This has proved to be a wonderful year in publishing. It is hard to imagine a more important biography than Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s exposure of Mao or a more compelling literary one than Jerome Charyn’s extremely personal take on Isaac Babel. Jed Perl’s long-anticipated “New Art City” is all we could have hoped from one of the great critics of this generation – it also goes a long way to rescuing art criticism from its academic champions. Yale University Press deserves all our especial praise for its publication of Kazimierz Sakowicz’s “Ponary Diary.” This account of the slaughter of Vilnius’s Jews during World War II is the most important book to cross our desks in years, bringing home so clearly the awful quotidian details of genocide. It is essential reading. But it is a primary document; its importance lies in its singularity and simplicity rather than its art or intentions. For us the book of 2006 took on a topic already seeming to be quarried to its full extent: Benjamin Franklin. Stacy Schiff’s examination of his embassy to Paris is everything a book should be: elegantly written, subtly informative, and downright pleasurable to read. It is an irresistible account of an extraordinary man. For this, “A Great Improvisation” is the 2005 New York Sun Book of the Year.

NEW YORK SUN BOOK OF 2005

A GREAT IMPROVISATION: FRANKLIN, FRANCE, AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICA

by Stacy Schiff (Henry Holt)

By restricting her narrative to Franklin’s period in Paris, Ms. Schiff, a brilliant stylist, has intensified the scope of her story as deftly as any dramatist – and without cheating! This is a scrupulously documented account based on impressive work in French archives. … We are all in the audience applauding Ms. Schiff, whose supple style is the perfect accompaniment to Franklin’s agile flirtation with the French.

– Carl Rollyson (March 30, 2005)

BIOGRAPHY

MAO: THE UNKNOWN STORY

by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

(Alfred A. Knopf)

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have performed an amazing feat in tracking down and assembling vast amounts of detailed information about one of the most destructive historical figures of all time. They interviewed hundreds of people – relatives, friends, colleagues, families of colleagues, staff members, witnesses to historical events, and diplomats and politicians from dozens of countries who met Mao. They consulted scores of archives in 10 countries and made use of vast numbers of both Chinese and non-Chinese language sources. It is hard to imagine a more thoroughly researched biography.

– Paul Hollander (October 17, 2005)

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: A WRITER’S LIFE

by Susan Goodman and Carl

Dawson (University of California Press)

What Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson accomplish, I hasten to say, is a deft depiction of the author and his era. … This impeccably researched and well-written biography shows an America in which the arts played a vital role that is no longer recognized. Howells took an active part in politics, writing campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes. He joined others such as Bret Harte, Richard Hildreth (historian and novelist), William J. Stillman (painter, critic, and journalist), and Harrison Brown (painter) in the diplomatic corps.

– C.R. (May 25, 2005)

THE ORIENTALIST: SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF A STRANGE AND DANGEROUS LIFE

by Tom Reiss (Random House)

Mr. Reiss’s book chronicles the adventures of a biographer, disclosing the process by which he discovered that in fact his subject was Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in Baku in 1905, an escapee via camel caravan from his native land, which Stalin (once a guest in Nussimbaum’s own home) was plundering and devastating. Nussimbaum would die of a rare blood disease in 1942 in Italy, two weeks too late to take advantage of doing the radio broadcasts that Ezra Pound had arranged for him. For sheer reading pleasure, for insights into the biographer’s world, and for the rediscovery of a major literary figure (please, someone, reprint Nussimbaum’s biography of Stalin!), this book cannot be bettered.

– C.R. (February 9, 2005)

SAVAGE SHORTHAND: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL

by Jerome Charyn (Random House)

Enter Jerome Charyn, whose new biography of Isaac Babel ought to take its place among the genre’s more innovative works. Mr. Charyn has an advantage over many other biographers because he is a novelist, and therefore is equipped to begin by describing what it is in Babel that gripped his imagination. … And this is Mr. Charyn’s great gift to biography: He shows how biographers are their subjects’ secret sharers. Indeed, he has brought much of Isaac Babel’s own bravura to the cloistered world of biography.

– C.R. (October 19, 2005)

NONFICTION

BEST OF 2005

NEW ART CITY: MANHATTAN AT MID-CENTURY

by Jed Perl (Alfred A. Knopf)

With “New Art City,” Jed Perl has written the history of the New York art world’s rise to global dominance in the 1950s. His narrative spans four decades and brings the city and its many artistic worlds alive in a vast and rich panorama. The story is how “in a fifteen-year period that began roughly with de Kooning’s first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1948 and ended when Pop Art was the darling of the news media, New York became, by near universal agreement, the world center for artistic experimentation.”… Mr. Perl’s narrative is a delight to read. He never stoops to fashionable language to give substance to his ideas, and his avoidance of the arcane lingo that now passes for art criticism is refreshing. … Start spreading the news – Jed Perl has given us a new standard book in the art-historical field.

– Tom Freudenheim (September 22, 2005)

IMPERIAL GRUNTS: THE AMERICAN MILITARY ON THE GROUND

by Robert Kaplan (Random House)

Through the medium of travel writing and the voices of the soldiers he quotes, Mr. Kaplan captures the simple truths that elude the elites. The short epilogue to “Imperial Grunts” is set, almost too appropriately, in the High Noon Saloon and Brewery in Leavenworth, Kan., where nobody talks about “Are we an empire or not?” Rather, people talk about which indigenous armies are better than others, or how successful the Marine training mission in the Caucasus was, tensions between the Army and the Air Force in East Asia, and so on … the talk is about application rather than conceptualization. … “Imperial Grunts” stands in vivid and bracing counterpoint to most academic analyses of the Pax Americana, circa 2005. Mercifully, it’s also a stylistic counterpoint: “Imperial Grunts” is a great story, very well told.

– Thomas Donnelly (September 13, 2005)

THE BREAKING POINT: HEMINGWAY, DOS PASSOS, AND THE MURDER OF JOSE ROBLES

by Stephen Koch (Counterpoint)

Though Dos Passos is no longer remembered in the same terms as Hemingway, in 1936 the two were considered approximate equals. Indeed, Dos Passos was then considered the most sophisticated and prominent literary voice of the left; his face was on the cover of Time the very week that the Spanish war began. … The tale of how all this came about is recounted in a gripping narrative by Mr. Koch. His thoroughly researched book dexterously navigates the political minefields of the era and has the pace and drama of a detective novel. There are many books on writers and the Spanish Civil War. This is one of the most important and original, and one of the very best.

– Stanley Payne (April 14, 2005)

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOWELL

edited by Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Lowell’s letters must be taken as an aggregate. There are certainly wonderful individual letters, especially to Jean Stafford and Elizabeth Hardwick, former wives, as well as to such lifelong friends as Elizabeth Bishop and Peter and Eleanor Ross Taylor. Nevertheless, it is the cumulative and total effect that is most moving and most memorable. In this sense, taken as a whole, Lowell’s correspondence strikes me as the most important book to appear on the American literary scene in many years. It stands beside his “Collected Poems,” which appeared after endless delay in 2003, not simply as a complement but as a unique and indispensable creation in its own right.

– E.O. (June 8, 2005)

THE PRINCE OF THE CITY: GIULIANI, NEW YORK, AND THE GENIUS OF AMERICAN LIFE

by Fred Siegel (Encounter Books)

Mr. Siegel is one of the most independent-minded urban commentators in America. A man of broadly social-democratic sympathies who has never underestimated the power of conservative ideas, he writes from a position of great moral as well as intellectual authority. Ultimately, his most important point is that there are far too many people in New York – whether government or parts of the government-supported nonprofit sector – who may profit from the city’s slow death. The case of Rudy Giuliani is instructive in two ways: It shows both that a man of political courage, determination, and great intelligence can change the system, and how hard it is for such a man not to be defeated by it.

– Francis Morrone (May 25, 2005)

SCIENCE & ECONOMICS

BEST OF 2005

BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING

by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

Mr. Gladwell is presenting science where it is most needed, and where good writing is most vital. He has the ability to synthesize a large body of scientific data into a highly readable, page-turning narrative, and to convert the raw numbers of research and statistics into meaningful facts for our personal lives. I thought he did this brilliantly with “The Tipping Point,” and I think he does it even better in “Blink.” For this feat all of us in the scientific community should be grateful, because the craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science.

– Michael Shermer (January 11, 2005)

AND THE MONEY KEPT ROLLING IN (AND OUT):WALL STREET, THE IMF, AND THE BANKRUPTING OF ARGENTINA

by Paul Blustein (PublicAffairs)

Paul Blustein’s new book, “And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out),” chronicles this latest episode in Argentina’s checkered economic history, which grew from the attempt to control hyperinflation and attract capital by “pegging” the currency to the U.S. dollar. … Mr. Blustein has built an admirably clear and cohesive – and important – narrative out of the tangled threads of Argentina’s economic history. Even more impressively, he has made a page-turner out of a currency crisis, which surely ranks among the neatest feats in the very checkered history of business journalism.

– Megan McArdle (February 24, 2005)

INCOMPLETENESS: THE PROOF AND PARADOX OF KURT GODEL

by Rebecca Goldstein (W.W. Norton)

“Incompleteness” is a difficult book to categorize. It is not really a biography, though it includes a sufficient account of Godel’s rather eventless life and highly peculiar personality. (The standard biography, published in 1997, is by John W. Dawson.)

Nor is it merely a popularized account of Godel’s 1931 result, though a sketch of that result and the method Godel used to prove it is included. Ms. Goldstein, rather, uses Godel as a frame on which to hang some commentaries on epistemology and related matters. Her central concern is the nature of mathematical truth. What does a mathematician actually mean by saying that such and such a proposition is true? … This is difficult material, at the borders of what we understand about human knowledge. The author has skillfully humanized it by showing us Godel, Wittgenstein, and Einstein in their work, their friendships, and their disagreements. Perhaps only a novelist could have done this. Rebecca Goldstein has, in any case, done it superbly well.

– John Derbyshire (March 2, 2005)

THE ROAD TO REALITY: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

by Roger Penrose (Alfred A. Knopf)

Roger Penrose’s “The Road to Reality” really is, as its subtitle proclaims, “a complete guide to the laws of the universe,” at least as we now understand them.

Mr. Penrose – a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, a fellow of the Royal Society, and the winner of numerous prestigious awards in physics and mathematics – is one of the most qualified scientists to pen such a tome. At just under 1,100 pages, this is his magnum opus, the culmination of an already stellar career and a comprehensive summary of the current state of physics and cosmology. It should be read by anyone entering the field and referenced by everyone working in these and related sciences.

– M.S. (February 23, 2005)

1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS

by Charles Mann (Alfred A. Knopf)

So much guilt, myth, and historical misinformation has accumulated around the saga of the American Indian that it is a wonder that anything new can possibly be said. Yet in fact we understand comparatively little about North America before the arrival of the Europeans. The difficult task is made more so by the many layers of politically correct ideology and old habits of thinking that threaten any new interpretation of the Indian past. A great many people, not only American Indians, have a huge ideological and political stake in how this story plays out. But in “1491” Charles Mann has done his homework and navigates these minefields with aplomb. He has not only absorbed the substance of a vast range of new research that has emerged during the past 10 years, but has personally visited many of the important sites in the company of key archaeologists and scholars. What he has to tell us is indeed a revelation.

– Peter Pettus (August 10, 2005)

FICTION

BEST OF 2005

SONECHKA

by Lyudmila Ulitskaya (Schocken)

Lyudmila Ulitskaya is one of the most outstanding new writers to be published in America in recent years. Her “Funeral Party” appeared in 1999 in both Russia and America, and the earlier and longer “Medea and Her Children” followed here in 2002. Now we have “Sonechka,” an even earlier novella bundled with some more recent stories. … In 70 pages, Ms. Ulitskaya unpacks a wholly unpredictable but smooth novel. As World War II begins Sonechka is an unmarriageable bookworm, but then Robert, a brilliant artist, marries her. They make a successful household, and Robert finds fame. Then their daughter becomes wild. Then Robert has an affair with her daughter’s friend, Jasia, an affair that Sonechka accepts. Then Robert dies Then Sonechka goes on. … The ultimate appeal of Ms. Ulitskaya’s work is its abundance of definition. She takes us into Sonechka’s shy, domestic mind and explains its subtlety without vagueness: “‘Or perhaps [Jasia]’s just very cunning,’ she told herself, not entirely spontaneously, knowing in her heart that this was not the case.” Sentences like that – kind, exact, surprising – should earn Ms. Ulitskaya a larger reputation than she yet has.

– Benjamin Lytal (May 4, 2005

THE SWIMMER

by Zsuzsa Bank (Harcourt)

Novels about loss usually emphasize plot. But in Zsuzsa Bank’s outstanding debut novel, “The Swimmer,” the feeling of loss manifests itself as a sense of being outside of time. As her narrator, Kata, sums it up, “It didn’t even bother us anymore to see how slowly our lives were passing.” It was “as if someone had dropped Isti and me into syrup and then forgotten us” … She recalls the brooding magic of Serbian Danilo Kis, or even the sunny creepiness of Gunter Grass. “The Swimmer,” if overlong and glancingly precious, introduces a potentially great voice in world literature.

– B.L (February 2, 2005)

PARADISE

by A.L. Kennedy (Alfred A. Knopf)

A.L. Kennedy’s astonishingly good new novel, “Paradise,” is all about alcoholism, but is soberly illuminating. … As Hannah tries to decide whether she is happy with sobriety, Ms. Kennedy fully adumbrates the seriousness of the alcoholic’s problem: Drink becomes a cipher for all meaning, and all of meaning’s paradoxes. Hannah has an internal “drinking voice” that has “seen my soul” and knows her better than her family. The drinking voice is identical to her consciousness. And her ability to love derives from drink, from the permeability it brings to her ego. Hannah is a monster and an angel; she would be intolerable were she not so completely illuminated by Ms. Kennedy. “Paradise” is a humane book, richly readable, and, most important given its subject, honest.

– B.L. (March 9, 2005)

SATURDAY

by Ian McEwan (Doubleday)

The shift in the public mood since September 11 is so palpable that it practically demands a novelist’s attention. Ian McEwan – whose last novel, “Atonement,” was a meticulous reimagining of World War II-era England – has decided in “Saturday” to take the temperature of the age in the most direct manner possible. … How do the sane defend themselves against the insane, the privileged against the hopeless, without succumbing either to cruel arrogance or to timid self-doubt? There are no more pressing questions for us today; by asking them so vividly and scrupulously, Mr. McEwan has written one of the most thoughtful novels of our panicky time.

– A.K. (March 2, 2005)

THE WORLD STILL MELTING

by Robley Wilson (St. Martin’s)

If his new book, “The World Still Melting,” is representative, Robley Wilson is a seriously neglected figure in American letters. Here is a novel that balances the palette of the Great Plains against the garish colors of the 1980s and comes out with an American farmer that is true to life, made neither absurd nor mythical by the changing landscape. … Ultimately an essay on the moral obligation to change with the times, “The World Still Melting” treats the persistence of Midwestern manners with rare, evenhanded perception.

– B.L. (February 16, 2005)

HISTORY

BEST OF 2005

PONARY DIARY, 1941-1943: A BYSTANDER’S ACCOUNT OF A MASS MURDER

by Kazimierz Sakowicz (Yale University Press)

It does not offer a historical overview of the Holocaust; it does not discuss the Nazi policy that led to the liquidation of Jewish Vilna; it does not specu late about the lives and identities of individual victims. It does not even tell us what Sakowicz thought and felt about what he saw.Yet by restricting his field of vision so severely, Sakowicz made his testimony all the more shocking and powerful. Over the last 60 years, the holocaust has been thoroughly memorialized, theorized, explained, and condemned; but its sheer scale al ways threatens to turn it into an abstraction. The mind resists visualizing the specific, daily acts of atrocity that added up to the thought-defying number of 6 million dead. “Ponary Diary” is one of the few documents that succeeds in making evil concrete, right down to the license plate number of the Gestapo staff car that accompanied the victims. For Sakowicz to keep such a diary, not knowing whether it could ever be shared or published, was an act of heroic dedication to the truth. To read it is our almost unbearable duty.

– Adam Kirsch (November 30, 2005

EDGE OF EMPIRE: LIVES, CULTURE, AND CONQUEST IN THE EAST, 1750-1850

by Maya Jasanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)

The great distinction of Ms. Jasanoff’s account, quite apart from her cogent presentation of the Anglo-French rivalry that spawned the British Empire, lies in its careful, nuanced, and sympathetic depiction of its protagonists. She has a novelist’s gift for characterization. Her portrait of the astonishing Tippoo Sultan is a particular success. His refinement and delicacy of taste as a connoisseur and collector are set in balance with his military ferocity and frequent cruelty. The traits do not contradict but coexist, and Tippoo, the bete noire of 19th-century English propaganda, emerges as a complex, mercurial, but breathing human being from her pages. … She has laid bare the intricacies of human lives too often masked by slogans and trendy formulae. She is herself the best kind of collector: a collector of neglected, but priceless, histories.

– Eric Ormsby (August 30, 2005)

IN COMMAND OF HISTORY: CHURCHILL FIGHTING AND WRITING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

by David S. Reynolds (Random House)

While the library of Churchilliana is immense and increasing, Churchill the Historian has been neglected in comparison with Soldier Churchill, Statesman Churchill, Imperial Churchill, even Churchill the Failure. Into the breach comes David Reynolds with “In Command of History,” which details Churchill’s composition of his World War II memoirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is a marvelous piece of scholarship.

– Robert Messenger (November 9, 2005)

THE RISE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN

by Sean Wilentz (W.W. Norton)

The achievement of Sean Wilentz’s “The Rise of American Democracy” is to make that occluded period come clear – and more important, to show why it still matters. In 800 packed pages, he guides the reader down all the broad and narrow byways of American politics from 1800 to 1860. His epilogue concludes with a remarkable image: a photograph of the mixed-race jury empaneled after the war for the trial of Jefferson Davis, which never took place. The picture, Mr. Wilentz writes, silently “affirms that the revolution caused by the rise of American democracy had created realities and possibilities scarcely imaginable” earlier. Mr. Wilentz’s major work helps us to imagine that revolution more completely than ever before.

– A.K. (November 2, 2005)

BEYOND GLORY: JOE LOUIS VS. MAX SCHMELING, AND A WORLD ON THE BRINK

by David Margolick (Random House)

As David Margolick points out in his epic retelling of the Louis-Schmeling saga, on the night the two men stepped into the ring at Yankee Stadium, there were more people listening – perhaps 20 million more – than tuned in to follow Seabiscuit in his famous race against War Admiral. Half the population of the United States heard the fight, greater even than the audience for President Roosevelt’s fireside chats. It has been estimated that more journalists covered the fight than were present at the Versailles peace conference. … Over the last 150-odd pages, I found my pulse racing and my hands sweating. I could almost smell the cigar smoke and old beer and hear the roar that swept through the Yankee Stadium bleachers when Schmeling hit the canvas.

– Allen Barra (September 28, 2005)