The World of Books

Each year The New York Sun asks celebrated writers and New Yorkers to name their favorite books of the year. From the latest scholarship to the latest novel, here are their choices.

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for the Washington Post, a member of its editorial board, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gulag."

Although I read many history books, the one I had the most fun with this year was Adam Zamoyski's "1812" (HarperCollins, 672 pages, $22.95). Mr. Zamoyski's book manages to chronicle both the pointlessness of the high politics surrounding Napoleon's invasion of Moscow, as well as the powerful experiences of those doing the fighting, making a historical event I thought I knew about seem somehow completely different. By the end of the book, it's impossible any longer to think of 1812 as it has traditionally been described, as a parable, or as a romantic escapade, or as a symbolic battle between the forces of revolution and those of autocracy. Instead, it looks far more like a precursor of the wars of the 20th century. The huge armies marching over Central Europe, the death and suffering of ordinary soldiers, the loyalty sworn to vaguely understood causes: The story seems less remote, and more familiar, than ever before.

JAMES ATLAS is president of Atlas Books. His memoir, "My Life in the Middle Ages," will be published by W.W. Norton in March.

The most compelling new book I read this year was Karen Armstrong's memoir, "The Spiral Staircase" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24), an account of the personal ordeals that beset her in her 20s and 30s,when she was denied a First at Oxford because of a dissenting examiner, lost her job as an English teacher at a London private school, and endured setbacks in her early writing life. At the end, after this series of grueling trials, she discovers her vocation as a commentator on world religion - but not before she undergoes a spiritual crisis of her own. It's a beautifully written testament to the resilience of a writer whose agnosticism has brought her closer to God than most of us will ever get.

The most gratifying encounter with a classic that I had this year was "The Great Gatsby," which I took up under the pressure of events - the need to help my 17-year-old son with an English-class writing assignment. I spent a long morning absorbed in that gorgeous prose, a sustained elegy to lost hopes that's as moving now - for different reasons - as it was when I first read it four decades ago. No one understood the poignance of life, its evanescent beauty, better than the sodden genius whose myth has overshadowed his virtuoso command of the American vernacular - and his ability to see.

LEON BOTSTEIN is president of Bard College, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, and editor of the Musical Quarterly.

"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Alfred A. Knopf) is, in my view, one of the most thought-provoking analyses of the complexities and ambiguities of the form in which radical evil takes shape; not only the way in which the charisma of leadership perverts life and wreaks endless destruction, but how its rationality captures the imagination of other intelligent people and how madness becomes institutionalized. The way the author does this is by integrating history and biography and by complicating what one would think to be an extremely simplistic picture of an unquestionably evil and dangerous man and an equally destructive and dangerous political regime. It's a riveting and disturbing book whose value transcends those interested simply in Soviet history and Soviet politics.

Also, "Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music" by Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton University Press, 264 pages, $29.95), a cultural history of music in the 19th century.

JAMES CAMPBELL is an editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

"Native Sons" (Ballantine Books, 256 pages, $24.95) by Sol Stein, including work by James Baldwin, was an important publication in two respects: It unearthed a play on which the two authors had collaborated as young men in the 1940s (as well as containing previously unseen photographs), and it set before the public the thickest sheaf of Baldwin's letters yet to be published. They deal with many things, including Mr. Stein's work as the editor, at Beacon Press, of Baldwin's first, great book of essays, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955). A full and annotated edition of Baldwin's correspondence is overdue. This attractive book is a welcome herald.

HAROLD EVANS is the author of "They Made America."

"Courting Justice" (Hyperion, 446 pages, $24.95) by David Boies. Here is a young newsboy who cannot easily read the newspapers he throws on porches because he is dyslexic. He grows up in a small farming community in northern Illinois and makes his way playing bridge and poker for money. You would have to imagine a lot of dots to connect him to the man who came to be characterized as "the lawyer everyone wants." David Boies does it for us in his engaging and absorbing book - more a memoir than an autobiography. Since he found it hard to read, he learned to speak without a text; since his gambling sharpened his memory, he honed it to a fine sharp edge in meticulous research. Both qualities, given depth at Northwestern and Yale, were instruments by which he has navigated through labyrinthine defenses and impaled many artful dodgers, though as he points out, "the American legal system does not deal effectively with litigators who are are prepared to lie and fabricate documents." This is most vividly borne out in the extraordinary good-guys, bad-guys story of the Guatemalan Jose Habe and his American wife, Amy. He kidnaps their two children, plots with a rabbi to trap her in a religious center staffed with armed goons, and even gets his innocent wife indicted with the connivance of a State Department more concerned to promote relations with a corrupt government than protect an American citizen and her children. Mr. Boies deals only with cases he took on during his four years from 1997-2001, but they include his breathtakingly bizarre deposition of Bill Gates in the Microsoft monopoly trial, his victories in cases against Sotheby's and Christie's, and his ultimate failure in the shenanigans in Florida, which ended with George Bush, not Al Gore, in the White House. Mr. Boies clearly has more books to write, but "Courting Justice" does not quickly fade from one's mind.

"Last Dance in Havana" (Free Press, 288 pages, $25) by Eugene Robinson. If you want to take a bath in self-righteous polemics about Cuba's lack of freedom, read a pamphlet. This is literature. Mr. Robinson, a former foreign correspondent, has a critical enough eye for what Castroism has done for Cuba (and what the stupidly pointless sanctions have done, too), but this narrative essay throbs with the excitement of an exploration of life and music — what's the difference in Cuba? — in the final days of Fidel and the start of the new Cuban revolution. If you enjoyed the movie "The Buena Vista Social Club," this book is a must, but it is an entertaining and absorbing read for anyone. Mr. Robinson tells of his adventures of flesh and rhythm with a marvelous sense of irony and at the same time you give us riveting insights into Castroism. Perhaps it takes an experienced foreign reporter, and a music critic, to really penetrate Cuba (and maybe it helps a bit not being conspicuously tourist-white).

"Wodehouse" by Robert McCrum (W. W. Norton, 384 pages, $27.95). P. G. ("Plum") Wodehouse, creator of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, P Smith, SF Ukridge; recorder of intrigues at Blandings Castle and the Drones Club; chronicler of the dark deeds at the 12th hole, and Broadway librettist - the master of the comic novel - has found an absolutely ripping biographer in the English Mr. McCrum. His book is an enjoyable romp through Wodehouse's life in Edwardian London and into Jazz Age America, but Mr. McCrum sensitively explores the shadows, too: the stupidly naive broadcasts for Goebbels and the long, slow emergence from ignominy. Wodehouse died an American citizen, a love affair that began with his first visit to New York: "Being there was like being in heaven," he wrote, "without going to all the bother and expense of dying." This is a scholarly biography, but scholarship with the chill off - hours of Wodehouse fun without feeling one is slacking.

NIALL FERGUSON is a professor of history at Harvard and author of "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire."

I have spent a good deal of the past year reading and thinking about World War II. Unfortunately, for every book I manage to read, two or three more seem to be published. This would be dispiriting if some of the new books weren't so tremendously good. This year's best were Ian Kershaw's fascinating vignette, "Making Friends With Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War" (Penguin Press, 512 pages, $29.95), which illuminates just why so many upper-class twits favored appeasement, and Chris Bayly and Tim Harper's "Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45" (forthcoming in the Unites States from Harvard University Press in February), which vividly tells the story of the distant war my late grandfather fought in. I've also discovered, rather late in life, Norman Mailer's ferocious if somewhat solipsistic account of the American experience in the Pacific, "The Naked and the Dead" (Picador). It's impossible not to admire the characterization of General Cummings, one of the most insightful portrayals of a military commander in modern literature.

THOMAS FLEMING is the author of "Illusion of Victory: Americans in World War I."

"The Road to Valley Forge" (Wiley, 384 pages, $30) by John Buchanan. This is a masterful narrative, rich in new insights into Washington's emergence as a leader of men. "The Lady of the High Hills: Natalie Delage Sumter" (University of South Carolina Press, 188 pages, $29.95) by Thomas Tisdale. In a contest for offbeat books, this would take first prize. Natalie Delage Sumter was a beautiful French girl who fled the Reign of Terror at the age of 11 and became the ward of Aaron Burr. Be prepared for some pleasant surprises. "Scotland's Empire" (Smithsonian Institution Press, 346 pages, $32.50) by T.M. Devine. A book that anyone with Scottish or Irish blood will read with fascination. It shows how the Scots and Irish were deeply involved in American history from its earliest days. "A Question of Loyalty: Gen. Billy Mitchell and the Court Martial that Gripped the Nation" (HarperCollins, 448 pages, $26.95) by Douglas Waller. A remarkably frank portrait of the man who was crucial to the rise of American air power. "George Washington Remembers" (Rowman & Littlefield, 192 pages, $39.95), edited by Fred Anderson. A rediscovery and analysis of the only autobiographical fragment George Washington ever wrote. It contains, among other things, a startling reevaluation of the foremost founding father's religious faith.

GARY GIDDINS is the author of "Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century" (Oxford University Press, 656 pages, $35).

Philip Roth's wrenching "The Plot Against America" notwithstanding, the novel that rattles most insistently in my head is Natsuo Kirino's "Out" — which is not entirely dissimilar to Mr. Roth's. Set in modern working-class Japan, it uses the more conventional method of presenting one character's impulsive action as the stimulus to reveal what all the other characters are made of. The difference between Roth's historical alteration and Ms. Kirino's radical deed — a domestic murder — is somewhat academic; all that really counts is how convincingly the results are played out. The brief Lindbergh presidency enables our peerless novelist to re-imagine his childhood with invigorated clarity. Ms. Kirino, the 53-year-old Japanese writer now based in Italy, dissects the lives of desperate women locked into a Walmart-like servitude and shows how one unlikely incident can tear apart the fabric of all they take for granted. She goes further than most genre novelists, avoiding the fake morality that metes out typically generic rewards and punishments.

"Out," which was published in 1997 with much success and subsequently filmed, is the first of Ms. Kirinio's novels to appear in English. Kodansha International brought out Stephen Snyder's translation in February, and it has provoked enough attention to warrant more to come, including "Soft Cheeks," which won the Naoki Prize in 1999. "Out" involves four women whose lives are turned inside out after they rush to the aid of one, inadvertently taking on the police and yakuza, including one of the most memorably fearsome psychopaths in fiction, Satake, whose bloodthirstiness is echoed in their own activities. For all the suspense Ms. Kirino generates, the novel's strength resides in the details of its canvas, the several strata of a vexed community, and in the uncommon protagonist, Masako, a woman whose strength is forged in the realization that she must change her life.

In a season rich with books on jazz, do not overlook Terry Gibbs's "Good Vibes" (368 pages, $34.95). published by the academic press, Scarecrow, and very likely the most candidly funny account of the jazz life in postwar America. No drugs here and not much in the way of bad times; Mr. Gibbs's focus on eccentricity and bandstand relationships, and his unpretentious stock-taking of an era that encompasses big bands and bop, East Coast street-smarts and West Coast security, feels real and spins by in a blizzard of anecdotes. The vibraphonist and bandleader told his story to Cary Ginell, who preserved Gibbs's mile-a-minute verbal licks and repetitions — his ear for the punchline. Sections on Buddy Rich and Terry Pollard amount to a jazzman's sentimental education, while stories of Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman, and the saxophonist who taped condoms to everyone else's band uniforms are flat-out hilarious.

THELMA GOLDEN is the chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

My favorites this year are all focused on Africa, a current obsession. Howard French's "A Continent for the Taking: the Tragedy and Hope of Africa" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $25) is necessary reading for anyone interested in the continent and trying to make sense of the current complex political, social, and cultural environment. I also loved Chimomanda Ngozi Adiche's novel "Purple Hibisucus" (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $13) and Chris Abani's novel "Graceland" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $24).

MAX HASTINGS is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and author of "Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-5."

The best history books I have read this year are Adam Zamoyski's "1812," a masterly account of Napoleon's disaster in Russia, which makes some of us ask for the 1,000th time why so many useful idiots continue to admire the French emperor; N.A.M. Rogers's superb history of the Royal Navy, "The Command of the Ocean" (forthcoming in the United States from W.W. Norton in April 2005); Martin Windrow's "The Last Valley" (Da Capo, 734 pages, $30), by far the best account ever produced in English of the 1954 French disaster in Indochina; and Thaddeus Holt's "The Deceivers" (Scribner, 1,168 pages, $49.95), an encyclopedic account of allied deception operations in World War II.

PAUL HOLDENGRABER is director of the public education program at the New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

I love repetition. I love re-reading. This year the book I have re-read most often, and each time with renewed pleasure, is "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina (Harper Trophy, 48 pages, $5.99). I can also recommend "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime" by Geoffrey R. Stone (W.W. Norton, 730 pages, $35). Though I have but merely read "Perilous Times" once, I recommend that everyone do the same.

DANIEL JOHNSON is associate editor of the Daily Telegraph.

May I beg my readers' indulgence? Religion has dominated my preoccupations over the past year, and so my selections are all directly or indirectly concerned with matters of faith. Bernard Lewis's "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 349 pages, $28) is a sparkling collection of essays by the man who knows more about the history of Islam than anybody in the Muslim world. George Weigel's "Letters to a Young Catholic" (Basic Books, 208 pages, $22.50) is a classic in the genre of Chesterfield's letters to his son; though perhaps of limited interest to non-Catholics, it is an example of the Church's intellectual vitality. "The Return of Anti-Semitism" by Gabriel Schoenfeld (Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95) is a call to arms, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. I am less alarmist than Mr. Schoenfeld, but he has put his finger on something rotten in the state of Europe. Finally, hot off the press comes "Sacred and Secular Scripture: A Catholic Approach to Literature" by Nicholas Boyle (to be published in the United States by the University of Notre Dame Press in March), a magnificent survey of the contrasting ways in which we read the Bible as literature and read literature as our Bible.

PAUL JOHNSON is the author, most recently, of "Art: A New History."

The books I absorbed with most pleasure and profit in 2004 was "Reading Paradise Lost" (The Wordsworth Trust) written by Pamela Woof to accompany the exhibition of Milton's illustrators at the Wordsworth Centre, Grasmere, Cumbria. It is the best book on England's most famous epic since C.S. Lewis published "A Preface to Paradise Lost" in 1942 and is a clear trumpet-call summoning you back to the poem itself. I was also delighted to get the third and final volume of "The Complete Paintings of John Singer Sargent" (Yale University Press, 364 pages, $65), compiled by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray. This superb monument of art scholarship finally does justice to the greatest portrait painter of modern times. I would also add "Washington's Crossing" by David Hackett-Fischer (Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $35), a brilliant monograph on George Washington's crossing of the Delaware at Christmas 1776. Narrative history at its best.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of "The Fortress of Solitude." His collection of essays, "The Disappointment Artist," will be published in March.

I'm not even sure I read more than 15 or so new books this year. So, herewith are the 10 most exciting books I bought in the last 12 months and hope to read soon: "Another Bulls - Night in Suck City" (W.W. Norton, 357 pages, $22.95) by Nick Flynn; "Collected Prose" by James Merrill (Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $40); all the J.F. Powers reissues from New York Review of Books Classics; "The Rules of Engagement" (Random House, 288 pages, $23.95) by Anita Brookner; "Back in the Day," photographs by Jamel Shabazz (Power-House Books, 128 pages, $39.95); "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 400 pages, $24.95); "Chronicles" (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $22.95) by Bob Dylan; "Jimbo in Purgatory" (Fantagraphics, 40 pages, $29.95) by Gary Panter; "Nixon at the Movies" (University of Chicago Press, 436 pages, $22.95) by Mark Feeney; "A Chance Meeting" (Random House, 284 pages, $22.95) by Rachel Cohen.

HEATHER MACDONALD is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Are Cops Racist?"

Mary Eberstadt's suggestion that parents might want to spend more time rearing their children has provoked howls of protest among ambitious, two career couples. But in "Home Alone America" (Sentinel, 240 pages, $25.95), Ms. Eberstadt is not talking about mere "quality time" but the sort that involves guidance and instruction, even saying "no." To take just one example, when no one is home to block all manner of childish caloric excess, obesity can result. Michael Moore, of course, has no such excuse.

A good antidote to the specious claims of the International Committee of the Red Cross that the United States has been torturing Al Qaeda terrorists is the previously published "When Hell Was in Session," by Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., (Morley House, 248 pages, $14.95). A Navy pilot, Mr. Denton was shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1965 and spent the next seven years imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. The stomach-churning brutality to which Mr. Denton and his fellow POWs were subjected reminds us what real torture is, treatment that is light years from the stress interrogation techniques, such as 20-hour questioning, which the United States has occasionally used against the worst terror detainees. Maybe if the ICRC had bothered to visit the American POWs during the Vietnam war, it would've learned some perspective.

FRANCIS MASON is the editor of Ballet Review.

"Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theatre, His Dance" (Simon & Schuster, 619 pages, $40) by Deborah Jowitt, is a superb book on Jerome Robbins, the greatest maker of ballets America has produced. It is not only the dance book of the year in my view but a masterful biography of a major world artist. Ms. Jowitt, the renowned dance critic of the Village Voice, was given access to Robbins's private papers and has written an engrossing biography of the child of Russian-American parents who made it to the big time in ballet and on Broadway. The Robbins-Bernstein ballet "Fancy Free" by the American Ballet Theatre took the roof off the Met; "West Side Story" changed musical theater internationally. Respected by Balanchine, who made him his partner at the young New York City Ballet, Robbins was a complex individual whose life Ms. Jowitt explores with candor and grace. Like Robbins's ballets, you have to see it to believe it.

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series.

Literary news from the Indian diaspora is usually intriguing, and very welcome. Alfred A. Knopf has this year brought to American readers M.G. Vassanji's beautiful novel of growing up in Kenya. "The In-Between World of Vikram Lall" (384 pages, $29.95) describes, and beautifully so, what it was to be a member of Kenya's Indian community during the Mau-Mau period: a lovely novel. And then, on to nonfiction, anything by John Cornwell is always challenging. His latest book, "The Pontiff in Winter" (Doubleday, 352 pages, $22.95) is not a comfortable read, but it is every bit as interesting as his other books on the doings of the Vatican. Mr. Cornwell is not over-enamoured of the current papacy, which he thinks is a disaster for the Catholic Church, and for many others. He does, however, acknowledge that the fate of Eastern Europe, and consequently of the world, was heavily influenced by the courage and determination of this remarkable man. Which reminds us that there are, indeed, only the various shades of gray: a suitable way, perhaps, of understanding this rather perplexing world of ours. Except in matters of punctuation, of course. There are very clear rules there, as another of this year's important books, Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," so wittily reminds us. J.D. M c CLATCHY is the editor of the Yale Review. His most recent collection of poems is "Hazmat."

The reason we admire Tolstoy as a sublime novelist is that there is not a single human emotion he does not recognize, understand, and sympathize with. The contemporary writer who best embodies, albeit on a smaller scale, the Tolstoyan sensibility is Alice Munro. Her latest collection of stories, "Runaway" (Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $25), looks into a series of stunted lives with an astonishing precision and grace. It is fiction of the highest order. I also this year enjoyed novels by John Updike, Philip Roth David Mitchell, and Russell Banks but above them all shone Cynthia Ozick's "Heir to the Glimmering World" (Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $24), a Dickensian saga, at once hilarious and grotesque, that is the touching portrait of an eccentric family and the orphan in their midst. Ms. Ozick writes with impassioned eloquence and moral depth - gifts too often lacking in our novels.

Among nonfiction books I found Joseph Ellis's biography of George Washington, "His Excellency" (Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $26.95), a stirring account both of a flawed and noble man and of the extraordinary origins of our nation: how ideas of freedom em powered ordinary men beyond their natural talents.

There were two notable books of poetry this year: the late Donald Justice's serene and haunting "Collected Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $35) and David Young's superb new translation of "The Poetry of Petrarch" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pages, $30) The year's genuine surprise, though was a pair of books from Richard Howard, on the occasion of his 75th birthday: his selected poems, "Inner Voices" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 440 pages, $35) and his selected prose, "Paper Trail" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 448 pages, $35). In both are Mr. Howard's cultivated, exuberant style of apprehending the variety of experience, the force of personality, and the demands of art. The two volumes together bring into vivid focus a remarkable career and a singular achievement.

JOHN McWHORTER is an associate professor in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of "Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Music and Culture and Why We Should, Like, Care."

The best book I read this year was by far, "Arc of Justice" (Henry Holt 432 pages, $26) by Kevin Boyle, which thoroughly deserved the National Book Award it got a few months after I read it. In Detroit in 1925, a black doctor moved into a white neighborhood only to have the house surrounded and attacked. When he shot into the crowd, he was arrested along with his young wife and several friends and relatives. Mr. Boyle does not merely describe the trial, but situates the episode within a tragic period of race relations after World War I, when the surge in the northern black population after the Great Migration led to the redlining practices so familiar until the 1970s, segregating blacks of all classes into ghettos. Mr. Boyle's research is impeccable and his writing is masterfully dramatic - I still feel like I knew all of the people involved when the trial was 80 years ago. The book also got me curious about some less incendiary portraits of that period in classic novels I had always wanted to get to, and John O'Hara's "A Rage to Live" and Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt" were both especially smashing.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A book that deserves serious attention is Jim Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet" (Viking, 448 pages, $25.95) which paints a great portrait of how President Bush's cabinet came together and the experiences that shaped and hardened their thinking. John Lewis Gaddis's "Surprise, Security and the American Experience" (Harvard University Press, 150 pages, $18.95) is a concise and thoughtful analysis of how September 11 changed America and what it means for the future of our grand strategy. Churchill's "Life of Marlborough" (University of Chicago Press, 1050 pages, $25) is a wonderful account of political and military leadership in a fractious and divided coalition. Everybody reads Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" but hardly anyone reads the "Theory of Moral Sentiments," a book that is critical to understanding Smith and his conception of free market economy. Gertrude Himmelfarb's "The Roads to Modernity" (Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $25) does a great job of placing the American enlightenment in the context of its British and French predecessors.

LUCY MITCHELL-INNES is coowner of Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in Manhattan.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" (Random House, 372 pages, $26) by Jon Krakauer. Mr. Krakauer has written a gripping tale in which history and the present collide. I loved the colorful story of the origins and history of the Latter-Day Saints, but the way it was woven into a modern murder story was much more creepy. "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" (Gotham Books, 240 pages, $17.95) by Lynne Truss. I loved this book for its British humor. Ms. Truss chronicles the catastrophes of punctuation as seen on the side of a London bus, littering newspapers, offices, and everyday life. "De Kooning: An American Master" (Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35) by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. In my field this is required reading. It rounds out the picture of de Kooning's life and the lives of his contemporaries. I found it informative if sometimes opinionated, and full of details that bring this very colorful man to life.

PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO is director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The book I have most enjoyed reading this year is "The Fencing Master" by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Harcourt, 256 pages, $24). It is a brilliant tale of intrigue set in 19th-century Madrid, and a work of considerable literary merit for a page-turner. Two other favorites were Patrick Suskind's "Perfume: the Story of a Murderer" (Vintage, 272 pages, $13.95), a hellishly effective and well-written tale of a most unusual murderer, set in 18th-century France, and Sandor Marai's "Embers" (Vintage,242 pages,$12.95),a rediscovered mini-masterpiece by this talented Hungarian author, a most original and totally captivating story of betrayal and much else, set in the declining, decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire.

PAUL NURSE is president of Rockefeller University and a Nobel laureate in Medicine.

"The Age of Shakespeare" (Modern Library, 240 pages, $24.95) by Frank Kermode. Shakespeare is always elusive, partly because so little is really certain about his life and partly because he himself never intrudes into his writing, allowing him to be so convincing portraying many different characters. This critical analysis from Frank Kermode is the best short account of Shakespeare I have read, illuminating the man but more importantly also his writing. Curl up with this book on Christmas Eve and by Christmas Day dinner you will be able to better appreciate the whole range of Shakespeare's extraordinary creativity, from the exquisitely beautiful sonnets to the grave and magical late plays.

DANIEL PIPES is a columnist for The New York Sun and the author, most recently, of "Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics."

The most fun I had reading a book was with Michael Mandelbaum's "The Meaning of Sports" (Public Affairs, 332 pages, $26), which gave me a chance to understand something mysterious but all around me. The most startling book, the one which most changed my mind, was Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror" (Regnery, 416 pages, $27.95). And of course my personal Coogler Award for the Worst Book of 2004 goes to Michael Moore's "Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader."

PETER PLAGENS is art critic for Newsweek.

In my field - art - the easy pick is Mark Stevens's and Annalyn Swan's "De Kooning: An American Master." Usually I can't stand biographies, especially artists', and especially-especially suicidal Abstract Expressionists, who remind me of Denis Leary's line about the pointlessness of a long movie on the Doors and Jim Morrison: "I'm drunk, I'm nobody; I'm drunk, I'm famous; I'm drunk, I'm dead."

Willem de Kooning was, albeit also a drunk, an exception: witty, cultured, and possessing not only a second act in his long life, but a third and a fourth as well. The writing in "de Kooning" is so solidly good it overcomes the inevitable biographers' penchant for justifying all those years of research by pouring a bucketful of facts into practically every paragraph.

I won't dress up the rest of my reading. I ingest a lot of the mental equivalent of non-nutritive fiber just to keep my cranial digestive tracts open. But while Bryan Burroughs's "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-4" (The Penguin Press, 624 pages, $29.95) might be mostly literary Metamucil, it's got a whole lot of vitamins and minerals added. In addition to relating several simultaneous thrillers (starring Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis, et al.),"Public Enemies" is also a great essay on just how far into the 20th-century America remained a primitive, Wild West country. The only disappointment: hardly a word about J. Edgar Hoover in drag.

Yes, every high-culture type has his or her favorite mystery writer. I'm sick of hearing my confreres rave about Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiassen, Ian Rankin, or Ruth Rendell. But here's mine: Bill James. He's really James Tucker, who also writes under the pen name of David Craig. He's in his mid-70s, lives in Wales, and - within a stunning output that includes a serious scholarly study of the novelist Anthony Powell – has written 20 or so novels featuring Colin Harpur and Desmond Isles, the most savagely unethical team of cops ever.

Sleeping with each other's wives, lusting after the other's pubescent daughter, and cold-bloodedly murdering drug dealers on the sly are only the tip of their iceberg of offenses against the society they're sworn to protect. Mr. James's concise language, ecology of violence, and hilariously bourgeois villains raise him head-and-shoulders above the rest. The latest Harpur & Isles to be published in the United States is "The Girl With the Long Back" (W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $23.95). My fulsome praise: It's as good as any of the rest in the series, which is to say genius.

DIANE RAVITCH is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Research Professor at New York University, and the author of "The Language Police."

"The 9/11 Commission Report" (W.W. Norton, 568 pages, $10) might well have been subtitled "While America Slept." It is a blessedly jargon-free government report. It provides a dramatic inside look at the planning and execution of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, based on interrogations of some of the evil-doers, interviews with high-level figures, and scrutiny of previously top-secret government documents. It also supplies a frightening picture of the complacency and inertia at the highest levels of the federal government during the 1990s, as the threat drew nearer. The narrative slows when the report gets into bureaucratic politics, but it is gripping when it details our government's unwillingness to confront our enemies, who were already at war with us years before September 11.

ARLENE SHULER is president and CEO of New York City Center.

I loved Erik Larson's "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America" (Vintage, 464 pages, $14.95) because Mr. Larson is a great storyteller who weaves this fascinating true story of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with the parallel drama of a serial killer who terrorized Chicago at the time. It was a real page-turner, filled with suspense, drama, and insights into a fascinating period of American urban history and some of the characters who shaped it.

JOHN STEELE GORDON is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, 1607-2001."

I would recommend three books that I particularly enjoyed reading this year. "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" (Houghton Mifflin, 688 pages, $28) by Richard Dawkins, is a fascinating, backward look at the evolutionary history of life from the present to the dawn of time. As always Mr. Dawkins is simply astonishing in his ability to make the most complex biological matters both clear and entertaining to the layman. I only wish he'd left out his irrelevant political asides. "Florence of Arabia" (Random House, 272 pages, $24.95) by Christopher Buckley, is a hilarious comic novel about an American attempt to change the Middle East for the better. As with all really good comedy, there's a lot of truth in it. "Washington's Crossing" (Oxford University Press, 576 pages, $34.95) by David Hackett-Fischer is history writing at its very, very best. It covers a crucial few months in the early days of the American Revolution and shows why George Washington was so indispensable to the winning of that conflict.

MARTHA SUTHERLAND is the owner of M. Sutherland Fine Arts in Manhattan.

"Last Boat to Cadiz" by Barnaby Conrad (Capra Press, 250 pages, $25.95), a suspenseful tale set in Sevilla at the end of World War II. A mysterious Nazi, who turns out to be Martin Bormann, will escape through "neutral" Spain, unless thwarted by a one-legged American vice-consul with a passion for bullfighting, a drunken Irishman, and a plucky Englishwoman. This book, which has the nostalgic feeling of "Casablanca," was written by the 80-year-old author of "Matador," which was the best-selling novel of 1952. "Jaywalking With the Irish" by David Monagan (Lonely Planet, 239 pages, $14.99). Irish-American David Monagan, once a student at Trinity College, Dublin, returns to the Emerald Isle in search of his roots, and finds that the Celtic Tiger is a cat that has changed its spots. A kind of "Year in Provence" with Guinness, this book is witty, heartfelt, and insightful. Frank McCourt called it the best book on modern Ireland. "The Siege of Salt Cove" (W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $24.95) by Anthony Weller. This elegantly crafted novel is told from 41 different characters' points of view. When the state of Massachusetts announces a plan to destroy the ancient wooden bridge in the fishing village of Salt Cove, it decides to secede from the United States. In the armed conflict, people die for self-determination and a sense of heritage. A masterful, moving tale by the author of "The Garden of the Peacocks." "In the Red Zone" (Spence Publishing, 247 pages, $27.95) by Steven Vincent. Mr. Vincent is a friend - I read his e-mail journal when he was over in Iraq, on which he based this book.