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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Will do paperback reissues next time.