrariness, but seem to have come up with a load of crap -- their efforts to go against the grain of climate research have drawn a lot of fire for their sloppy scholarship. Makes you wonder about the whole bag, even if the previous book was actually based on some of their own research.

James W Loewen: Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History (paperback, 2009, Teachers College Press): Author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, and Sunset Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism -- books that have got quite a few people to rethink what they thought they knew.

Eric S Margolis: American Raj: America and the Muslim World (2008; paperback, 2009, Key Porter): The implication is not only that the US has superseded Britain not only in its imperial function but in its structure. Author previously wrote War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, which has been through a couple of editions.

Lawrence G McDonald/Patrick Robinson: A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (2009, Crown): Significant because the Lehman bankruptcy was the single most traumatic event of the financial collapse of 2008. Insiders might know something about that, but most of what happened lies elsewhere, including the political decision to let Lehman collapse. A lot of inside stories are coming out, including: Joseph Tibman: The Murder of Lehman Brothers: An Insider's Look at the Global Meltdown, and Andrew Ross Sorkin: Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves.

John Mueller: Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (2009, Oxford University Press): No doubt there's been some hysteria worth debunking, especially along the lines of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud quip, but there's also plenty of room for serious concern about atomic weapons. The bit I most worry about is the effort to preserve the practice of conventional warfare in an age when such war should be as unthinkable as nuclear holocaust. Author previously wrote Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Ralph Nader: "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" (2009, Seven Stories Press): Fiction, probably not compelling as literature, more like a disguised political tract, and for that matter one fluffed up to 736 pp. Wouldn't mention it but I'm not sure he's wrong. Moreover, I don't like the odds.

Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne): Bumps up against a pet peeve of mine: if heroin is bankrolling the Taliban, why not just legalize poppy growing and let legitimate sources drive the excess profits out of the market? [book page]

Rufus Phillips: Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (2008, Naval Institute Press): A protege of Edward Lansdale, Phillips was involved in US actions in South Vietnam from the beginning, and recognized its imminent failure. For proof that the lessons were not learned, Phillips draws analogies to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bernard Porter: The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (paperback, 2006, Oxford University Press): This looks at what people back in Britain thought and cared about their bloody empire, and the answer seems, interestingly enough, to be not much.

Ronald Radosh/Allis Radosh: A Safe Haven: Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel (2009, Harper): An attempt to whitewash Truman as a founding Zionist hero of the Jewish State, similar to Martin Gilbert's Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship. A more balanced and nuanced view would be much more interesting.

Barnett R Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2nd ed, paperback, 2002, Yale University Press): A bit dated, but Afghanistan's inability to form viable state institutions seems timeless. Rubin was a generally astute critic of Bush policy in Afghanistan, but he seems to have disappeared lately, sucked up in Holbrooke's inner circle, where's he's likely a frustrated voice for reason.

Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People (2009, Verso): A bestseller in Israel, where it challenged various myths about just who it was returning to the promised land: in particular, argues that Ashkenazi Jews mostly derive from converts under the Khazar Empire. That in itself matters less than the use of Jewish identity in the forming of Israel, where myth turned into something deeply troubling.

Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt): Tramping around Pakistan, not necessarily in the safest regions either, gives a young journalist a sense of mortality and a curious look at an important nation we poorly understand. [book page]

Neil Sheehan: A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (2009, Random House): Basically the story of developing ICBMs as the alternative to Curtis LeMay's SAC bombers. Sheehan claims that Schriever, a USAF general who pushed the missile programs, with keeping the peace, but it strikes me that he merely took war to a more elevated level of antireality.

Avi Shlaim: Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (2008, Knopf; paperback, 2009, Vintage): Major biography of Jordan's King Hussein, who played a major role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in many ways straddling both sides while cashing checks on the CIA payroll. One thing I've long wondered was whether Hussein entered the 1967 War intending to lose the West Bank and thereby rid himself of Palestinian threats to his dynasty. I doubt if that's answered here.

Avi Shlaim: Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations (2009, Verso): Essay collection, from one of Israel's most important "revisionist" historians, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

Lewis Sorley: A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (paperback, 2007, Harvest Books): This book has gotten attention of late, especially from Af-Pak War hawks who believe that all we need to win in Afghanistan is a better military strategy and blank check support back home. Focuses on Gen. Creighton Abrams, also the subject of Sorley's Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times, who was allegedly turning the Vietnam war around before the peaceniks back home stabbed him in the back.

William T Vollmann: Imperial (2009, Viking): Huge (1306 pp) book about the Imperial Valley in the southeast corner of California and adjacent Mexico, best known for the accidental Salton Sea. I hadn't noticed Vollmann until I saw Poor People in the nonfiction section, but I gather he's a novelist of some importance and much verbosity who spits out mammoth nonfiction tomes on the side -- another one called Rising Up and Rising Down runs to 3,352 pages in 7 volumes.

William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959; 50th Anniversary Edition, paperback, 2009, WW Norton): The classic first look at the underside of US foreign policy. New forword by Lloyd C Gardner, and new afterword by Andrew Bacevich. Williams personally trained a whole generation of critical historians. Bacevich came to Williams late, but also wrote the introduction to the 2006 reprint of Empire as a Way of Life.

Gordon S Wood: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009, Oxford University Press): A new slab in the multi-author Oxford History of the United States, following Robert Middlekauff's entry for 1763-1789. Wood previously specialized in the revolutionary period, so it will be interesting to see how he moves forward. At 800 pages, probably magnificent.

Slavoj Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (paperback, 2009, Verso): A short (96 pp) takeoff on the famous Marx quote, which originally referred to the Napoleons, this time applied to the triumphs and failures of neoliberal capitalism. Zizek is a Slovenian psychologist-philosopher with quite a bit recently published in English, including (working backwards to 9/11 and probably missing some): In Defense of Lost Causes; The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?; The Sublime Object of Ideology; Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books; For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor; Enjoy Your Symptoms: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out; The Universal Exception; The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters; How to Read Lacan; Interrogating the Real; The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality; Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible; Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences; The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity; Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates; plus some commentaries on Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Robespierre. Probably a similar number of earlier books.

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Previously mentioned books (book pages noted where available), new in paperback:

Kenneth S Deffeyes: Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (2001; new edition, paperback, 2008, Princeton University Press): Ex-Shell Oil geologist, teaches at Princeton, was John McPhee's guide for his first marvelous geology book, Basin and Range, introduced the concept of "peak oil" in the first edition of this book, and followed it up with the more general Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak in 2005. Deffeyes predicted a peak in 2004-2008, so presumably the new edition refines that prediction. A couple of global recessions since the first edition appeared suppressed demand, as did a couple of historic price run-ups. Hubbert's US peak was much more clearcut because slacking US production could painlessly (or so it seemed) be replaced from foreign sources. The same isn't true of world production, so we should expect the sort of chaos at the peak that we are in fact seeing.

Gordon M Goldstein: Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (2008; paperback, 2009, Holt): Looks at the push to escalate US involvement in Vietnam through the prism of McGeorge Bundy's post-MacNamara revisionist memory. Thankfully, Bundy died before he could whitewash this, but Bundy did manage to keep the focus on what presidents want as opposed to what their stupid advisers tell them. [book page]

Steven D Levitt/Stephen J Dubner: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005; paperback, 2009, Harper Perennial): Not sure what the new material for the long-awaited paperback is: maybe why it takes four years to turn a much-in-demand hardcover bestseller into a paperback. But probably doesn't have much new, unless they explain why they saved the good stuff for the hardcover sequel coming out October 20: SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Most likely I'll wait for the paperback again; may even get so used to waiting I wait a little longer.

Kapil Komireddi: Indian Winter: A little bit about the prospects of turning Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire into a movie. I can't really see Hugh Grant in the role of Lord Louis Mountbatten, last viceroy and first governor-general of India -- Clive Owen maybe. Hard to improve on Cate Blanchett as Lady Mountbatten. Still, the bigger problem is that it will be all but impossible for a movie based on the principal characters not to compound the book's most serious weakness, which is that it makes so much history turn on the actions of a small number of larger-than-life figures: the Mountbattens, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Churchill. The book tends to fall into the Great Man bag, even if the greatest figure on that list is the Lady. This approach isn't without its insights. In particular, the intense personal dislike between Louis Mountbatten and Jinnah seems to have preceded the prejudice that Mountbatten showed against Pakistan in dividing the empire. On the other hand, it reduces Pakistan to a personal delusion of Jinnah, as if there was nothing more behind it than the ambitions of one determined politician. And it leaves the eruptions of violence mostly unexplained, since they don't much figure into the actions or programs of the principal figures. I finished the book grateful for what I learned but with so many residual questions I wanted to read further.

The "secret history" has much to do with the Mountbattens, but remains rather discreet about Edwina's romance with Nehru. The movie, of course, even if they don't take liberties with the record will inevitably render the affair so explicit as to be undeniable -- and needless to say, the cash register bets that they will go further. And there's the rub. I've seen a dozen or more major movies about India over the last couple of decades, and all ultimately portrayed India in positively glowing terms. I hadn't realized that this is to some extent a consequence of the censorship rights the Indian government demands as part of the price to film there. Despite its much ballyhooed boast to be the world's largest democracy, India is tightly controlled by Nehru's direct heirs, who don't take kindly to publicizing Nehru's dalliance with a foreign woman -- something Nehru himself was very circumspect about. Komireddi does a good job of explaining how this works. Indeed, his notes on the proliferation of Nehru-Gandhi names reminds me of the Ronald Reagan sanctification project here.

For much more from the book, look here.

I notice that I have a bunch of book pages typed up that I haven't posted anything on here in the blog. These are books that I got from the library, read quickly, typing up more or less extensive quotes as I went through them, but in most cases not a lot of comments. One could, in theory, go back and annotate them further. I like having the quotes accessible, especially since the books aren't. And typing is something I have a lot of practice doing, having spent a good chunk of my worklife in typesetting shops. I think there's even a sort of cognitive advantage in not just reading but typing.

The books:

• Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (2009, Random House): Key insight is that Jihadism posits a war on a cosmic plane where it is impossible to defeat. Winning against a cosmically projected war is more a matter of returning to reality. Unfortunately, much of the US Global War on Terror is similarly cosmic, equally ungrounded in reality.

• Alan Beattie: False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World (2009, Riverhead): A spotty, impressionistic, somewhat contrarian survey of how some nations developed better than other nations, starting with a long riff on Argentina vs. United States.

• Adam Cohen: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America (2009, Penguin Press): Focuses on FDR's first 100 days, and on five key advisers who influenced FDR in that period: Lewis Douglas, Raymond Moley, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and Harry Hopkins.

• Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): A quick tour of the Middle East, focusing on hot spots and problem areas, starting with a piece on oil and winding up in Pakistan.

• Diane Dumanoski: The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Out Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth (2009, Crown): A book on the effects of climate change. Overreliant, I think, on James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis.

• Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008, Knopf): War reporting, mostly from Iraq, with an opening section from pre-2001 Afghanistan. Not a very sensitive observer, let alone critic, of the war, but a vivid writer with a fair share of atrocity stories.

• Betty Fussell: Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef (2008, Houghton Mifflin): In depth look at the American beef industry, from someone who still eats steak and throws in some recipes at the end.

• Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War, Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008, Free Press): Somewhat simplistic survey of the military-industrial complex, sympathetic to Eisenhower, excessively so.

• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne): In-depth look at the drug angle in the Afghanistan war. Unfortunately, her angle takes her to conclusions that only serve to propagate the war.

• Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt): Good background history of Pakistan embedded in a travelogue that takes the author to some of the most dangerous places in the country, ultimately getting him kicked out.

There are a couple more books I'll try to get to soon.

William Astore: Apocalypse Then, Afghanistan Now: Within a year of the US invasion, Iraq was reminding Americans of a certain age of a certain familiar quagmire in southeast Asia. Any such historical comparison is bound to have as many variances as similarities, which makes for fruitless debate as the apples and oranges glide by in their own quantum orbits. The real question isn't whether the whole comparison fits. It's whether we've learned lessons from the past experience. The Iraq-Vietnam analogies wound up fading, mostly for two reasons: one is that the anti-American forces were never able to unite over a Sunni-Shiite divide that the US actually did much to exacerbate; the other is that the Shiite-dominated government was able to consolidate a power base that the puppets in Saigon never managed. As such, the US military, with its penchant to turn everywhere it bombs into Vietnams, faded into the background, taking its quagmire with it.

On the other hand, Vietnam-Afghanistan analogies are booming. Of course, there are differences, but one similarity stands out, and it is the one that McGeorge Bundy singled out as the single most important (and by the US unexpected) characteristic of the Vietnam War: the endurance and persistence of the enemy, even in the face of extraordinary losses sustained over long periods of time -- longer timespans than the American people could stomach. Even if nothing else in the analogy holds up (and I wouldn't go that far) the main reason the US lost the Vietnam War looks like the main reason the US is likely to lose out in Afghanistan.

Tom Engelhardt points out in his introduction that Washington these days is torn between two Vietnam books: Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, and Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam. I've read the former. You can read all you need to know on my book page. I haven't bothered with Sorley. I don't find his book credible, for a couple of reasons. One is that throughout the whole history of the war there were always metrics to show that the US was winning. It eventually became a commonplace that the US won every battle and still lost the war. So intuitively I don't believe Sorley's victories. That doesn't mean they're not worth examining, but I'd be real surprised if examination doesn't reveal that they are illusions or irrelevancies. Another reason is that the US had already lost the war in 1964-65. Before the US had hopes of propping up a friendly Vietnamese regime against a Vietnamese insurgency, but the desperate coup against Diem and insertion of US soldiers discredited the Saigon government and turned the war into a colonialist venture. No power since WWII had pulled that off, and Vietnam was too large, militant, resilient, and patient to allow an exception. So even if Sorley could point to tactical victories, turning that into anything more than an extension of an already shamefully extended war would be very hard to believe. One more point is that I believe that a US military victory -- whatever that means -- would have been a bad thing, certainly for the US and most likely for Vietnam. A "victory" in Vietnam would have bolstered the militarist right, leading to more wars -- much like the evident victory in Afghanistan in 2001 led to the Iraq invasion in 2003. Or like the US victory in WWII put us on a path of 60+ years of more/less constant war, where defeated powers like Germany and Japan have managed to mind their own business.

In 1965 McGeorge Bundy was looking at analyses showing that the US could never win anything in Vietnam and urging Johnson to Americanize the war -- to send massive ground troops and to launch enormous waves of bombing -- for no reason other than to save face by postponing the inevitable. Thirty years later he, like Robert McNamara, realized that his advice was disastrous, but he was trapped inside a bubble where everyone thought the world would end if even one domino flipped communist. Astore contrasts the simultaneous views of others not inside the imperial bubble -- specifically Norman Mailer. One striking point Astore makes, citing Mailer:

Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless. How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more emotional participation by the people of America."

Of course, with television there are Americans who can picture Afghan faces, but they are few and far between. Some sympathize with Afghanistan, a sentiment hawks readily prey upon, although you'll be hard pressed to find those same hawks actually caring about America much less Afghanistan. The real reason they insist on fighting in Afghanistan is that they like to fight. They worry if the US ducks out of a fight even in a place that otherwise matters not one whit to the people who run the country, much less the people who merely work here. If you look back to hawks like Bundy you find the same indifference and disregard of Vietnamese people our modern hawks have for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the you find the same callow reasons for slogging on.

Matthew Yglesias: The Goldberg Standard: Might as well quote this short post in toto:

To some, the modern American right-wing looks intellectually moribund. Steve Hayward thinks there's some truth to that, but also powerful minds working on serious issues; people like . . . Jonah Goldberg. The idea that Goldberg's Liberal Fascism represents one of the peaks of right-of-center political thinking is, I think, a more damning indictment than anything any liberal could possibly come up with.

Goldberg is so inscrutable I've never even managed to parse the title. In English we normally put the adjective in front of the noun, which should make the book about a subset of Fascism, specifically the Liberal subset. In other words, it reads like an oxymoron, but whereas you can find relatively jumbo shrimp, which fascists were relatively liberal? Franco? Juan Peron? Neither seems to be a subject of interest to Goldberg. Nor is it clear that he means Fascist Liberalism, although that seems to get closer to his intent. But rather than focusing on a subset of liberalism, he wants to taint the whole by finding a phylogenetic linkage from fascism to liberalism -- something remarkable (in the sense of ridiculous) not only logically but historically. Or maybe not: could he be complaining that fascism is debilitated by its ontological linkage to liberalism?

Given the confusion in the title -- not helped by the subtitle, The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, implying (among other things) that Il Duce was an American and that "the politics of meaning" actually means something -- it seems unlikely that reading the book would clarify anything. Still, the book was a huge bestseller, paving the way for subsequent nonsense by Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, and Michelle Malkin. Still, the main effect seems to have been to free the word "fascist" of all meaning for use as an all-purpose epithet. Maybe it was wrong to characterize George Bush (just to pick a not-quite-arbitrary example) as a fascist, but at least one could make a logical argument, citing points both for and against. But after Goldberg, the right is free to attack Obama as fascist or nazi or socialist or liberal or any other nasty itch they wish to scratch.

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PS: From the publisher's notes:

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term "National socialism"). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities -- where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. [ . . . ]

We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

No need to refute these arguments point-by-point. Like antimatter, few even survive as arguable assertions as far as the period. To take an example, one reason no one (but Goldberg) remembers Du Bois as having been "inspired by Hitler's Germany" was that the people we do remember so inspired where conservative racists and antisemites, not civil rights leaders. Another reason is that Du Bois is more often remembered as a communist, forgetting that before WWII hardly any white people but communists really supported civil rights. FDR certainly didn't want to talk about it -- Ira Katznelson wrote a book about the New/Fair Deals called When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Injustice in Twentieth-Century America. (Goldberg's own magazine, National Review was still defending segregation in the 1960s.)

In my recent books post, I noted several new paperback editions of books that I had read over the last year, but hadn't managed to get my quotes/notes pages together on. I've hustled a bit and finally gotten that done:

• Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner).
• Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2008; paperback, 2009, Holt).
• James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008; paperback, 2009, Free Press).
• Paul Krugman: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008; paperback, 2009, WW Norton).

I didn't manage to add a lot of analysis or critique to these notes. I've never been much for liberalism, which is one reason I so appreciate Ali, but Frank, Galbraith, and Krugman make a pretty solid case for it, and not just given the recent alternative.

Ahmed Rashid: The Afghanistan Impasse. I just read two books on Afghanistan, and was pleased to see this, nominally a review of two more books that I had only dimly been aware of and conveniently found in the library. Turns out it has little to do with Nicholas Schmidle's To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (Henry Holt) and Gretchen Peters's Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's). I'll thumb through those books later and let you know what I find. Rashid is the venerable Pakistani journalist whose Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia is the standard source on the rise of the Taliban, and whose 2008 book, Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia is the best available book on what happened to the region since the US got took an interest in late 2001. (See my book page for extensive quotes.) He is, in short, both a guy who knows what he's talking about. However, he seems to have gotten too wound up in his subject, which is turning him from a fine journalist to a muddled pundit. Consider the following two paragraphs:

After Obama's injection of 21,000 troops and trainers, total Western forces in Afghanistan now number 100,000, including 68,000 US troops. It is likely that General McChrystal will soon ask for more. Obama's overall plan has been to achieve security by doubling the Afghan army's strength to 240,000 men and the police to 160,000; but these are tasks that would take at least until 2014 to complete, if indeed they can be carried out. Meanwhile the military operation in Afghanistan is now costing cash-strapped US taxpayers $4 billion a month.

Across the region many people fear that the US and NATO may start to pull out of Afghanistan during the next twelve months despite their uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban walking into Kabul. Al-Qaeda would be in a stronger position to launch global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to "liberate" large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the security situation has deteriorated progressively ever since winter 2001/2002 -- the time period when Rory Stewart was able to walk across much of the country (see The Places in Between [book page]. This has happened in almost perfect correlation with the increase of US and NATO troops, the "training" of "Afghan forces," and the spending (or wasting) of vast sums of development money. The two may not be causally linked, but it's clear that involvement of the sort that the US has engaged in for eight years now has had little benefit either to Afghanistan or to the US and now seems to be returning less and less value. I'm convinced that the problem is endemic both to Afghanistan and to the US, and that the combination simply doesn't work. As polls indicate, a majority of Americans (and a supermajority of Democrats) have come to the same conclusion, even if they're unlikely to phrase it my way. (Most are less tempted to blame the Americans than the Afghans.) We're a nation that prides itself on good business sense, and quite frankly any business that reviews returns like these will quickly move to cut their losses. There may be some room for debating how to do that, but it should be clear that our best efforts have failed and that some sort of reduction is clearly in order.

Rashid, however, has bought into the occupation to such an extent that his second paragraph is full of doom alarms meant to cower us. Although the Taliban can do damage in Afghanistan, there is no reason to think they could take over Kabul without significant foreign support, which is very unlikely. Similar predictions were made when the Soviets withdrew, but the rump government held its positions against US- and Pakistani-funded mujahideen for three years, until the Soviet Union collapsed and ended all aid. The notion that Pakistan would fall to the Taliban is even more far fetched. Pakistan may tolerate the Taliban in the small and marginal (to it) FATA, but Pakistan's military easily routed the Taliban in the Swat Valley. No one thinks the Taliban has any prospects beyond the Pashtun belt, which as Pakistan goes is thin and marginal.

One thing that's happened in the last year is that the honeymoon between Pakistan and the Taliban is finally over. It's hard to see either side putting that relationship back together again. Pakistan has a problem with India, but the solution there is diplomatic. That is something the US can and should work on. Afghanistan has a lot of problems, and no easy solutions. Most of all they need to develop a viable state and a viable economy. I doubt that either has ever happened under foreign occupation. They certainly haven't happened while there was a major insurrection against foreign occupation. The US and NATO need to reduce their footprint and chokehold considerably, preferably completely. Aid needs to be managed better -- now it's mostly soaked up in graft, doing virtually no one any good. There are plenty of smarter ways to do this, but the one thing we know will be disastrous would be to keep pumping troops in until we grind the Afghans into submission. We don't have the troops, time, or money, and the human toll on the ground would be devastating.

Rashid's threats turn out to be the same threats that Gen. McChrystal made in his leaked report about what would happen if he didn't get his extra 40,000 troops. Such threats play on the ignorance of politicians, who can easily imagine them being turned into told-you-so's if they don't cover their ass and go along. In other words, they're bully bluffs. The real question to ask McChrystal is what difference 40,000 troops would make. The obvious answer is that they'll provide the Taliban with more targets, so more American troops will get killed and maimed; and they'll kill a few more Taliban and a lot more ordinary Afghans, as well as turn more of the latter into Taliban. In other words, they will perpetuate the violence, which is really the last thing we should want.

Rashid writes a bit about the elections. One thing I have to say about this is that it would have been good for Karzai to have lost -- not because he's corrupt or inept or whatever, but because it would have shown Afghans that it is possible to change leaders without using bullets. That would have been a good lesson to learn. It would even give the Taliban reason to run for office rather than try to shoot their way in.

Tom Engelhardt: Measuring Success in Afghanistan. Checking the numbers, plus a thought on why "their Afghans" are so effective fighting and "our Afghans" aren't:

Here's something to carry away with you: Life is invariably hard when you set up your massive embassies, your regional command centers, your election advisors, your private security guards, your military trainers and advisors, your diplomats and civilian enablers and then try to come up with a formula for motivating the locals to do your bidding.

The way to level the field between "our Afghans" and "their Afghans" is to bring the US troops home. Then all each will have to fight for is their own freedom from control by other Afghans -- where the Taliban have a pretty nasty track record, as do the warlords in different ways. They can pick their poison, or compromise. But now the choice is between fighting for or against us, which isn't a choice that favors us.

Tom Engelhardt: How to Trap a President in a Losing War: On the McChrystal memo. Sees Petraeus behind it, "the most political general to come down the pike since, in 1951 in the midst of the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said his goodbyes to Congress after being cashiered by President Truman for insubordination -- for, in effect, wanting to run his own war and the foreign policy that went with it." Also makes frequent reference to "the Surgettes": the pundits who, having got lucky in Iraq, now see surges as the answers to each and every military failure. The Surge worked in Iraq because it was preceded by a series of deals that were the real cause for the reduction in violence. (By the way, the drop was masked for nearly a by the additional violence the extra troops brought with them. The reduction only became evident when the troops were throttled to keep the whole strategem from failing.) For lots of reasons the same strategy cannot work in Afghanistan.

Helene Cooper: GOP Support May Be Vital to Obama on Afghan War. A good reason to think about whether he really wants to fight to keep the Afghan war going. One big reason why Clinton lost his health care reform program in 1993-94 was that he pushed NAFTA out ahead of it. He passed NAFTA, but only with Republican support, while crippling the union efforts he needed for health care. Why didn't he make NAFTA contingent on getting health care passed? Why not make Afghanistan contingent on health care reform now? It's not like the Republicans are cutting him any slack for being out front with in their war -- and really, all wars benefit the Republicans because they burn tax money and distract from reform at home. Not that the political calculus is what you want to base your Afghanistan policy on. But it's safe to say the Republicans do just that, and if they see a way to burn Obama they'll do it.

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I read two books on Afghanistan last week, collecting extensive notes on them.

Gregory Feifer's The Great Gamble covers the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, with a bit on the Najibullah regime that remained in power until 1992. It's drawn mostly from the personal stories of Soviet soldiers, with a fairly brief summary of the high-level politics in the Kremlin. The decision to "invade" seems to have been made almost accidentally, like the Politburo was trying to follow procedures for 1956 Hungary and 1967 Czechoslovakia but couldn't remember the details and were too embarrassed to look them up or test whether they were relevant to Afghanistan. They weren't. The Soviets had installed communist regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and owned them lock, stock and barrel. Moreover, they were lined up behind an Iron Curtain where NATO threatened the Soviet Union on one side, but where the Soviet Union was free to act on the other. The communist government in Afghanistan was the result of a local coup -- and was riven by factions (Khalq and Parcham) actively involved in killing each other off. The Kabul government had very little control over the countryside -- in fact, less and less every day. The only thing the Soviets actually decided was to dive in and kill off the Parcham leader, Hafizullah Amin (who had recently killed off the Khalq leader, Mohammed Taraki). The troops were sent in to back up the assassination, having already failed once so ineptly that Amin was unawares. Soviet invasion instantly undermined the Kabul government, rather than fortifying it, leaving the invaders with an utter mess. From there on, well, you know the drill: stay the course, we can't afford to lose, giving up would invite disaster, blah blah blah. The Soviet Union had declined miserably by the 1980s, such that the soldiers were ill-equipped and ill-supported. They provisioned themselves by looting, and defended themselves by indiscriminate slaughter. The US, China, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia poured billions of dollars in weapons to prop up mujahideen warlords, who barely made a dent against the Soviet war machine, but did incredible damage to Afghanistan. The Soviet Union lost fewer than 15,000 soldiers in the war (although the injuries and trauma were far greater). More than a million Afghans died, and seven million were displaced. In other words, the Americans (primarily the Reagan administration) cheerfully sacrificed 70 Afghans for every Soviet they killed. They utterly destroyed the Afghan state and economy, and they prevented a whole generation of Afghans from learning and developing normal skills, while training a generation of murderers and thieves. The result was civil war that continues to this day, exemplified by the Taliban rule in the late 1990s, one of the most barbarous and incompetent regimes since WWII. Nor were the scars restricted to Afghanistan. Returning Soviet soldiers turned into violent criminals, which practically became the norm in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mujahideen warlords Reagan praised as like our founding fathers took jihad on the road, leading to scores of terrorist atrocities from Bali to the World Trade Center in New York. And after 2001, the Americans returned to wreak even more havoc in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, becoming not only the world's superpower but its most dangerous rogue nation.

For more on Feifer's book, see the book page.

Jones is a RAND Corp. political scientist, based in Washington DC. His resume includes visiting Afghanistan "over a dozen times since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." His book promises to be the first comprehensive history of the first 7 years of the US occupation of Afghanistan. It's fairly spotty in that regard: neither a military history nor a political history; despite a few first-person stories, not what you'd call journalism either. He throws in a few pages on Alexander and Tamerlane and Babur and Rudyard Kipling, but he doesn't offer much depth. He does offer some sociological concepts, and sketches out a comparative set of insurgency studies. And he winds up with a few prescriptions that never once call into question the premises of the problem. In a nutshell, this is what passes for analytical thinking in DC these days. Lord help us.

For more on Jones' book, see the book page.

At the end of Jones' book, he makes a set of recommendations for turning the war around. He argues that at least some Americans have always understood Afghanistan (ambassadors Zalmay Khalilzad and Ronald Neumann are his examples) and that the problems were caused by political leaders who didn't listen to good advise (no names, but I know a Bush when I smell one). Then he blames the insurgency on "too little outside support for the Afghan government and too much support for insurgents." That led me to comment:

There's no evidence, in this book at least, that either Khalilzad's adolescence of Neumann's sheep hunting adventure in any way offered any profound insights into the problems poised by Afghanistan. They, at best, were slightly less ignorant and slightly less indifferent than the usual run of Americans driven by the Global War on Terror into Afghanistan. The fact is that Afghanistan was never more than an accident in the minds of American politicians and warriors who had their minds on something else: on humiliating the Russians back in 1979 and on reasserting US global dominance in 2001. The original sin was back in 1979 when Carter and Brzezinski put the whole Afghan people at risk to further their puerile Cold War fantasies. Pause a moment on that: if Jimmy Carter cared so little about what would happen to Afghanistan, what hope can you invest in the brains and moral character of Reagan, Clinton, and two generations of Bush?

It's easy to argue that an insurgency arose in Afghanistan because the post-2001 state was weak, but when has Afghanistan ever had an effective system of government? Certainly not under Zahir Shah, when Afghanistan was still at peace. Most likely never. The Soviets can be blamed for meddling if not in the 1978 Revolution, which seems to have been a bit of mischief endemic to the weak government's elite institutions, then in trying to sort out the Khalq-Parcham factional strife of the pro-communist ruling party. But it was first Pakistan then the US that tore Afghanistan apart with their "better dead than red" obsession. The Soviets' real crime was blundering into the trap the US had set. They did this because they didn't understand a couple of very basic things: first was that neither communist faction had any popular support; second was that whoever controls the state in Afghanistan controls nothing of effective value; third is that the only thing that really gets Afghans riled up is the presence of a foreign army on their soil. From 1979 on, Afghanistan has been riven by civil war, which has largely been sponsored by foreign interests, each concerned with the other, none caring the least bit about what happens to the Afghans.

The only important thing that changed between 1979 and 2001 was that during the intervening 22 years (now 30 years) the only skill worth an Afghan's effort to develop was fighting war. The result is that the political class in Afghanistan has been rigorously selected for the sole trait of self-interested preservation in times of war. Back in 1979 Afghanistan had virtually no skills for state-building. Two decades later the state was run by the Taliban, probably the most incompetent bureaucrats of the last century. (I suppose you could argue that the Belgian legacy in the Congo that led to Mobuto was in the running, but I doubt that it comes close. Aside from the Taliban's warped-but-real system of justice, every other normal function of government, to the extent that it was implemented at all, was left to the charity of foreign NGOs.) So along comes Bush and Rumsfeld, who really don't have the slightest clue why America functions better than other oligarchies like Haiti, and they're dumbfounded to find themselves in a country where nobody knows how to do anything, except fight. That's pretty hopeless under any circumstances, but what makes it even worse is that all Bush and Rumsfeld ever wanted in the first place was to fight -- fighting is why the US invaded in the first place.

So when the author complains about the government getting too little support and the insurgency getting too much support he's trying to balance totally different things on the same scale. The fact is that the insurgency got peanuts compared to what was spent on the government and the war effort. I mean, who paid for the Taliban? A few tribal leaders in the poorest part of Pakistan, some mid-level ISI operatives, the mythical financiers of the Gulf sheikdoms, some drug runners. They must have been outspent a thousand-to-one, but in Afghanistan you can buy a lot of killing awful cheap, and you can hardly buy honest government at all -- especially when you're laundering so much of the money back to outfits like DynCorp, which is, after all, the Bush way.

So to say the debacle wasn't inevitable is to buy into a lot of wishful thinking that has no business in Afghanistan.

He then proposed to fix this by building up a non-corrupt government, working more with local institutions than with national ones, and persuading Pakistan to shut down the safe havens the Taliban are using in Pakistani territory. For comments on those, follow the link above.

Tried to collect the more timely, more pointedly political items this time, after dumping most of my lesser-interest titles yesterday. Part of this involved doing more research, so the well is still pretty full. Could even do a third part, but will probably wait a while, since this is chewing up a lot of time I don't really have available. I couldn't resist picking up the Maass book below, something I hope to get to soon.

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Matthew Alexander/John Bruning: How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (2008, Free Press): Alexander is evidently a pseudonym for an Air Force interrogator who worked on the intelligence that caught up with Zarqawi. Reviews claim this reads like a thriller, but the key point is that it works as an indictment of Cheney's torture methods.

Tariq Ali: The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom: And Other Essays (2009, Verso): Title essay takes off from a Proust quote: if Zionism seeks a biblical homeland for the Jews on the basis of persecution, why not also look for a biblical homeland for gays and lesbians? More pieces on literature and politics.

Glenn Beck: Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (2009, Threshold Editions): I thumbed through this incoherent comic book last night, finding it virtually impossible to read. Back cover is covered with critical attacks on Beck, mostly pegging him as a vile moron. It says something about his niche marketing that he figures they're good for sales. Looks like his readers are the idiots, and the point of argument is to work up fury. Haven't looked at his other new bestseller, Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, let alone such earlier efforts as America's March to Socialism: Why We're One Step Closer to Giant Missile Parades.

Wendell Berry: Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (2009, Counterpoint): A collection of old essays from over 30 years, with a new introduction by Michael Pollan. Probably leans more toward farming, which is Berry's passion.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (2009, Nation Books): Attempts to show that the movers and shakers of the Republican right wing are scum at a personal level, as well as ignorant and vile politically. Came up with enough examples to write 416 pages. Given how the post-Bush right has broken down, he may be right.

Harold H Bruff: Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on Terror (2009, University Press of Kansas): That's putting it, uh, thoughtfully. John Yoo's book title, War By Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror, suggests that he wasn't even trying to be a lawyer. David Addington was always a guy who wrapped the law around his politics. Bush had no training in law: the only point he grasped was that as long as you could get away with it the law didn't apply. He hired lawyers to defend that insight. But then he also thought the only point of democracy was winning.

Paul Davidson: The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity (2009, Palgrave Macmillan): A short book of economic policy prescription, based on the immemorial question, what would John Maynard Keynes say now?

John Diamond: The CIA and the Culture of Failure: US Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq (2008, Stanford Security Studies): Another book on the CIA's uncanny ability to screw up everything it touches. I've recently read Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, which dishes the dirt from the beginning. This starts with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and covers the rudderless years in more detail.

Richard J Evans: The Third Reich at War (2009, Penguin Press): Third volume following The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, presumably the end of a trilogy, unless he wants to do a The Third Reich in Myth and History, which would itself be interesting, but a change of pace. Long (944 pages), stuff that's been covered a lot -- and continues to be; cf. Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. Don't know how good they are. I bought the first on a whim, thinking it might be interesting to note parallels between the emergent Nazis and the Bush fascists, but never actually got to the book.

Bradley Graham: By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (2009, Public Affairs): Big (832 pp), more than I want to know about him, plenty of room for his many idiosyncrasies to get so annoying you lose track of how he fit into the military-industrial complex as well as how he wrecked it.

Alan Hart: Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One: The False Messiah (paperback, 2009, Clarity Press): One should be able to make a strong case for the title. Evidently a second volume is planned.

Godfrey Hodgson: The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009, Yale University Press): One of those ideas that keeps popping up no matter how many times you try to kill it. Not necessarily a good thing either. One Amazon review points out: "In the last third of the book, Hodgson details the areas where America truly is exceptional among industrial nations: last in health care, near last in educational achievement, first in incarceration rates, first in violent crime, last in intercity train service and public transit, first in income inequality, first in the amount spent on the military, first in allowing lobbyists and money to influence the democratic process." Probably helps that Hodgson is British. He's written a number of books on the US, including The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Movement in America.

David E Hoffman: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race & Its Dangerous Legacy (2009, Doubleday): Looks like a major book, based on research on both sides of the Cold War divide. Early on, at least some US military planners saw the arms race as a way to bankrupt the Soviet Union. That led to ever more fanciful schemes, which still possess the "best and brightest" minds of the Pentagon. That arms race almost immediately led to scenarios of apocalyptic destruction. It also caused a persistent unraveling of America's sense of democracy, a moral rot that time and again sided us with despotic regimes in a desperate totalitarian pursuit of gamesmanship. If this book doesn't spell all that out, it should.

Susan Jacoby: Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (2009, Yale University Press): After writing such sweeping books as Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason, here's one short and specific, part of a series, "Icons of America." Hiss is, well, iconic because people read more into him than there ever was -- something that I must say I never understood. I can, for instance, recall Nixon ranting that the real reason liberals opposed him on Vietnam was that they could never forgive him for what he did to Hiss, as if a couple million dead in Vietnam and Cambodia mattered less than the fate of an Ivy League commie. That's the sort of exaggeration Jacoby gets to work with -- if only anyone cares anymore.

Dahr Jamail: The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009, Haymarket): Another scoop for a freelance reporter who went further and dug deeper into the Iraq war than just about anyone else. Forward by Chris Hedges.

Seth G Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009, WW Norton): RAND Corp. analyst looks back, second guesses, offers some more guesses. [PS: After reading this book, note seems about right.]

Anne Karpf/Brian Klug/Jacqueline Rose/Barbara Rosenbaum, eds.: A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (paperback, 2008, Verso): Pieces from a British group called Independent Jewish Voices.

Ichiro Kawachi/Bruce P Kennedy: The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health (paperback, 2006, New Press): Linked from Richard Wilkinson's The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, this seems to be even more specifically focused on health care. As you know, the US has worse health outcomes than any other rich country despite spending twice or more as much per capita. Lots of reasons are possible, including that overtreatment isn't necessarily a good thing, but inequality seems to have far more to do with it: both in the denial of essential services and in the jealous protectionism of those who think they're better off for it.

Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009, Doubleday): I've probably read all of Krakauer's books -- mountain climbing is one of my odder side interests, and Mormonism is another -- still this doesn't seem like a very promising combination. The only lesson I draw from Tillman is the utter waste of America's war in Afghanistan, and more generally America's passion for war. People are tempted to think that Tillman did something remarkable leaving the NFL for Afghanistan, but the two are so foolishly intertwined that it was merely pathetic.

Mark LeVine: Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (2009, Zed): The years in question start with the Intifada, follow through the Oslo accords and the revival of Israel's rejectionist right under Ariel Sharon. The Intifada marked a shift in how Israel saw its Palestinian problem: before it was external, led by the PLO, characterized by terrorism; after, it was homegrown, an indictment of Israeli occupation. Short book has a lot of ground to cover.

William A Link: Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (2008, St Martin's Press): Obviously way too sympathetic, which in this case makes you question the whole project. A better title would have been Blustering Bigot.

Peter Maass: Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil (2009, Knopf): There is no doubt but that the world is going to run out of oil sooner or later. The world economy grew almost linearly with the extraction of oil, so its decline seems inevitable as well. This can happen more or less violently, but if the oil industry itself is any indication, the future looks pretty bleak.

Michelle Malkin: Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (2009, Regnery Press): Chart-topping bestseller, which raises the question: why didn't anyone use this title when Bush was president? I mean, other than that it would have been impossible to squeeze it all into 256 pages. I especially love the bit about Michelle Obama and Joe Biden being "nepotism beneficiaries."

David N Myers: Between Jew and Arab: The Lost Voice of Simon Rawidowicz (2008, Brandeis): Rawidowicz died in 1957, having established himself as a notable scholar and written some essays critical of the Zionists' failure to protect Arabs during the 1947-49 war, a source not only of future conflict but of the deep-seated moral crisis within Zionism.

Shuja Nawaz: Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (2008, Oxford University Press): Looking back at the Musharraf years, it seems pretty obvious now that the Bush administration understood virtually nothing about Pakistan's army and its view of the state and the world. This big (600 pp) book comes late but might help, especially since it's not clear that Obama gets it either.

David Neiwert: The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (paperback, 2009, Polipoint Press): Takes on the tendency in the right to seek the elimination of their enemies, as opposed to any of the wussier approaches favored by liberals, like trying to argue a case on points. Covers the obvious suspects, with Lou Dobbs mixed in with the neo-fascists.

Trevor Paglen: Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (2009, Dutton): Author is described as "a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur." Book attempts to expose a number of DOD and CIA "black ops" sites, helping you to get some notion of the bizarre things the security state is up to. Previously wrote: Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights. A similar book is Harry Helms: Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You're Not Supposed to Know About.

Charles P Pierce: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009, Doubleday): Inspired by the Terry Schiavo case and the Creation Museum, which are as good as anywhere to start, but pretty low-lying fruit. I'm still ambivalent about the Dark Ages scenario -- there seems to be a lot of pull in both directions -- and would like to go beyond the mere cataloguing of contemporary stupidity. So the key question here is "how" this happened. Part of it is certainly that stupidity has been in the political interests of the right, but it's also been accommodated by politicians of the not-so-right. Businesses too. Where does that leave us?

Nomi Prins: It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (2009, Wiley): Former Goldman Sachs managing director turned muckraking journalist, argues that the pillage had less to do with subprime mortgages than "a financial system that rewards people who move money instead of people who make things, operates outside of the media's gaze, is sheltered from governmental supervision, and uses leverage to turn risky deals into insanely risky deals." Seems about right. Previously wrote Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not).

TR Reid: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009, Penguin Press): A comparative study of health care systems around the world, perhaps the easiest way to show how skewed, deranged, and wrong-minded the US "system" is. Previously wrote The United States of Europe.

Donald E Schmidt: The Folly of War: America's Foreign Policy, 1895-2005 (paperback, 2005, Algora): Traces America's war tendencies to the militant idealism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson along with a belief in American Exceptionalism.

James Scott: The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a US Spy Ship (2009, Simon & Schuster): An old story which has generally been kept under wraps. Much smaller events have been blown up into excuses for war, but Israel wasn't a country we were keen on tangling with. So why did it happen? And why didn't it matter? And is the appearance of a new book on the subject an indication that we're having second thoughts about unconditional support for a country that sometimes treats us as badly as they treat everyone else?

Robert Skidelsky: Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009, Public Affairs): Keynes biographer, his multi-volume series reissued abridged in 2005 to a mere 1056 pages. This reminder comes in at 240 pages. It seems to me that Keynes' disappearance has been greatly exaggerated, but there's nothing like a huge worldwide financial crisis to bring people back to the essential books. Also see: Peter Clarke: Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist.

Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009, Viking): Looks at how natural and manmade disasters break the run of everyday life and trigger community-building: various earthquakes, Katrina, etc.

David Swanson: Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (paperback, 2009, Seven Stories Press): Law and order guy, thinks Bush and Cheney and various accomplices should stand trial for their numerous crimes. Makes a good case, I'm sure.

Sam Tanenhaus: The Death of Conservatism (2009, Random House): An acolyte/biographer of Whitaker Chambers, he tries to defend his conservative idealism from reality by arguing that real conservatism died and has been replaced by an impostor. I doubt that he identifies the impostor as fascism, but someone acould write such a book.

Nicholas Thompson: The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (2009, Henry Holt): The contrast is one way to look at the Cold War, but Kennan went through his hawkish phase too, and he's far better remembered for his "long telegram" rant than for all the reservations and caveats he offered later.

Marcy Wheeler: Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy (paperback, 2007, Vaster Books): A short brief on two interrelated subjects, tied together by the media that abets them. The Iraq propaganda story has been covered at great length elsewhere; the Valerie Plame outing less so.

Richard Wilkinson: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (paperback, 2006, New Press): Ran across this because Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have a new book coming out in December (already out in UK) called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. The focus strikes me as right: inequality poisons personal relationships in ways both subtle and profound, and those redound throughout society. Conversely, social cohesion depends on the fundamental sense that we're all basically alike, and therefore we're all in this together.

Richard Wolffe: Renegade: The Making of a President (2009, Crown): The most conspicuous (at least in bookstores right now) of a pile of quickie books on Obama's election win. Others include: Gwin Ifill: The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama; David Plouffe: The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory; Larry J Sabato: The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House; Chuck Todd: How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election; Greg Mitchell: Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008; Evan Thomas: "A Long Time Coming": The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Campaign and the Historic Election of Barack Obama.

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Previously mentioned books new in paperback (book pages noted where available; some are stubs or have brief notes without quotes; eventually all will have quotes and comments):

Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner): A personal, rather idiosyncratic history of Pakistan willingly but not necessarily all that constructively under America's imperial thumb. [book page: note]

Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2008; paperback, 2009, Holt): A pretty accurate summary of the Republicans' run of ruin in Washington. Paperback added something to the subtitle; not sure if the book has been updated. [book page: stub]

James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008; paperback, 2009, Free Press): Give corporations the keys to the state and they'll turn it into a system for preying on people, the exact opposite of what a democratic state should do. One of the better political books to appear in the last couple of years. I need to go back and pick up my quotes. [book page: stub]

Paul Krugman: The Conscience of a Liberal (2007; paperback, 2009, WW Norton): Part political manifesto, but cooly delivered because he wants to work a macro view of US history in, from the Long Gilded Age through the New Deal-inspired levelling and back to a return of Gilded Age inequality. [book page]

Paul Krugman: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008; paperback, 2009, WW Norton): Revised a year ago from the 1999 original, written then in response to the East Asian collapse of 1997, which bears many of the same traits as the current boom/bust. [book page: note]

Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008; paperback, 2009, Penguin): Probably the single best book out on America's post-2001 Af-Pak fiasco, although it still leaves plenty of questions unanswered and even unraised. [book page]

I have enough book notes piled up that I'm going to do two posts in quick succession to clean up the excess -- second part will most likely appear tomorrow. When I do these things I usually pick the most urgent and important titles from my accumulated notes, but this time my plan is to save those for tomorrow and clear out as much of the old stuff I've been skipping over as possible. So skim lightly, but these are books I thought had some interest. I've adopted the convention of limiting these posts to 40 books each, but this one runs a little long. Otherwise I'd wind up doing this again.

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Daniel J Barrett: MediaWiki (Wikipedia and Beyond) (paperback, 2008, O'Reilly): Large book on the free software package that underlies Wikipedia. I've been meaning to use MediaWiki for a couple of projects, so this is of special interest to me. On the other hand, I've been accumulating books on Wikipedia without yet getting to the point of using them. Won't have a real opinion on them until I do.

Robert H Bates: When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa (paperback, 2008, Cambridge University Press): Failed states consume economies in chaos, corruption, and predation, but what causes states to fail? One suggestion here is that globalization, especially backed by IMF policies, undermined efforts to build stable, adequately financed state organizations.

Derek Bickerton: Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages (paperback, 2009, Hill and Wang): A book about creoles and pidgins, part memoir of a lifetime's study.

David Blumenthal/James Morone: The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (2009, University of California Press): New history of the politics of health care policy.

Paul Buhle, ed: The Beats: A Graphic History (2009, Hill and Wang): Text by Harvey Pekar and others; art by Ed Piskor and others. Not sure who all the others are. Short, celebratory, maybe a little critical when it comes to sexism. Stuff I used to care a lot about, not just when I read Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti but also when I followed Buhle's comics jones in Radical America.

Kathleen Burk: Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (2008, Atlantic Monthly Press): Big book (848 pages), tries to straddle the Atlantic from 1497 on.

Lisa Chamberlain: Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction (2008, Da Capo Press): Portrait of Gen X (those born in the mid-1960s through '70s) as pioneering entrepreneurs; one review tags this "gushing, anecdotal" -- not very useful attributes.

Mike Chinoy: Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (2008, St Martin's Press): Author is an ex-CNN reporter, which doesn't really make this an "inside" account -- but then you really wouldn't want to read a book on this by the likes of John Bolton.

Gregory Cochran/Henry Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009, Basic Books): Argues for genetic evolution within the last 10,000 years, contrary to the more common expectation of genetic stability in large populations.

Jennet Conant: The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008, Simon & Schuster): Third book by Conant as she digs around WWII for interesting stories. I'm not much for spy stories, but the other two books looked like they might be interesting: Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II and 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos.

Philip J Cunningham: Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 (2009, Rowman & Littlefield): Evidently the author was there, was friends with various protesters, and kept a day-by-day account of the events. Seems a little dated for that kind of detail, but maybe not.

Michael C Desch: Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (2008, Johns Hopkins University Press): Dissects the argument, going back to 1815, that Democratic states are inherently more likely to prevail in wars.

Marq de Villiers: The End: Natural Disasters, Manmade Catastrophes, and the Future of Human Survival (2008, Thomas Dunne): Global warming, of course, but also volcanoes, meteors, massive tsunamis, noxious gases, plagues and pandemics, mass extinctions: stuff that happens all the time.

Bart D Ehrman: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (2009, Harper One): Basic historical deconstruction of the New Testament -- the outline I've seen is mostly stuff I know about, but probably not at this detail. Evidently, Ehrman has been doing this for a while now. Previous books include: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (1996); Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It Into the New Testament (2003); Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003); Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005); The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (2006).

Jon Entine: Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People (2007, Grand Central Publishing): Research into the genetic angle of Jewish history, a subject more succinctly covered in David B Goldstein: Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History (2008, Yale University Press). This may be one of the few areas where anyone's still talking about races, but then Entine, who draws a paycheck at American Enterprise Institute, previously wrote: Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It.

Randy Charles Epping: The 21st Century Economy: A Beginner's Guide (paperback, 2009, Vintage): Author of the very similar A Beginner's Guide to the World Economy, originally dating from 1992, with a 1995 revised edition and a 2001 reprint. Most likely this title is basically another revision. Elementary, of course.

Douglas Farah/Stephen Braun: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible (paperback, 2008, Wiley): Exposé of Russian arms dealer Victor Bout. Certainly not the only one, and a piker compared to the US Government.

Stephen Fender: 50 Facts That Should Change The USA (paperback, 2008, The Disinformation Company): A sequel to Jessica Williams: 50 Facts That Should Change the World, reissued in 2007 in a 2.0 Edition. The emphasis is on facts that are non-obvious, counterintuitive even, but Americans are so ignorant -- one, or maybe several, of the facts -- that that isn't too hard.

Ann Finkbeiner: The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite (2006, Viking; paperback, 2007, Penguin): A history of elite scientists consulting with the Defense Department, especially after the Sputnik craze in 1958.

Leonard M Fleck: Just Caring: Health Care Rationing and Democracy (2009, Oxford University Press): Takes rationing as a serious ethical issue, insisting that "no one has a moral right to impose rationing decisions on others if they are unwilling to impose those same rationing decisions on themselves in the same medical circumstances."

Tom Gjelten: Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (2008, Viking): A portrait of the rum barons as benevolent capitalists in the old Cuba, cast by Castro out of their country to exile in Miami, whereupon they started financing the good fight against the bad revolution.

Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (2009, Yale University Press): A venerable topic, of course, always more so when one's own sense of superpowership is well nigh keeling over.

Adam Gopnik: Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009, Knopf): Coincidentally, both Lincoln and Darwin were born on 12 February 1809, the first link in this attempt to draw both in to a common narrative of 19th century progress.

Colin Gordon: Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (paperback, 2009, University of Pennsylvania Press): Having lived in St. Louis, I can certainly buy it as a case example for urban decline.

Ronnie Greene: Night Fire: Big Oil, Poison Air, and Margie Richard's Fight to Save Her Town (2008, Amistad): The town is Norco, LA, located in what's variously called Chemical Corridor and/or Cancer Alley. The poison air comes from Shell Oil, one of the real big ones. Greene's a Miami Herald reporter, who gets to report for once.

Stephen P Halbrook: The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms (2008, Ivan R Dee): Fundamental research into the why and wherefore of the second amendment. Argues that an individual right was seen as a way to check the abusive power of a standing army. Author previously wrote The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich, which is probably another brief in favor of broad gun ownership.

Harry Helms: Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You're Not Supposed to Know About (paperback, 2007, Feral House): Not much of a travel guide, and evidently not all that complete -- e.g., no Fort Detrick, the evident source of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, at the very least enabled by your tax dollars.

Tom Holland: The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West (2009, Doubleday): A history of Europe's 1K crisis -- the apocalyptic expectations surrounding the year 1000. Don't know how far this goes, but it certainly sets the stage for the Crusades beginning in 1095. Holland has written a couple of books on earlier history: Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic and Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. I found Rubicon to be a very useful introduction to a subject I knew little of.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, ed: Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future (2009, Random House Canada): Smart guy, likes big questions with a lot of weight on the future. This is one of those questions, but he's just editing, pulling together six Canadian experts, including William Marsden, author of a title worth repeating: Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care).

Brooks Jackson/Kathleen Hall Jamieson: unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (paperback, 2007, Random House): Tough job for a short (208 pp) book, more likely to drown in examples than draw lessons beyond the usual don't believe most (or damn near anything) that you hear. Focuses on politics and advertising, pretty low lying fruit.

Flora Jessop/Paul T Brown: Church of Lies (2009, Jossey-Bass): On the polygamist Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, by a woman who grew up there, broke away, and works against them.

Steven Johnson: The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008, Riverhead): On Joseph Priestley, focusing more on his political interests in emigrating to America and advising Thomas Jefferson than on his notable work in chemistry.

Frank Levy/Richard J Murnane: The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (paperback, 2005, Princeton University Press): On the shifting shape of the job market, driven largely by the increased use of computers, and what this means for a generally ill-prepared workforce.

Andrew Lih: The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009, Hyperion): One of the major developments in world civilization in the last ten years of so. Not quite the "greatest story ever told," but along those lines.

Eugene Linden: The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations (paperback, 2007, Simon & Schuster): Global warming book, with historical examples similar to Jared Diamond's Collapse -- Greenland, Mayan, etc.

William Lobdell: Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace (2009, Harper Collins): Memoir, following the writer through the maze of American religion, first as someone seeking help, then as a journalist covering the beat, then finally as someone seeking help. Seems like honest confusion, and modest enlightenment.

Cody Lundin: When All Hell Breaks Loose (paperback, 2007, Gibbs Smith): A survival guide of some sort, predicated on the notion that our world is going to hell. Not sure whether it helps, but most survival guides give you plenty of reason to try to never have to use them.

G Calvin Mackenzie/Robert Weisbrot: The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (2008, Penguin Press): An overview history of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. I think this fills in a slot in Penguin's multi-volume US history.

Jennifer Hooper McCarty/Tim Foecke: What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries (2008; paperback, 2009, Citadel): A technical mystery revisited.

John McWhorter: All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America (2008, Gotham): Of course it can't, but with plaudits from Shelby Steele and Stanley Crouch one might easily be tempted to believe the opposite. McWhorter has written several books on language which look interesting (e.g., Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English), and several books on black culture and politics which don't (e.g., Doing Our Own Thing: The Degeneration of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care).

Richard John Neuhaus: American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile (2009, Basic Books): Catholic theologian, died earlier this year. Had a strong hand in moving at least part of the Catholic church into alignment with the Republican right. In particular, he was often cited by Bush for his guidance on issues like stem-cell research. Given that sort of insider connection, it seems a little precious to describe himself as an exile.

Richard E Nisbett: Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009, WW Norton): A nature/nurture rehash, leaning strongly to the notion that good schools make all the difference when it comes to IQ.

Karen Page/Andrew Dornenburg: The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs (2008, Little Brown): The idea here is to build up a map of what ingredients enhance what flavors. Many, of course, are things that we already know about from past experience, but one might learn something.

Gregory Alonso Pirio: The African Jihad: Bin Laden's quest for the Horn of Africa (paperback, 2007, Red Sea Press): An attempt to sort out the complex political machinations in and near Somalia, especially the inevitable Jihad card, and the shadowy connections with former-Sudan resident Bin Laden.

Charles Postel: The Populist Vision (2007; paperback, 2009, Oxford University Press): Big new history of the late 19th century populist movement.

Guido Giacomo Preparata: Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (paperback, 2005, Pluto Press): I figure this argument is skewed and more than a little paranoid, but wouldn't mind seeing some exposure of US and UK business interests backing their German colleagues' support of Hitler. Multinational business interests go back a long ways -- shared class interests all the more so. Didn't work out so well in this case, which is why it's illustrative even if not typical.

John Reader: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (2009, Yale University Press): Domesticated in Peru some 8,000 years ago, imported to Europe in the 1500s where it had a huge demographic impact -- especially in Ireland and in Eastern Europe, which are by now inconceivable without it.

Thomas C Reed/Danny B Stillman: The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation (2009, Zenith Press): Ambitious subject scope, probably a bit skimpy at 393 pages (cf. Richard Rhodes' three volumes, which still don't cover a lot of the smaller proliferation cases). Authors are nuke designers, which should add some technical interest.

Marcus Reeves: Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (paperback, 2009, Faber & Faber): Historian, tries to link put draw out the context rap artists work out of, from Grandmaster Flash to Jay-Z and Eminem.

Melissa Rossi: What Every American Should Know About the Middle East (paperback, 2008, Plume): Author is Italian, which evidently gives her a leg up on her readers -- she's done several of these books: What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running the World, What Every American Should Know About Europe, What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World, What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running America. Seems like I have one of those, although I've never really looked through it. I have a limited fascination with remedial education books, like the old Cultural Literacy books -- not so much because I'm likely to learn something as I find it interesting what other people think you should know.

Michael Ruhlman: Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (2009, Scribner): Writer turned chef still writing. I'm still waiting for his The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen to come out in paperback. This goes deeper into one part of that: the ratios that work in recipes. Seems like a useful idea. Wonder why it's not adequately covered in the previous book.

Lisa Sanders: Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis (2009, Broadway): How doctors figure out diagnoses, and perhaps more importantly, how they screw up, and what happens when they do.

Peter Senge: The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (2008, Doubleday): Senge seems to be some kind of management guru -- a previous book is called The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. Has four co-authors here, listed in much smaller type: Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley. Looks like a business primer, which means it looks like sustainability is moving up from radical concept to something someone can make money off of. That's kind of notable in its own right.

David Shippy/Mickie Phipps: The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 (2009, Citadel): Reminiscent of Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, which doesn't bring the book up to snuff -- most of the reviews I've seen aren't very promising. The technology itself could be fascinating, but the game machine culture has pretty much completely turned me off.

Alyn Shipton: A New History of Jazz (2nd revised updated ed, paperback, 2008, Continuum): Big (804 pp) book on a big subject, originally published 2001 (an even bigger 965 pp). Original cover looks semi-familiar, but I don't see it anywhere handy.

Lee Siegel: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (2008, Spiegel & Grau): A lament on how the internet affects culture and social life. Author has written Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination and Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; also some novels.

Keith Cameron Smith: The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class (2007, Ballantine): Short self-help book, 10 points in 128 pages, presumably simple enough anyone can follow it. Cheap if that's all it takes to rake in millions.

Neil de Grasse Tyson: The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (2009, WW Norton): Astronomy writer, has several previous books. This one surveys the late, not-so-great ninth planet, its checkered history and controversy. That Americans are exceptionally fond of it is curious, I suppose.

Steven T Wax: Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror: A Public Defender's Inside Account (2008, Other Press): Lawyer for several cases, including Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who was nabbed for the Madrid train bombings based on a botched fingerprint analysis.

Peter S Wells: Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (2008, WW Norton): A revisionist argument on how dark the Dark Ages were, based on archaeological data, after dismissing contemporary accounts as Roman-biased.

Jenna Woginrich: Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life (2008, Storey Publishing): A memoir of attempting to lead a self-sufficient life: raising food, making clothing, being satisifed with simplicity. A whole growing genre here, like William Coperthwaite: A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity.

James Wood: How Fiction Works (2008, Farrar Straus and Giroux): I hardly ever read fiction -- used to average about one book per year, but the only novel I've read post-2001 was Tom Carson's Gilligan's Wake (just couldn't resist) -- but I used to have a weakness for metafiction, ever since I discovered how much more fun it was to read Leslie Fieldler on Nathaniel Hawthorne than to read Hawthorne himself. This is getting some hype.

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Paperback reprints will wait until Part 2, which will have more political books.

Some other books that I've noted in my book prospecting notes but (generally) haven't explored further. Listed alphabetically by author. A couple go beyond the politics of health care to get into the practice, but I usually drew the line short of there. Some deal with suspicious public health issues, and some of those are suspicious in their own right. Some push right-wing or status quo-ist agendas, some ideologically (e.g., Cato Institute) but most with a financial stake in their scheme. A small number of more general political books are listed where they seem to be especially relevant (e.g., Rahm Emanuel's The Plan), but not many. I've skipped over most books published before 2001, except when they seem to have historical value. There were a rash of books that appeared during 1992-94 that are presumed hopelessly dated. There was a slight uptick around 2004, and again from 2006 on when it started to look like a Democrat might be elected president in 2008 -- although more than a few of those books were meant to ward off Republican agendas like HSAs and CDHC.

I've added notes to some where I thought helpful, but have let most explain themselves through their titles. Several books have book page links. I've eliminated all of the superfluous titles (mostly MD) on author names.

• Henry J Aaron/Leonard E Berman, eds: Using Taxes to Reform Health Insurance: Pitfalls and Promises (paperback, 2008, Brookings Institution Press)
• John Abramson: Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (2007; paperback, 2008, Harper Perennial): Drug industry expose; there are several of these.
• Carl F Ameringer: The Health Care Revolution: From Medical Monopoly to Market Competition (2008, University of California Press)
• Marcia Angell: The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (paperback, 2005, Random House): Especially this one.
• Tom Baker: The Medical Malpractice Myth (2005; paperback, 2007, University of Chicago Press)
• Charles Barber: Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (2008, Knopf)
• Dan Beauchamp: Health Care Reform and the Battle for the Body Politic (paperback, 1996, Temple University Press)
• Donald M Berwick: Escape Fire: Designs for the Future of Health Care (2004, Wiley)
• RE Biedermann: Health Care Cure! (paperback, 2002, Wheatmark): As far as I can tell, his cure is positive thinking.
• David Blumenthal/James Morone: The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (2009, University of California Press): New history of the politics of health care policy.
• Bill Bradley: The New American Story (2007, Random House): Favors single-payer "Medicare for all," then offers a voucher-based alternative.
• Howard Brody, Hooked: How Medicine's Dependence on the Pharmaceutical Industry Undermines Professional Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield)
• Shannon Brownlee: Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (2007, Bloomsbury): On my shelf; the idea that you can not only save money but also improve quality by eliminating unnecessary treatments is attractive but may prove to be hard to attain.
• Grace Budrys: Our Unsystematic Health Care System (2nd edition, 2005, Rowman & Littlefield)
• Lawton R Burns: The Health Care Value Chain: Producers, Purchasers, and Providers (2002, Jossey-Bass)
• Lawton Robert Burns, ed: The Business of Healthcare Innovation (paperback, 2005, Cambridge University Press)
• Michael F Cannon/Michael D Tanner: Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It (paperback, 2005, Cato Institute): Nothing wrong here consumer choice in a free market can't fix.
• Clayton M Christensen/Jerome H Grossman/Jason Hwang: The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care (2008, McGraw-Hill)
• Larry R Churchill: Self-Interest and Universal Health Care: Why Well-Insured Americans Should Support Coverage for Everyone (1998, Harvard University Press)
• John F Cogan/R Glenn Hubbard/Daniel P Kessler: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps To A Better Health Care System (2005, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research): Calls for patient empowerment (i.e., CDHC).
• Jay S Cohen: Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies: Prescription Drugs, Side Effects, and Your Health (2001, Tarcher)
• Jonathan Cohn: Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis -- and the People Who Pay the Price (2007; paperback, 2008, Harper Perennial): personal case reporting.
• Gregoire Coombs: The Rise and Fall of the HMO Movement: An American Health Care Revolution (2005, University of Wisconsin Press)
• Greg Critser: Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (2004; paperback, 2007, Mariner Books)
• David M Cutler: Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System (paperback, 2005, Oxford University Press)
• Norman Daniels: Just Health Care (1985, Cambridge University Press)
• Tom Daschle: Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis (2008, Thomas Dunne; paperback, 2009, St Martin's Griffin): not much when you have lobbyists like Daschle cutting insider deals.
• Gregory Dattilo/David Racer: Your Health Matters: What You Need to Know About US Health Care (2006, Alethos): From an insurance exec.
• Mike Davis: The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of the Avian Flu (2005; paperback, 2006, Holt)
• Howard Dean: Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer (paperback, 2009, Chelsea Green): Or, why Obama didn't offer the most visible Democratic MD in the country a job.
• Richard DeGrandpre: The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture (2006, Duke University Press)
• Alan Derickson: Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America (2005, Johns Hopkins University Press)
• Adam F Dorin: Jihad and American Medicine: Thinking Like a Terrorist to Anticipate Attacks Via Our Health System (2007, Greenwood): Lots of bad things that could happen; no reason to link them to Jihad.
• David Dranove: Code Red: An Economist Explains How to Revive the Healthcare System Without Destroying It (2008, Princeton University Press)
• Carl Elliott: Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (paperback, 2004, WW Norton)
• Rahm Emanuel/Bruce Reed: The Plan: Big Ideas for Change in America (2006; paperback, 2009, Public Affairs)
• Madelon Lubin Finkel: Truth, Lies, and Public Health: How We Are Affected When Science and Politics Collide (2007, Greenwood): AIDS, contraception, stem cell research, marijuana as medicine, breast implants, obesity, vaccination, etc.
• Leonard M Fleck: Just Caring: Health Care Rationing and Democracy (2009, Oxford University Press): If you have to ration (and to some extent you do), how do you do it ethically?
• Sherman Folland/Allen Goodman/Miron Stano: The Economics of Health and Health Care (6th Edition, 2009, Prentice-Hall): At $168, priced like its subject matter.
• Meredith Fort/Mary Ann Mercer/Oscar Gish, eds: Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health (paperback, 2004, South End Press)
• Philip J Funigiello: Chronic Politics: Health Care Security from FDR to George W Bush (2005, University Press of Kansas)
• Laurie Garrett: Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000; paperback, 2001, Hyperion)
• Arthur Garson/Carolyn L Engelhard: Health Care Half Truths: Too Many Myths, Not Enough Reality (2007, Rowman & Littlefield)
• Atul Gawande: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (2002; paperback, 2003, Picador): Notes on the practice of surgery; has a useful discussion of malpractice issues.
• Atul Gawande: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (2007; paperback, 2008, Picador)
• John Geyman: Falling Through the Safety Net: Americans Without Health Insurance (paperback, 2003, Common Courage Press)
• John P Geyman: The Corporate Transformation of Health Care: Can the Public Interest Still Be Served? (paperback, 2004, Springer)
• John Geyman: Shredding the Social Contract: The Privatization of Medicare (paperback, 2006, Common Courage Press)
• John Geyman/Marcia Angell: The Corrosion of Medicine: Can the Profession Reclaim Its Moral Legacy? (paperback, 2007, Common Courage Press)
• John Geyman: Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying, and How We Must Replace It (paperback, 2009, Common Courage Press)
• Susan Giaimo: Markets and Medicine: The Politics of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States (2002, University of Michigan Press)
• Julio Gonzalez: Health Care Reform: The Truth (2009, Aragon): Anti "Democrat agenda"; hint: only right-wingers label their books "The Truth."
• John C Goodman/Gerald L Musgrave/Devon M Herrick: Lives at Risk (paperback, 2004, Rowman & Littlefield): Anti-single-payer hysteria.
• Merrill Goozner: The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs (2004; paperback, 2005, University of California Press)
• Colin Gordon: Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (2003, Princeton University Press)
• Peter Gosselin: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families (2008; paperback, 2009, Basic Books): Needless to say, health insurance (or lack thereof) plays a big role.
• David Gratzer, The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (paperback, 2008, Encounter Books): Also has a book on how to wreck Canada's health care system.
• Katharine Greider: The Big Fix: How The Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers (paperback, 2003, Public Affairs)
• Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think (2007; paperback, 2008, Houghton Mifflin)
• Robert Gumbiner: Curing Our Sick Health Care System: A Solution to America's Health Care Crisis (paperback, 2006, Author House): Looks like "Medicare for all."
• Jacob S Hacker: The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (1998; paperback, 1999, Princeton University Press): One of the main books on the Clinton fiasco.
• Jacob S Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (2007; paperback, 2008, Oxford University Press): a general book where, again, health care costs loom large.
• Jacob S Hacker, ed: Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System -- and How to Heal It (paperback, 2008, Columbia University Press)
• Nortin M Hadler: The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System (2004, McGill-Queen's University Press)
• Nortin M Hadler: Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (2008, University of North Carolina Press)
• George C Halvorson/George J Isham: Epidemic of Care: A Call for Safer, Better, and More Accountable Health Care (2003, Wiley)
• George C Halvorson: Health Care Reform Now!: A Prescription for Change (2007, Jossey-Bass)
• George C Halvorson: Health Care Will Not Reform Itself: A User's Guide to Refocusing and Reforming American Health Care (2009, Productivity Press): Kaiser Permanente CEO.
• Mark J Hanson/Daniel Callahan: The Goals of Medicine: The Forgotten Issues in Health Care Reform (paperback, 2001, Georgetown University Press)
• Fran Hawthorne: Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat (2005, Wiley)
• David Healy: Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (paperback, 2006, NYU Press)
• David Hemenway: Private Guns, Public Health (paperback, 2006, University of Michigan Press)
• Regina Herzlinger: Market-Driven Health Care: Who Wins, Who Loses in the Transformation of America's Largest Service Industry (paperback, 1999, Basic Books): Harvard Business School prof, sees insurance as the problem for distorting prices; uses eyewear as an example of how an effective market-driven system would work.
• Regina Herzlinger, Who Killed Health Care? America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem -- and the Consumer-Driven Cure (2007, McGraw-Hill)
• Philip J Hilts: Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation (2002; paperback, 2004, University of North Carolina Press)
• David Himmelstein/Steffie Woolhandler: Bleeding the Patient: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care (paperback, 2001, Common Courage Press)
• Stephen SS Hyde: Cured! The Insider's Handbook for Health Care Reform (paperback, 2009, HobNob): Perfect markets can fix anything.
• Icon Group International: Health Care Reform: Webster's Timeline History, 1945-2007 (paperback, 2009, Icon Group)
• Haynes Johnson/David S Broder: The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point (1996, Little Brown; paperback, 1997, Back Bay Books): History of Clinton's health care fiasco.
• Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement (paperback, 2007, Duke University Press): Abbreviated CDHC, not that any actual consumers are driving it.
• Martin Kantor: Uncle Sam's Shame: Inside Our Broken Veterans Administration (2008, Greenwood): Don't know how this squares with other reports that the VA system is actually pretty good.
• Jerome P Kassirer: On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health (paperback, 2005, Oxford University Press)
• Joel M Kauffman: Malignant Medical Myths: Why Medical Treatment Causes 200,000 Deaths in the USA Each Year, and How to Protect Yourself (paperback, 2006, Infinity)
• Sharon R Kaufman: And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life (2005, Scribner)
• Ichiro Kawachi/Bruce P Kennedy: The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health (paperback, 2006, New Press)
• JD Kleinke: Oxymorons: The Myth of a US Health Care System (2001, Wiley): Another CDHC scheme, based on eliminating employer groups.
• Arnold Kling: Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (paperback, 2006, Cato Institute)
• Laurence J Kotlikoff: Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans (2007, MIT Press): Mandatory private insurance with vouchers.
• Richard D Lamm: The Brave New World of Health Care (paperback, 2003, Fulcrum): Former Colorado governor; if I recall correctly, big into rationing and death panels.
• Richard D Lamm/Robert H Blank: Condition Critical: A New Moral Vision for Health Care (paperback, 2007, Fulcrum)
• Marie L Lassey/William R Lassey/Martin J Jinks: Health Care Systems Around the World: Characteristics, Issues, Reforms (paperback, 1996, Prentice Hall)
• Jacky Law: Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (paperback, 2006, Basic Books)
• Evan S Levine: What Your Doctor Won't (or Can't) Tell You: The Failures of American Medicine -- and How to Avoid Becoming a Statistic (paperback, 2005, Berkley Trade)
• Robert Arthur Levine: Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System: Why Comprehensive Reform Is Needed (2009, Praeger)
• Harold S Luft: Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis (2008, Harvard University Press): Pushes something called "SecureChoice," which looks like single-payer for big ticket items (e.g., hospital stays) with CDHC for small change and a cut for the insurance companies for processing checks.
• Joanne Lynn: Sick To Death and Not Going to Take It Anymore!: Reforming Health Care for the Last Years of Life (2004, University of California Press)
• Maggie Mahar: Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much (2006, Collins): Looks like one of the more systematic analyses; on my shelf.
• Theodore R Marmor: The Politics Of Medicare (2nd edition, paperback, 2000, Transaction)
• TR Marmor: Fads, Fallacies and Foolishness in Medical Care Management and Policy (2007, World Scientific)
• Rick Mayes: Universal Coverage: The Elusive Quest for National Health Insurance (paperback, 2005, University of Michigan Press)
• David Mechanic, ed: Policy Challenges in Modern Health Care (paperback, 2005, Rutgers University Press)
• Ivan J Miller: Balanced Choice: A Common Sense Cure for the US Health Care Systems (paperback, 2006, Author House): sort of a single-payer base with wildly diverging copays depending on provider choices.
• Matthew Miller: The 2% Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love (paperback, 2005, Perseus)
• James A Morone/Lawrence R Jacobs, eds: Healthy, Wealthy, & Fair: Health Care and the Good Society (2005, Oxford University Press)
• Ray Moynihan/Alan Cassels: Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients (paperbck, 2006, Nation Books)
• Ray Moynihan/Melissa Sweet: How Patients Should Think: 10 Questions on How to Make Better Decisions about Drugs, Tests, and Treatment (paperback, 2009, Pegasus)
• Rudolph Mueller: As Sick As It Gets: The Shocking Reality of America's Healthcare, A Diagnosis and Treatment Plan (2001, Olin Frederick)
• David B Nash/Neil L Goldfarb, eds: Quality Solution: The Stakeholder's Guide to Improving Health Care (paperback, 2006, Jones & Bartlett)
• Vicente Navarro: The Politics of Health Policy: The US Reforms, 1980-1994 (1994, Wiley): Reagan, Bush, Clinton, if you can call them reformers.
• Barack Obama: The Plan: Barack Obama's Promise to America and His Plan for the Economy, Iraq, Healthcare, and More (paperback, 2009, Pacific)
• Mary O'Brien/Martha Livingston, eds: 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care (paperback, 2008, New Press)
• Robert Ohsfeldt/John E Schneider: The Business of Health (paperback, 2006, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research)
• Lawrence J O'Brien: Bad Medicine: How the American Medical Establishment Is Ruining Our Healthcare System (1999, Prometheus): Focuses on physician mindsets.
• Oliver S Owen: Doctors, Dollars and Death: Bad Medicine in America (1994, Warren H Green)
• Kant Patel/Mark Rushefsky: Health Care Politics and Policy in America (3rd edition, paperback, 2006, ME Sharpe)
• Kant Patel/Mark E Rushefsky: Health Care in America: Separate and Unequal (paperback, 2008, ME Sharpe)
• Melody Petersen: Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (2008; paperback, 2009, Picador)
• Michael E Porter/Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg: Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results (2006, Harvard Business Press)
• R Lee Prescott: Barack Obama's Plan to Socialize America and Destroy Capitalism (paperback, 2009, Madrona Books)
• TR Reid: The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009, Penguin Press): Compares US health care to other systems all around the world.
• Marc Roberts/William Hsiao/Peter Berman/Michael Reich: Getting Health Reform Right: A Guide to Improving Performance and Equity (paperback, 2008, Oxford University Press)
• J Patrick Rooney/Dan Perrin: America's Health Care Crisis Solved: Money-Saving Solutions, Coverage for Everyone (2008, Wiley): HSA pushers; you didn't actually think they had a solution, now did you?
• Peter Rost: The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman (paperback, 2006, Soft Skull Press)
• David J Rothman/Sheila M Rothman, Trust Is Not Enough: Bringing Human Rights to Medicine (2006, New York Review Books)
• Mark E Rushefsky/Kant Patel: Politics, Power and Policy Making: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s (paperback, 1998, ME Sharpe)
• Jessica Snyder Sachs: Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (paperback, 2008, Hill & Wang)
• Lisa Sanders: Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis (2009, Broadway)
• Len Saputo/Byron Belitsos: A Return to Healing: Radical Health Care Reform and the Future of Medicine (2009, Origin Press): Pushes something called "Health Medicine" which doesn't sound like medicine at all.
• Stuart O Schweitzer: Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy (2006, Oxford University Press)
• Karen Seccombe/Kim A Hoffman: Just Don't Get Sick: Access to Health Care in the Aftermath of Welfare Reform (paperback, 2007, Rutgers University Press)
• Saul William Seidman: Trillion Dollar Scam: Exploding Health Care Fraud (paperback, 2008, Universal)
• Virginia A Sharpe, ed: Accountability: Patient Safety and Policy Reform (2004, Georgetown University Press): Figures 98,000 Americans die each year due to medical error; wonders why.
• George P Shultz/John B Shoven: Putting Our House in Order: A Guide to Social Security and Health Care Reform (2008, WW Norton): Another GOP complaint about poor people living too long.
• Theda Skocpol: Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government (2nd edition, paperback, 1997, WW Norton): The sinking of Clinton's health care agenda.
• Don Sloan: Practicing Medicine Without a License! The Corporate Takeover of Healthcare in America (paperback, 2006, White Cloud Press): Single-payer, universal care, damn the corporations.
• Susan Smith: Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (paperback, 1995, University of Pennsylvania Press)
• Barbara J Sowada: Call to Be Whole: The Fundamentals of Health Care Reform (2003, Greenwood)
• Paul Starr: The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (1983; paperback, 1984, Basic Books): Pulitzer Prize-winning history of medical profession in US; although old, its conclusion about the profit-driven corruption of the profession has only become more true; I have a copy on the shelf.
• Rosemary A Stevens/Charles E Rosenberg/Lawton R Burns, eds: History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past Back In (paperback, 2006, Rutgers University Press)
• Kip Sullivan: The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and How We'll Get Out of It (paperback, 2006, Author House)
• Cass R Sunstein: The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution -- and Why We Need It More Than Ever (2004; paperback, 2006, Basic Books): On legal issues surrounding a right to universal health care.
• Keith Syrett: Law, Legitimacy and the Rationing of Health Care: A Contextual and Comparative Perspective (paperback, 2007, Cambridge University Press)
• Ken Terry: Rx for Health Care Reform (paperback, 2007, Vanderbilt University Press): Single-payer, PGPs, pretty much seconds Relman.
• Richard H Thaler/Cass R Sunstein: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008; Yale University Press; paperback, 2009, Penguin Press): Makes a science of manipulating people by architecting options; both authors are prominent Obama advisers.

• Werner Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster (MIT Press)
• Neil Vidmar: Medical Malpractice and the American Jury: Confronting the Myths About Jury Incompetence, Deep Pockets, and Outrageous Damage Awards (paperback, 1997, University of Michigan Press)
• Howard Waitzkin: At the Front Lines of Medicine: How the Health Care System Alienates Doctors and Mistreats Patients . . . and What We Can Do About It (2001, Rowman & Littlefield)
• Andrew Weil: Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future (2009, Penguin)
• Joel S Weissman/Arnold M Epstein: Falling Through the Safety Net: Insurance Status and Access to Health Care (paperback, 2004, Beard Books)
• Susan Wicklund: This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor (2007, Public Affairs)
• Richard Wilkinson: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (paperback, 2006, New Press): Broader than just health care.
• Richard Wilkinson/Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009, Bloomsbury) [Dec. 22]

The more I look, the more such books I find, although many of them seem outside the bounds of good taste or immediate relevance. Selecting a short reading list is impossible. I have only read 3 of these (the Bradley and Hacker links, and the first Atul Gawande), plus 7 of the 9 books I reported on yesterday (1 link was based on a review, one more on an excerpt). And I have a few more books on hand if/when I get time for them: Brownlee, Mahar, Starr, the second Gawande, Groopman; and I have Kawachi/Kennedy and the first Wilkinson on order. Reid's new book looks promising, and Rothman is a historian I've long admired tackling an important subject. Hardly makes me an expert, but it does suffice to cover much of the story. It also helps that I've read quite a bit of the background history and theory; also that I have more personal experience that I really want to think about. I've been thinking that health care would make a good subject for a case analysis in my book on how to think about public policy. The exercise of dredging up all these books makes me realize that there's an even bigger gap here for a book that can triangulate between the practice of health care, the business and politics around it, the social and philosophical concerns of patients, and the technology. Will have to think more about that.