Amy Bloom, author of Away.

TPN / KAREN TAPIA-ANDERSEN

While you’re preparing to toast the New Year with distilled spirits, here’s a distillation of a different sort — albeit just as spirited: Our reviewer’s choices for their five favorite books of 2007.

Happy New Year from all of us!

— Doug Riggs, Books editor

Lois Atwood

1. THE LETTERS OF NOEL COWARD, edited and with commentary by Barry Day (Knopf, $37.50). Letters to and from the multitalented Coward delightfully reflect the life and times of the theater and literary worlds of England and New York for much of the 20th century.

2. AT LARGE AND AT SMALL: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22). An intelligent, amusing, interesting collection of essays, ranging from the joys of killing butterflies and then classifying them to the tactless title that Arctic explorer Stefansson chose for a book describing an expedition in which 11 people died: The Friendly Arctic.

3. INES OF MY SOUL, by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins, $25.95). The larger-than-life heroine who, with Valdivia, one of Pizarro’s field marshals, “lived a life of legend” and conquered Chile for Spain. Allende’s intuitive novel is a joy to read.

4. SUITE FRANCAISE, by Irène NÉmirovsky (Vintage International, $14.95). A gripping novel that begins with the Nazis moving into Paris and the ensuing panic of the fleeing French, this work comes close to defining coexistence between the conquered and their rulers. Its author died 64 years ago in Auschwitz.

5. MONIQUE AND THE MANGO RAINS: Two years with a midwife in Mali, by Kris Holloway (Waveland Press, $17.95). A Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, Holloway worked in a remote village with 24-year-old Monique, and the two young women became close friends. This is a fascinating picture of what a determined, intelligent but uneducated midwife can accomplish with almost no medical facilities.

Adam Braver

1. VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE: Stories, by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $13). Fifty-seven stories told in 240 pages. There is a sensibility to all of these very smart pieces that reminds us that a story doesn’t always have to be the cause and effect of a series of events to make us feel. Sometimes it’s just the cause. Sometimes it’s just the effect.

2. THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead Books, $24.95). A novel that captures the brutality, crudeness and ugliness of Dominicans in the United States and on the island, yet at the same time shows the undercurrent of hope and beauty carried by its characters.

3. THE CURTAIN: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera (HarperCollins, $22.95). A thoughtful, well laid out treatise about the relationship of the novel to our contemporary culture. Serious readers will appreciate how Kundera tracks the evolution (or, perhaps, intelligent design) of the novel. Writers and would-be writers will find his insights invaluable.

4. AFTER DARK, by Haruki Murakami (Knopf, $22.95). Set in Japan, the novel follows two sisters’ very different paths between midnight and dawn. Parallel realities. Beautiful sentences.

5. LIKE YOU’D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY, by Jim Shepard (Knopf, $23). The stories in Shepard’s collection capture people throughout time with an exact piercing, as though he’s mapped out every corresponding nerve that can make us go weak at the knees.

Donald D. Breed

1. GEORGE GERSHWIN: His Life and Work, by Howard Pollack (University of California, $39.95). The definitive biography of arguably America’s most gifted composer, in two parts: “Life,” in which we learn, for example, that Gershwin was also an athlete and ladies man, and “Work,” which seems a mountain of minutiae, but keep plugging, it’s fascinating, especially the chapters on Porgy and Bess.

2. CAPE WIND: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound, by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb (Public Affairs, $26.95). When entrepreneur Jim Gordon began to set up 130 wind turbines on Horseshoe Shoal, five miles south of Cape Cod, he had no idea that his biggest (and continuing) obstacle would be the opposition of wealthy owners of second homes within sight of the windmills, as well as Sen. Edward Kennedy, who likes to sail in the area. The authors, one the editorial page editor of this newspaper, paint a convincing picture of NIMBYism at its worst.

3. AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, by Jack Beatty (Knopf, $28.95). The corruption, violence, terrorism and money-grubbing of the Gilded Age were a betrayal of America’s ideals, which had been so recently redeemed in the Civil War and Recon- struction, Beatty says. Why tell that story now? Because, he says in his introduction, we’re now in a “Second Gilded Age.”

4. THE CIGARETTE CENTURY: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America, by Allan M. Brandt (Basic Books, $36). The story of how big to- bacco men denied medical research that showed cigarettes were deadly, even though they knew better, and how a combination of lawyers and doctors finally turned the tide. But an estimated 100 million people died, and many are still smoking.

5. DIAMONDS, GOLD and WAR: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, by Martin Meredith (Public Affairs, $30). Written by an authority on Africa, this book focuses on South Africa during the three tumultuous decades in which diamonds and gold were discovered, and two bloody wars were fought between the British and Boers. There is a great deal about Cecil Rhodes, an odd duck.

Tom Chandler

1. FOURTEEN STORIES: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers, by Jay Baruch (Kent State University Press, $18.95). Baruch is an emergency room doctor who has seen it all and writes with a scalpel’s precision. His stories feel edgy, starkly real, and his human heart shines through on every page!

2. THE RHODE ISLAND SHORT STORY CLUB PRESENTS — A Collection of Short Stories, Essays, and Poems (The Rhode Island Short Story Club, $16). The Short Story Club has been crafting words since 1894 — they know what they’re doing. This rich collection includes work by local writers and poets such as Ingrid Wild Kleckner, Doris Riggs, Elaine Kaufman, and dozens of others.

3. THE RHODE ISLAND WRITERS’ CIRCLE ANTHOLOGY 2007 (The Poet’s Press, $16.95). The state is fortunate to have such a large, active and long-lived writers’ group. This anthology contains fiction, poems, memoirs, essays, even a play — a genre for every taste, and a great showcase of abundant Ocean State talent.

4. THE POETRYSKY ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE POETRY (PoetrySky Press, $35). Editor and poet Yidan Han has compiled a fine representative cross-section of native Chinese poets, all born in the 20th century, in styles ranging from lyrical to surreal to experimental.

5. TIME AND MATERIALS, by Robert Hass (Ecco, $22.95). This is the first new collection in 10 years from the U.S. Poet Laureate emeritus. Hass looks at the world from the corner of his eye, writes poems of grace, wisdom, icy clarity. A great starter book for the non-poetry lover.

Erik J. Chaput

1. THE GREAT UPHEAVAL: AMERICA AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD, 1788–1800, by Jay Winik (HarperCollins, $29.95). Historian Winik, author of the award-winning April 1865, details the relationships among America, Russia and France at the end of the 18th century. It is “these relationships and interrelationships, as much as any one country alone,” according to Winik, “that laid the foundations for the world we know today.”

2. THE RADICAL AND THE REPUBLICAN: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, by James Oakes (Norton, $26.95). The author of two of the most important books on the Old South published in the last 30 years, Oakes has written an engaging narrative on the nature of antislavery politics.

3. AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, $26.95). Yet another superb book about the Founding Fathers from one of our most gifted historians and storytellers.

4. WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford, $35). The latest installment in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States superbly details the contours of the Jacksonian era and the transforming effect of the Market Revolution.

5. UNRULY AMERICANS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CONSTITUTION, by Woody Holton (Hill and Wang, $27). Holton has written a truly fascinating account of the origins of the 1787 Constitution and the politics of the 1780s, updating the so-called Progressive interpretation of the Constitution, which revolves around deep-seated economic forces and sectional and class divisions in American society.

Sam Coale

1. TREE OF SMOKE, by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27). A hallucinatory, spell-binding, haunting and haunted epic of the tragedy of Vietnam, with all the shadowy goings-on of one-man operations, CIA ineptness, macho posturings and the horrors of jungle warfare. It’s impossible to put down.

2. THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, $26.95). A dazzling murder mystery amid the Jewish settlement in Alaska with writing so exuberant, it leaps off the page. “Strange time to be a Jew” goes the choral refrain, and there’s nothing more wonderfully strange than this ethnic saga.

3. LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, $27.95). Though dense with facts and lurid details, Weiner reveals the terrifying inadequacies of our intelligence services, complete with government bureaucracies demanding more secrecy, more agents and more money. Who will ever say no? Seen any good videotapes lately?

4. ON CHESIL BEACH, by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, $22). A wedding night in 1962. A miniature masterpiece of sexual uncertainty, social misfires, and human misunderstandings. You ache over the characters’ misconceptions and limited imaginations and are grateful to have survived your own marital beginnings.

5. SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD, by Colin Thubron (HarperCollins, $25.85). Sumptuously written and stunningly detailed, it takes us from China to Antioch along the old trade route and misses absolutely nothing. Thubron cannot write a dull or pedestrian sentence.

Tom D’Evelyn

1. ON FORM: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, by Angela Leighton (Oxford, $55). Leighton bundles surprise and history; her readings of specific poems and poets open up old and new books so the reader feels like Keats with his copy of Chapman’s Homer.

2. A READER’S GUIDE TO WALLACE STEVENS, by Eleanor Cook (Princeton, $35). In addition to superb commentary, there’s an Appendix — 27 golden pages — on how to read poetry. And the guide to Stevens’s poems is full of shrewd, humane, often witty insights into a poetry that we thought we had gotten over.

3. TIME AND MATERIALS, by Robert Hass (Ecco, $22.95) won the National Book Award. Here’s a poet who embraces the poet’s ancient role, which includes teacher of princes: “The nations of the world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers.” Hass can be beguiling, too: a poem begins, “You know that milkmaid in Vermeer?”

4. W.H. AUDEN: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (The Modern Library, $40). Reading Auden during the centennial of his birth was a perpetual rediscovery of the place of poetry in our lives: “Born to flirt and write light verses, / he died bravely / by the headsman’s axe.”

5. FACING THE MOON: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, by Keith Holyoak (Oyster River, $17). Holyoak, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and a poet, has braved choppy waters and translated two of the greatest Chinese poets, with happy results. Exploring the genius of the Chinese lines, Holyoak discovers a music that fills his idiomatic English with charm. “We wave. You turn, / and set off down the road. / The horses snort — / on parting, a last whinny.”

Mark Dunkelman

1. RETURNING TO EARTH, by Jim Harrison (Grove Press, $25). This story (many stories, really) of a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of ALS on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, his bereaved family and friends, and the possibility of reincarnation as a bear, glows with the crystalline brilliance of the telling. Harrison has written about these characters and this setting before, but never better.

2. LEVIATHAN: The History of Whaling in America, by Eric Jay Dolan (Norton, $27.95). In this comprehensive overview of a colorful industry with strong area ties, once important but now vanished, Dolan offers an excellent introduction to the fascinating story of American whalemen and their prey.

3. WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Knopf, $24). An episodic overview of centuries of women’s history and its interpretation (and misinterpretation), Ulrich’s book also serves as the modest autobiography of a late-blooming but full-flowered historian.

4. HOUSE OF HAPPY ENDINGS, by Leslie Garis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25). In this bittersweet memoir, Garis charts the decline of her mentally ill father and introduces us to her paternal grandparents, the prolific authors of the Uncle Wiggly books, the early Bobbsey Twin tales, and many other popular juvenile books.

5. MUSICOPHILIA: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, $25). The neurologist and best-selling author turns to the strange intersections of music and the mind in a book that alternately astounds, perplexes, delights, and appalls, but never ceases to fascinate.

Anne Grant

1. INDIAN SUMMER: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, by Alex Von Tunzelmann (Henry Holt, $30). Britain’s precipitous departure from India set lose sectarian animosities that had been quiet for centuries. Democratic hopes devolved into cataclysmic bloodshed and forced relocation of 10 million. We who long for a hasty withdrawal from Iraq could learn about caution from this superbly written history.

2. A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead, $25.95). Well-drawn characters and a gripping storyline trace three wrenching decades of Afghanistan’s history, told with exquisite tenderness that breathes life into current reports about war and the status of women.

3. AMERICAN CREATION: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, by Joseph J. Ellis (Knopf, $26.95). After boldly declaring “All men are created equal,” President Thomas Jefferson might have abolished slavery and protected Native Americans through the Louisiana Purchase. Unable to conceive of a multiracial society, he secures the land for whites only and makes the Civil War inevitable.

4. INFIDEL, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, $26). An African refugee turned Dutch parliamen- tarian tells her life story, defies religion and asks incisive questions that risk her life, doom a colleague, and topple a government. Her outspoken independence promises strong leadership to come on issues of our time.

5. UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT, by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson (Thomas Dunne, $26.95). The Duke lacrosse rape case shows how influential people can commandeer our courts and media for private gain. When ideologues on the left or the right succumb to the arrogance of power and when mobs assail the innocent, freedom’s foundations crumble.

Ann Hood

1. LOVING FRANK, by Nancy Horan (Ballantine, $23.95). A fictionalized version of the real-life love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Memah Cheney, this novel is a heartbreaker as well as an intimate look at creativity and forbidden love.

2. AWAY, by Amy Bloom (Random House, $23.95). Young Jewish immigrant Lillian Leyb escapes a Russian pogrom that kills her husband and mother and — perhaps — her 3-year-old daughter. Lilly’s journey in America to follow a lead about her daughter’s whereabouts is a stunning tour de force.

3. WONDERFUL TONIGHT: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me, by Pattie Boyd (Harmony; $25.95). To my Beatles-obsessed, ’60s-obsessed self, few people are as lucky as Pattie Boyd, who not only epitomized England’s Carnaby Street, but also married both George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Sigh. It wasn’t a picnic, but read it and live vicariously.

4. ALICE WATERS AND CHEZ PANISSE: The Romantic, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution, by Thomas McNamee (Penguin, $27.95). Foodies everywhere pay homage to Alice Waters and her famous Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. This book’s subtitle says it all.

5. THE ELEMENTS OF COOKING: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen, by Michael Ruhlman (Scribner, $24). A culinary Elements of Style, this slim book will fit perfectly on your kitchen shelf, where you can grab it for easy-go-to references for kitchen tools and techniques. Who doesn’t love a guy who can cook?

Jon Land

1. SCAVENGER, by David Morrell (Vanguard, $24.95). Morrell, the best and most influential thriller writer ever, has never been better. A manipulative madman enlists two unwilling players in what is essentially a human video game. Blisteringly paced, brilliantly structured, and compulsively readable.

2. BAD LUCK AND TROUBLE, by Lee Child (Delacorte, $26). Child’s nomadic, loner hero Jack Reacher reunites with some members of his former military investigation team to find out why others have been murdered. This is Child’s best book yet, and Reacher rivals James Bond as the best series hero ever.

3. POWER PLAY, by Joe Finder (St. Martin’s, $24.95). The best hostage-taking drama in years pits violent kidnappers against corporate big-wigs who, fortunately, have a man with a secret past in their midst. Finder, the best financial thriller writer going today, adds bullets to the mix with stunning success.

4. ACT OF TREASON, by Vince Flynn (Atria, $25.95). The master of the post-9/11 thriller weaves a devilish conspiracy, with Mitch Rapp facing off against villains both in and out of the government. Reading Flynn is therapy for our terror-tortured psyches as Rapp ably fills the role of a postmodern superhero.

5. (A tie) PLAY DIRTY, by Sandra Brown (Simon and Schuster, 416 pages, $26.95). A steamy noir that follows the efforts of a disgraced ex-football player to reclaim his life by fathering a crippled billionaire’s child. After 50-plus books, Brown continues to redefine a genre she helped create. A true master.

5. (A tie) THE JUDAS STRAIN, by Jim Rollins (Morrow, $25.95). The best pure action thriller of the year finds Rollins’ elite Sigma Team racing to stop a deadly virus from wiping out humanity. Relentlessly entertaining and impossible to put down.

Tony Lewis

1. LEVIATHAN: The History of Whaling in America, by Eric Jay Dolin (Norton, $27.95). A panoramic look that is nonetheless richly detailed and all-encompassing, it tells us everything about whaling — history, economics, culture — yet in a way that would serve nicely as a handbook for shipmates.

2. EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, $32). You won’t need an atom of math or science to appreciate this superlative account of the tangled life and abstruse work of the man whose name is synonymous with genius.

3. ON CHESIL BEACH, by Ian McEwan (Doubleday, $27). McEwan’s prose alone is worth the price of admission, but the story, about two virgins on their wedding night, is pitiful and deeply affecting.

4. A LIFE OF PICASSO: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, by John Richardson (Knopf, $40). The third installment in Richardson’s definitive account of a 20th-century master is a detailed and engrossing look at how art emerges from the chaos of life.

5. FATAL FORECAST: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea, by Michael J. Tougias (Scribner, $24). Weather buoys malfunction, boats are lost at sea, and one man survives. This white-knuckle account of a surprise hurricane on Georges Bank in 1980 is truly incredible.

Phyllis Meras

1. THE ELEPHANTA SUITE, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin. $25). Veteran travel writer Theroux has written three splendid novellas about Americans attempting to “know” the endlessly fascinating but also disquieting country of India.

2. HEADS OR TAILS: A Life of Random Luck and Risky Choices, by Arthur T. Hadley (Gliterati Inc., $25). Arthur Twining Hadley 2d came from the “right” family and had an IQ of 153, but was dyslexic and a rebel. He went to Groton and should have gone on to Yale, but instead, at 18, enlisted in the army in World War II. He was injured, but survived. He did attend Yale, married four times, and became a journalist, editor and author, working for Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune and New Times magazine. This is his story.

3. MY FATHER’S SECRET WAR: A Memoir, by Lucinda Franks (Hyperion, $24.95). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Franks, a reporter for United Press International and the New York Times, always knew there was a mystery about her father. When, clearing out the house after her mother’s death, she finds Nazi memorabilia, she uses her reportorial skills to find out about her father’s past. The result is this gripping book.

4. NABEEL’S SONG, by Jo Tachell (Doubleday, $23.95). In 1979, Nabeel Yasin, a popular young Baghdad poet — but one distinctly out of step with the regime of Saddam Hussein — managed to flee the country with his wife and children. Journalist Tachell recounts his terrifying experiences in his native land, his escape and the aftermath.

5. THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD WITH KIDS, by Bob Sehlinger and Liliane J. Opsomer with Len Testa (John Wiley & Sons, $16.99). Anyone planning a visit to Walt Disney World with children will find the experience greatly improved if they take along a copy of this book, which gives the usual information but also advice on how to prepare, mentally and emotionally.

Jeanne Nicholson

1. TO THE CASTLE AND BACK, by Vaclav Havel (Knopf, $27.95). Not a traditional memoir, this is a collage of three separate components highlighting Havel’s intellect and charm: diary-like entries written primarily in Washington; excerpts from memos written to his staff during his 14 years at Prague Castle as president of the Czech Republic; and Havel’s responses to a journalist’s questions, filled with humor and intelligence.

2. TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Knopf, $25). Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent and internationally published author wrote with the narrative power of his countryman Joseph Conrad. This compelling biography captures his travels while covering conflicts during four decades in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

3. FDR, by Jean Edward Smith (Random House, $35). Jean Edward Smith has written the definitive biography, from Roosevelt’s birth in 1882 to his untimely death in Warm Springs in 1944, delving deeply into his remarkable life, but always with discretion when touching on his private life.

4. IDENTICAL STRANGERS: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein (Random House, $25.95). When 35-year-old Elyse Schein, who always knew she was adopted, decided to search for her biological mother, she inadvertently discovered that she had an identical twin, Paula Bernstein, and uncovered amazing family secrets.

5. BREAKING NEWS, How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else, by reporters of the Associated Press (Princeton Architectural Press, $35). I found myself sitting on the edge of my chair, reliving history as though it were unfolding outside my window as the men and women who wrote it tell inside stories behind critical history-making events.

Lisa Palmer

1. FLOWER CHILDREN, by Maxine Swann (Riverhead Books, $21.95). With provocative prose, Swann deftly and vividly encapsulates the flip side of an eccentric upbringing. The series of stories that make up the novel bring the reader to a far-left-of-center other world.

2. THE COMMUNIST’S DAUGHTER, by Dennis Bock (Knopf, $24). Bock succeeds with this historical novel, told through correspondence meant for his daughter that is tender, honest and dramatic in what it reveals.

3. GRACE (EVENTUALLY): Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, $24.95). Lamott’s fresh perspective and magical prose make this book fun to read. In the collection of 23 essays, the author hunts for grace in ways that are clever, reassuring and amusing.

4. BRIDGE OF SIGHS, by Richard Russo (Knopf, $26.95). An exquisitely wrought chronicle, Russo’s new novel explores the deep and real themes of identity and ambition. He quickly draws in the reader with seemingly effortless dialogue and a style that is simple and direct.

5. RUN, by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, $25.95). Even with Patchett’s spare approach and condensed-time structure (several of her novels are set within a 24-hour period), she succeeds in creating wholly rendered, sympathetic characters whose lives unfold before the reader.

Richard J. Ring

1. THE SLAVE SHIP: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker (Viking Penguin, $27.95). A compelling “ethnography” of the slave ship — that “strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory” — as a stage upon which human dramas occurred, among captain, crew and slaves.

2. TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE: A Biography, by Madison Smartt Bell (Pantheon Books, $27). Bell’s well-researched historical novels on the Haitian Revolution laid the groundwork for this excellent biography of Toussaint, the slave leader whom Bell calls the “highest achieving African- American hero of all time.”

3. THE UTILITY OF FORCE: The Art of War in the Modern World, by Gen. Rupert Smith (Knopf, $30). Identifying a newly emerging paradigm of warfare, Smith answers the question, “Why does it seem that modern wars are never unequivocally won?” in a complex and thoughtful way.

4. AMERIGO: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Random House, $24.95). Fernández-Armesto paints a vivid picture of Vespucci’s life and character against the backdrop of 15th-century Italy and Spain, concluding that his subject was representative of a specific breed of Mediterranean men who were desperate and driven enough to lead Atlantic exploration for decades.

5. OUT OF PRINT AND INTO PROFIT: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in the Twentieth Century, edited by Giles Mandelbrote (Oak Knoll Press, $55). This collection of 22 essays by British antiquarian book dealers offers personal glimpses into the fascinating and quirky world of the rare and collectible book trade as it existed before the rise of the Internet.

Luther Spoehr

1. CRAZY ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, by Cait Murphy (Collins, $24.95). Back to the all-but-unimaginable past, when the Cubs were expected to win, Fred Merkle missed second base, Christy Mathewson threw fadeaways, and Hal Chase probably threw games. It’s been told before, but never with this verve and attention to context.

2. CONFESSIONS OF A SPOILSPORT: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University, by William C. Dowling (Penn State University Press, $23.95). Professor Dowling witnessed New Mexico State’s plunge into athletic scandal, so when his new school, Rutgers, decides to go into big-time athletics, he organizes the opposition.

3. WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford, $35). A big honking book that’s not a page too long. The latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States, it emphasizes how technology — the telegraph, mass publishing, railroads — hurled America into modernity.

4. AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM, by Philip F. Gura (Hill and Wang). Not for everybody, but if you’ve ever wondered about the intellectual and cultural milieu that nurtured Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the rest, this precise, tightly written book is where to find out.

5. PICTURING RHODE ISLAND: Images of Everyday Life, 1850-2006, by Maureen A. Taylor (Commonwealth Editions, $29.95). This one is for everybody: tanneries and theaters, breweries and beach houses, and, of course, mansions and mills. The photos are excellent, but it’s the detailed captions that set this book apart.

Mandy Twaddell

1. THE LAST SUMMER OF THE WORLD, by Emily Mitchell (Norton, $24.95). In this debut novel, the life of a celebrated artist is imagined with the sensibility of a seasoned author. Mitchell tells the story of Edward Steichen, the photographer who documented World War I from the sky. With a plot relentless in its inevitability, and language shifting from spare to lush, Mitchell’s voice is refined and graceful depicting what is not: war and the dissolution of a marriage.

2. ALICE: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker, by Stacy A. Cordery (Viking, $32.95). A long book about the long life of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose passion for politics governed her dazzling social life. For decades she maintained a gathering place for the Capitol’s key players. Presidents came and went, while Alice remained “Washington’s other monument.”

3. THE GATHERING, by Anne Enright (Grove/Atlantic, $24). Introspection and flashback can be off-putting, but here they brilliantly serve Enright’s intent. Veronica Hegarty sets out to collect the body of her brother, Liam, who has taken his life. Her silent memories of Liam are vivid and penetrating. The loss of a sibling is a distinct grief that Enright nails in this award-winning novel.

4. ARE WE ROME? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy (Houghton Mifflin, $24). The United States as Rome repeated is not an original thought. But Murphy draws an elegant comparison. The book is admirably short for the scope of its subject, and the parallels are both predictable and surprising, like outsourcing, fluid borders, diminishing public service and corruption. Yet the analysis leaves the reader galvanized with hope.

5. BORN STANDING UP: A Comic’s Life, by Steve Martin (Scribner, $25). Martin’s roadmap to success applies not just to comedy, dissected here, but to those things that demand discipline, self-awareness, stamina, and a study of “crucial mutations.” As a dedicated writer, he presents a story that is both inspiring and bittersweet, with one-liners sprinkled throughout: “It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.” As Elvis remarked, “Son, you have an ob-leek sense of humor.”Some of our critics’ favorites: