the washington post book world sunday, december 12, 2010 l l
8 EZ
BEST OF 2010
Nonfiction
THE ARTIST, THE PHILOSOPHER, AND THEWARRIOR: The Intersecting Lives of da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and theWorld They Shaped, by Paul Strathern (Bantam, $30). Us- ing his novelist’s eye, Strathern creates flesh-and-blood portraits and conveys the impact these extraordinary men had not only on each other but on the Renaissance.—Steven Levingston
AT HOME: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson (Doubleday, $28.95). Bryson strolls from kitchen to cellar, from garden to nursery, the bet- ter to show us howWestern civiliza- tion created domesticity.—Louis Ba- yard
ATLANTIC: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Si- mon Winchester (Harper, $27.99). A voyage of discovery ranging almost from the primeval ooze to the environ- mental concerns of the early 21st cen- tury. —Ken Ringle
BETSY ROSS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, byMarla
R.Miller (Henry Holt, $30). Ross did not birth the first flag, but the artisan portrayed in this eloquent biography and the many plucky revolutionary American wom- en workers like her should be stitched in our collective memory.—Marjoleine Kars
BLOODY CRIMES: The Chase for Jef- ferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse, by James L. Swanson (Morrow, $27.99). This mar- velous book is centered on the sepa- rate journeys of two men—one dead, the other whose cause had died—to their destinies. —John C. Waugh
THE BRIDGE: The Life and Rise of Ba- rack Obama, by David Remnick (Knopf, $29.95). In his exhaustive bi- ography, Remnick seeks to illuminate Obama’s role as racial hero and light- ning rod, and to discern the president’s own mixed feelings about it.—Gwen If- ill
CHASING GOLDMAN SACHS: Howthe Mas- ters of the Universe MeltedWall Street Down…andWhy They’ll Take Us to the Brink Again, by SuzanneMcGee (Crown Business, $27). An ex- ceptionally lucid, well-written account of how and why the fi- nancial system broke down. —James Ledbetter
THE CLASSICAL TRADITION, edited by Anthony Grafton,
GlennW.Most and Salvatore Settis. (Belknap/Har- vardUniv., $49.95). Shows us how deeply the stories, iconic figures and ideas of antiquity succor our imagina- tions and still suffuse the world we live in.—Michael Dirda
CLEOPATRA: A Life, by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown, $29.99). Schiff has dug through the earliest sources on Cleo- patra, sorted throughmyth and misap- prehension, tossed out the chaff of gos- sip, and delivered a spirited life.—Ma- rie Arana
COLOSSUS: Hoover Damand the Making of the American Century, by MichaelHiltzik (Free Press, $30). De- tailed and vividly written, destined to be the standard history for decades to come.—Kevin Starr
DEEP BLUE HOME: An Intimate Ecolo- gy of OurWild Ocean, by Julia Whitty (HoughtonMifflinHarcourt, $24). A dream of a book, vivid yet languorous, rich in detail, richer still in emotional impact.—Thomas Hayden
DELUSIONS OF GENDER: HowOur Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine (Norton, $25.95). The author’s mission is to demolish the sloppy science being used today to justify gender stereo- types.—Wray Herbert
DENIAL: A Memoir of Terror, by Jessi- ca Stern (Ecco, $24.99). Stern, a terror- ism expert, turns her formidable pow- ers of investigation on the night she was raped at gunpoint.—M.A.
THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY, translated from the Russian by Cathy Porter (Harper Perennial; paperback,
sassin whose motivation may be sim- pler to grasp than most previous inves- tigators have realized.—David J. Gar- row
HITCH-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, $26.99). A fat and juicy memoir of a fat and juicy life. —Diana McLellan
JUSTICE BRENNAN: Liberal Champi- on, by Seth Stern and StephenWerm- iel (HoughtonMifflinHarcourt, $35). Scrupulously honest and consistently fair-minded, “Justice Brennan” is a su- premely impressive work that will long be prized as perhaps the best judicial biography ever written.—D.J.G.
ASSOCIATED PRESS “The LastHero”
$16.99). Provides a harrowing portrait of a marriage. Leo Tolstoy was clearly a fanatic as well as a genius, and Sofia was often half crazy from the strains of living with him.—M.D.
ECLIPSE OF THE SUNNIS: Power, Ex- ile, and Upheaval in the Middle East, by Deborah Amos (PublicAffairs, $25.95). If I were developing a reading list for newcomers to theMiddle East, Amos’s slim but powerful volume would be the last assigned book, the perfect sad coda to a century of trage- dy.—Thomas W. Lippman
THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner, $30). An en- thralling, juicy, scholarly history of cancer.—Susan Okie
THE EYES OF WILLIEMCGEE: A Trage- dy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim CrowSouth, by AlexHeard (Harp- er, $26.99). In arresting prose,Heard has produced a book that captures a significant slice of the past and a case whose verdict was all but preordained. —Michael Kazin
THE GRAND DESIGN, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (Bantam, $28). I’ve waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology with- out a single equation.—James Trefil
THE GUN, by C.J. Chivers (Simon & Schuster, $28). Chivers puts the AK-47 into its social, historical and techno- logical context in an evocative narra- tive.—Mark A. Keefe, IV
ALAMY “Cleopatra”
HELLHOUND ON HIS TRAIL: The Stalk- ing of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, byHampton Sides (Doubleday, $28.95). Sides draws a memorable and persuasive portrait of the amateur as-
KINGDOMUNDER GLASS: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve theWorld’s Great Animals, by Jay Kirk (Henry Holt, $27.50). Kirk makes taxidermy fascinating in his gonzo narration of the life and odd marriage of Carl Ake- ley, an eccentric explorer and inventor who developed exceptional artistry in the true-to-life stuffing of dead ani- mals.—Dennis Drabelle
THE LAST HERO: A Life of Henry Aar- on, byHoward Bryant (Pantheon, $29.95). In this beautifully written and culturally important biography, Bryant tells the Aaron story with gusto and a ferocious sweep.—Wil Haygood
THE LAST STAND: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, byNathaniel Philbrick (Viking, $30). Philbrick evokes what surely must have been the feeling of that day among the cavalrymen, in which igno- rance and overconfidence descended into reluctant confusion, then sudden- ly fell off a cliff into panic, disbelief and death.—Brian Hall
LET’S TAKE THE LONGWAY HOME: A Memoir of Friendship, by Gail Caldwell (RandomHouse, $23). A beautifully written book about the best friend Caldwell lost to cancer in 2002. —Heller McAlpin
LIFE, by Keith Richards (Little, Brown, $29.99). The most scabrously honest and essential rock memoir in a long time.—L.B.
LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon (Viking, $32.95). A fabulous detective story, replete with hidden treasure, diabolical adversaries and a curse from one generation to the next.—Jerome Charyn
MAGIC ANDMAYHEM: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Ko- rea to Afghanistan, by Derek Leebaert (Simon & Schuster, $26).How refresh- ing to read a smart, polemical book that is deliciously rude to many grand poohbahs of our time while making good sense about the mess theUnited States now finds itself in across the globe.—Robert G. Kaiser
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