Lois Atwood

WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple.(Knopf, $27.95). A brilliantly written portrait of a friendship, this book illuminates the social, cultural and political realities of the period. Surprises include the reclusive poet making the first move toward friendship.

THE SUM OF OUR DAYS, by Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (HarperCollins, $25.95). A refugee from her native Chile, Allende continues here the story of her daughter Paula, who died in her 20s. The memoir is as inspired as her fiction and equally demanding and rewarding. Characters abound, not least the author and her support group, the Sisters of Perpetual Discord.

HAPPY FAMILIES, by Carlos Fuentes , translated by Edith Grossman (Random House, $26). Written by a master, these stories and choruses show contemporary Mexico in its cruelties, ambiguities and ironies. The legacies of dictatorship and repression inform every line.

THE COMMONER, by John Burnham Schwartz (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $24.95). The patterned, meaningless busyness of Japan’s royalty is brought to life in this novel about the previous and the present crown princesses. Eerily true to what is known about the most secretive royal court in the world, The Commoner is a heartbreaking look at the dissolution of an individual.

WE’VE ALWAYS HAD PARIS . . . AND PROVENCE: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France, by Patricia and Walter Wells (Harper, $26.95). A charming, unpretentious mixture of 30 years of memoir, recipes and photos. It will make even those who’ve never lived on a French farm or in a pied-a-terre in Paris feel nostalgic.

Adam Braver

BLACK FLIES, by Shannon Burke (Soft Skull Press, $14.95). A novel about paramedics in Harlem in the mid-1990s. Both raw and matter-of-fact, where the disturbing becomes the routine, and the line between normal and abnormal slowly dissolves.

YESTERDAY’S WEATHER, by Anne Enright (Grove Press, $24). Thirty-one stories that take us into dozens of ordinary yet complex lives, and then challenge us to see ourselves within them. Enright’s deft sentences often contain a simplicity that is bonded by an amalgamation of irony, honesty and humor.

HOW THE DEAD DREAM, by Lydia Millet (Counterpoint, $24). The storyline suggests the novel is about a culture of misplaced selfishness that is searching for a way out of its anomie; but it is much more about the notion of extinction — how by living as the center of our own species, we are always on the verge of extinction.

THE DIVING POOL: Three Novellas, by Yoko Ogawa (Picador, $13.) The first American publication by one of Japan’s most renowned literary writers. Odd, dark plots told with a simplistic distance that, in turn, makes them all the more harrowing and touching.

INDIGNATION, by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, $26). Roth’s latest goes back to a place his early admirers will recognize — the college campus. Fear becomes an object, something by which people define and shape their lives; and, as seen throughout the novel, the tragedy is that fear can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the characters slowly begin to inhabit the very things they are most

afraid of.

Don Breed

CAPITOL MEN: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen, by Philip Dray (Houghton Mifflin, $30). Well into the 20th century, the white supremacists in the South had not only re-subjugated the black slaves freed in the Civil War, they had succeeded in portraying Reconstruction as a terrible mistake with ignorant Negroes and white carpetbaggers sacking the states. Fortunately, revisionists like Philip Dray are finally setting the record straight. The atrocities waged by the whites in ultimately defeating Reconstruction make painful reading.

WORLDS AT WAR: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West, by Anthony Pagden (Random House, $35). This Oxford-educated professor at UCLA traces the political, religious and intellectual differences between East (which is actually our Middle East) and the West. He says it started with the Trojan wars and continues in Iraq.

TAKING ON THE TRUST: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, by Steve Weinberg (Norton, $25.95). A former investigative reporter who now teaches the subject, Weinberg relates one of the greatest feats in the genre: Ida M. Tarbell’s exposé of how John D. Rockfeller built Standard Oil into America’s most powerful monopoly.

PETROSTATE: Putin, Power, and the New Russia, by Marshall I. Goldman (Oxford, $27.95). Although this book could use an update now that oil prices have fallen, it’s a good narrative of how Russia recovered from near-bankruptcy to prosperity. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a wild scramble for Russia’s natural resources, but when Vladimir Putin took charge, he made clear that “the state has the right to regulate the process of their development and use.”

THE COMANCHE EMPIRE, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale, $35). If you had the image of American Indians as victims and primitives, you need this book. The Comanches were, as the title suggests, an empire that challenged the New Spain in the West. They were fierce warriors and hunters, but also military strategists, diplomats and canny traders. Their legacy remains.

Tom Chandler

33  1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets, by Barbara Schweitzer (Little Pear Press, $15). You might want to check to see that your socks are fastened securely at the tops, so they won’t roll up and down as you read these funny hot true poems.

FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS, by Annie Proulx (Scribner, $25). Proulx continues her elegant profiling of hardscrabble lives, vanishing wilderness, and endless sky in past and present day Wyoming.

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, $25.99). LOL essays on flaming mice, Japanese lessons, and the tragic beauty of smoking. You will like this book whether you like it or not.

THE POETRY LIFE: TEN STORIES, by Baron Wormser (CavanKerry Press, $18). Wormser connects a variety of non-English majors with poems they have come to love. This is for those who claim not to understand why good poetry matters.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963, by Adam Braver (Tin House Books, $14.95). A fascinating, intricately researched novel about that terrible day, as it must have seemed to the president’s shocked young widow.

Erik Chaput

IRISH TITAN, IRISH TOILERS: Joseph Banigan and Nineteenth-Century New England Labor, by Scott Molloy (University of New Hampshire Press, $25). With the good sense, keen judgment, and undeniable wit for which he is so well known, University of Rhode Island labor historian Scott Molloy has written a fascinating book on a previously underappreciated figure in 19th-century New England.

THE ARK OF LIBERTIES: America and the World, by Ted Widmer (Hill and Wang, $25). In his new, invigorating look at the history of American foreign policy, Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, uses his formidable historical skills to explore the area where politics, ideology and religion intersected to produce an understanding of America’s place in the world.

THE AGE OF REAGAN: A History, 1974-2008, by Sean Wilentz (Harper, $28). Bancroft prize-winning historian Wilentz has written an engaging and balanced account of the rise of the conservative movement in America. As he notes, the title of his book “points to the straightforward proposition that Ronald Reagan has been the single most important political figure of the age.”

AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham (Random House, $30). I will admit that I was skeptical when I heard that Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, not a practicing historian, was writing a book on the presidency of Andrew Jackson. But through research in previously unstudied historical sources, Meacham has managed to shed new light on one of our most controversial, violent, and consequential presidents.

OUR LINCOLN: New Perspectives on Lincoln and his World, edited by Eric Foner (Norton, $28). With the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009, a host of new books on the Sixteenth President have appeared. One of our nation’s most distinguished historians, Eric Foner, has edited a brilliant collection of essays that will be of interest to students and scholars.

Sam Coale

WAR JOURNAL: My Five Years in Iraq, by Richard Engel (Simon & Schuster, $28). Engel, the NBC anchor in the Middle East, has written a harrowing, personalized account of day-to-day life in Iraq, meticulously undermining all the political posturing that surrounded it.

WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple (Knopf, $27.95), is a remarkably engaging tale of the aesthetic confrontation between the poet and the pundit. Biographer and critic Wineapple disinterred both of them from the tomb of stereotype and ignited how much was at stake in a glorious sparring of words and wonder.

THE AGE OF ENTANGLEMENT: When Quantum Physics was Reborn, by Louisa Gilder (Knopf, $27.50), spins the fascinating yarn of its discovery amid the likes of Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger and Dirac. For anyone who wants to understand the human angle of modern physics and separate quirks from quarks, this is your book.

FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS, by Annie Proulx (Scribner, $25). For me, Proulx’s collection of Wyoming stories is the best written and the most moving fiction of the year, a splendid American vision that leaves you humbled.

It’s a tie between Tony Morrison’s

A MERCY (Knopf, $23.95) and Philip Roth’s INDIGNATION (Houghton Mifflin, $26), but the sweep and lush prose of Morrison’s novel set in early Virginia has the edge. The entanglement of slaves, free blacks, settlers and Native Americans, each trying to survive in an achingly beautiful and terrifyingly dangerous American wilderness, is simply stunning.

Mark Dunkelman

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf, $27.95). Faust delivers an incisive and sensitive exploration of and meditation on the Civil War’s unparalleled harvest of death. Her book is comprehensive, compassionate, and highly recommended.

SOUTHERN STORM: Sherman’s March to the Sea, by Noah Andre Trudeau (Harper, $35). Trudeau offers a detailed, day-by-day military history of the legendary march from Atlanta to Savannah in the autumn of 1864. Should stand for decades as the standard general account of the notorious campaign.

SAVING SAVANNAH: The City and the Civil War, by Jacqueline Jones (Knopf, $30). The subtitle is misleading. It’s a sweeping history of Savannah (and environs) before, during, and after the war, with an emphasis on race relations and the black struggle for freedom.

THROES OF DEMOCRACY: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, by Walter A. McDougall (Harper, $34.95). This second of a multi-volume history of the United States comprehensively covers the social, political, economic, scientific, religious and artistic developments of a tumultuous era.

LINCOLN’S DARKEST YEAR: The War in 1862, by William Marvel (Houghton Mifflin, $30). The second book of a projected four-volume history of the Civil War from the Northern perspective, written by one of the best non-academic historians. It provides a refreshing corrective to traditional triumphal histories, presenting cynical soldiers, war-weary civilians, and a corrupt and directionless presidential administration.

Jon Land

NOTHING TO LOSE, by Lee Child (Delacorte, $27). Child’s latest entry is a quasi-allegorical tale that finds his nomadic series hero Jack Reacher laying waste to the evil in a town called Despair. Riveting, engaging and masterful, this is Child at the height of his powers. And Reacher is the most original thriller hero since James Bond.

EXTREME MEASURES, by Vince Flynn (Atria, $27.95). Sometimes writers transcend their craft. Such is the case with Flynn who in his latest further cements himself as the pop culture voice of the post 9/11 world in fiction. His novels are like highly stylized comic books in which the villains who haunt our psyches and seem ever prepared to subvert our world get what’s coming to them. A neat turnaround that makes Extreme Measures as much therapy as great fun to read. Flat out terrific.

THE LAST ORACLE, by Jim Rollins (Morrow, $26.95). Nobody paces a book better than Rollins and The Last Oracle is no exception. This high energy, thrill-a-page tale of force-fed disaster and world domination is as brilliantly imagined as it is superbly structured. The summer just wouldn’t be complete without the latest from Rollins.

NIGHT OF THUNDER, by Stephen Hunter (Simon & Schuster, $26). Bob Lee Swagger, Hunter’s exceptional recurring hero, might be aging but his mind and trigger finger are as sharp as ever. This one takes the action to NASCAR country after the near murder of Swagger’s daughter and features a colorful array of both bad guys and good. Superb in every way.

SMOKE SCREEN, by Sandra Brown (Simon & Schuster, $26.95). Brown’s deft storytelling prowess is showcased again in this thriller in which mysteries from the past and present collide. Calling her the queen of romantic suspense fails to give Brown enough credit. She is one of the best thriller writers of today, period.