ADAM KIRSCH
Frederick Brown
‘Flaubert: A Biography’

The book I read this year that seemed closest to the platonic ideal of its genre was Frederick Brown’s “Flaubert” (Little, Brown; 640 pages; $35). Gustave Flaubert is one of the rare writers who is as interesting to read about as he is to read — sometimes I wonder if his letters, with their hilarity and idealism, aren’t better than his novels, or at least easier to love. Mr. Brown brings both the artist and the man to life, in a literary biography that is itself genuinely literary — beautifully written, psychologically astute, displaying both wide knowledge of the period and deep understanding of the subject. Two qualities of Mr. Brown’s biography are especially praiseworthy, and unusual. He situates Flaubert expertly in his cultural and economic milieu, showing how this scourge of the bourgeoisie was in some ways its truest product; and he is finely sympathetic with Flaubert, without being either slavish or judgmental. Few books of any kind feel so genuinely civilized.

ERIC ORMSBY
‘William Christenberry’

“Houses rise and fall,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “crumble, are extended.” No one has documented this collapse and rebirth more movingly than the brilliant photographer and artist William Christenberry. For decades Mr. Christenberry has been returning to the same humble structures in such out-of-the-way spots as Moundville or Havana Junction, both in rural Alabama, to capture the startling effects of time and weather on country stores, barbecue shacks, and handmade hovels. In “William Christenberry” (Aperture, 204 pages, $50), the best of his work is on display, edited by the artist himself with accompanying essays by Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox, and a foreword by Elizabeth Broun. Like his friend William Eggleston, Mr. Christenberry is a master of color photography and has an eye for the subtly garish. Few people appear in his shots though every building discloses their unseen presence. These are beaten-down ramshackle affairs, each of which asserts a striking individuality. Mr. Christenberry has photographed his sites, sometimes tracking their rise and fall over a 40-year span, as lovingly as their builders erected them; in each lowly façade with its door askew and its sagging steps, there is a secret story caught by the lens. For me this is one of the best, and certainly one of the most beautiful, books of 2006.

BENJAMIN LYTAL
Cesar Aira
‘An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter’

Cesar Aira’s first major translation into English,”An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter” (New Directions, 120 pages, $12.75), excited me in a way novels rarely do. Mr. Aira crams his pocket-sized tale with visual pyrotechnics, but it is at an analytical level that the novel explodes. He brings his landscape painter, the historical Johann Rugendas, over the Andes, where clouds shoot up through vertical vents, and out onto the pampas, where a ball of lightning leaves him disfigured but still eager to record the details of a day long Indian raid. As he sketches, he contemplates the composite picture for a large canvas, with its tiny intelligible figures and its larger, compositional lines, what he calls the physiognomy of landscape. A second Aira book, coming from New Directions in February, is perhaps better than this one. Mr. Aira has authored 30 novels in total. New Direction’s Spanish-language authors, including Javier Marías and Roberto Bolaño, make up the most noteworthy phenomenon in current fiction publishing, and Mr. Aira, though eccentric, seems to be the most original of these authors, most free from the most original of these authors, the most free from the shadow of Borges. A steady stream of Aira translations would significantly enhance the diet of sympathetic American readers.

CARL ROLLYSON
J. A. Leo Lemay
‘The Life of Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747′

The first two volumes of J. A. Leo Lemay’s projected seven-volume biography of Benjamin Franklin (University of Pennsylvania Press, 647 pages, $39.95) have to rank as the premier specimen of the genre this year. I cannot imagine a more authoritative work than this one, based on a lifetime of scholarship.

A seven-volume biography may conjure up visions of tedious detail, but such is not the case for two reasons: Mr. Lemay’s prose is well-paced, and he intrigues even seasoned students of Franklin with new details and, even better, new attributions — delightful additions to the Franklin canon that include public letters, essays, satires, and speeches.

In Mr. Lemay’s volumes, Franklin emerges more than ever as the first major American author. The writings of Franklin, a prolific controversialist who often wrote under pseudonyms, anticipated those of Poe and Twain. Franklin’s literary genius has not been acclaimed more often because he failed to keep any orderly record of his contributions to newspapers and periodicals.

One of the great pleasures of these two volumes is watching Benjamin Franklin get himself into one jam after another. Mr. Lemay has a genius for recreating Franklin de novo, as if Franklin’s life has yet to be lived. Given all that has been written about Franklin, including several recent good books, this is an extraordinary achievement.

OTTO PENZLER
Joseph Wambaugh
‘Hollywood Station’

Joseph Wambaugh’s “Hollywood Station” (Little, Brown; 352 pages; $24.99) is the crime novel of the year for two reasons. First, it marks the return of one of the giants of the genre, a former Los Angeles policeman who brought a level of honesty, integrity, and verisimilitude previously unknown in the cop novel.

He showed millions of readers that these centurions of contemporary society, the men and women paid to protect us from each other, are pretty much like the rest of us, only more so. They are braver, funnier, crazier, drunker, tougher, lonelier, and more dedicated than civilians to their jobs and colleagues. Their adventures proved endlessly fascinating, making book after book a best seller.

At the height of his career, Mr. Wambaugh quit; no novels for 11 years and none set in Los Angeles for 25.

Suddenly, along came “Hollywood Station,” one of the richest, most perfectly plotted novels of his long, distinguished career. Equally vital, the characters are depicted as clearly as if they had been painted by Andrew Wyeth on nitrous oxide.

For humor, ice-pick-sharp dialogue, lovable (and despicable) characters, nonstop excitement culminating in a stunning climax,”Hollywood Station” belongs in the stocking of everyone you love.

REZA ASLAN
Author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam” (2005).
Vali Nasr
‘The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future’

Vali Nasr’s brilliant analysis of the resurgence of Shiism (Norton, 287 pages, $25.95) is not only a wonderful introduction to the faith and history of Shia Islam practiced by some 15% of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, but also a warning to America policy makers of the consequences of America’s post-September 11, 2001, foreign policy. In short, the war on terror, and especially the war in Iraq, has completely reshaped the power dynamics of the Middle East, allowing the historically under-represented and often brutally oppressed Shia to become the dominant force in the region. This “Shia Revival” has our traditional Arab Sunni allies in the Middle East shivering with fear and incensed with America for unleashing what many are referring to as a Shia Crescent from Iran to Lebanon. How this crescent may transform the region remains to be seen, but Nasr believes, correctly, that such a shift to Shia dominance may not be so bad a thing after all. That is, as long as America stops treating the Iranian regime as a pariah state and instead recognizes it as the new, dominant power in the region.

MICHAEL KORDA
Author of “Journey to a Revolution” (2006).
Jonathan Littell
‘Les Bienveillantes’

There’s no question in my mind that the most important book I’ve read this year has been Jonathan Littell’s “Les Bienveillantes” (Gallimard, 904 pages, 25 Euros), so far as I know, the first novel written by an American to win France’s coveted Prix Goncourt — already something of a miracle in this age when relationships between the two sister republics are strained and marked by a certain contempt on both sides. Let me say right away that “Les Bienveillantes” is something of a challenge, being over 900 pages in French (it has not yet been translated) of dense, packed type with very few paragraphs, so that there are few natural breaks — reading it is like swimming further out to sea than you intended to; you have to stop from time to time and dog-paddle to catch your breath. On the other hand, here is a Proustian novel (in terms of length, detail, and narcissistic emotional self-analysis), which is at the same time Tolstoyan (in terms of sweeping narrative, number of characters, and historical knowledge), which tells the life story of its narrator/hero. He is a Frencheducated German, a concealed homosexual who is also a Nazi war criminal, an officer in the feared SS Sicherheitsdienst through whose unpitying eyes we see in every excruciating detail the work of the Einzatskommandos, shooting Jews by the tens of thousands in Poland and Russia, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the death camps. It is the whole terrible story of the Holocaust told, for once, not from the point of view of the victims, but from one of the perpetrators. It is ambitious and plunges so deeply (and fearlessly) into the very heart of evil that it can only make us ask why most American fiction shies away from the big subjects of world importance and turns away from the deep, terrible tragedies of our times. It is a stunning — and terrifying — achievement.

MICHAEL SHERMER
Publisher of Skeptic magazine and monthly columnist for Scientific American. His latest book is “Why Darwin Matters” (2006).
Eric D. Beinhocker
‘The Origin of Wealth’

In the long history of economic thought since the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,”a dozen or so works stand out as seminal in their exquisite blend of data and theory and epochal boldness in attempting to answer a big question. Pace Smith, the newest addition to the canon is Eric Beinhocker’s “The Origin of Wealth” (Harvard Business School Press, 527 pages, $29.95), which dares to answer how humanity made the transition from small bands of hunter-gatherers to giant nations of consumer-traders. Contrast, for example, the Yanomamö people of Brazil, whose average annual income has been estimated at the equivalent of $90 per person per year, with the Manhattanite people of New York, whose average annual income has been estimated at $36,000 per person per year. That dramatic difference of 400 times, however, pales in comparison to the differences in Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), a retail measure of the number of types of products available), which has been estimated at 300 for the Yanomamö and 10 billion for the Manhattanites, a 33 million times difference! Mr. Beinhocker employs evolutionary thinking, complexity theory, and economics to explain how this happened.

DIANE RAVITCH
Research professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.
Efraim Karsh
‘Islamic Imperialism: A History’

Since September 11, 2001, I have read many books about Islam but had not been able to find one that explains the history of Islam in terms accessible to nonspecialists like me. I found that book in 2006. It is “Islamic Imperialism: A History” (Yale University Press, 288 pages, $30) by Efraim Karsh. The book succinctly describes the rise and spread of Islam over the centuries and relates that history to the present state of world affairs. It is wellwritten and amply documented. I highly recommend it.

FR RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS
Editor in chief of First Things, a monthly magazine of religion, culture, and public life.
Francis Collins
‘The Language of God: A Scientist Pre-sents Evidence for Belief’

Of the hundreds of books read in whole or in part this year, I’m not sure this is “the most important.” That title likely belongs to a philosophical or theological text of less interest to the general public. But “The Language of God” (Free Press, 304 pages, $26), written by a distinguished geneticist and former director of the Human Genome Project, is the most important book addressing public controversies over alleged conflicts between science and religion, with specific reference to evolution and a biblical understanding of creation. In a year that has witnessed the publication of an unusual number of polemical tracts equating rationality with atheism, Mr. Collins is a welcome voice of calm reason.

ANN APPLEBAUM
Author of “Gulag: A History” (2005) and columnist for the Washington Post.
Thomas Ricks
‘Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq’

If you have to choose a single volume from the enormous stack of books on Iraq published this year, pick “Fiasco” (Penguin Press, 496 pages, $26) by Thomas Ricks. Unlike many of the writers, Ricks didn’t start out in opposition to the war — he’s been on the Pentagon beat for years, has famously good contacts among U.S. Army brass, and is not exactly a common-or-garden pacifist. But it is precisely his sympathy for ordinary American soldiers that makes this book so good: Step by step, he shows how the higher-ups betrayed the army with catastrophically bad planning and a failure to clarify the basic goals of the mission. There will be no better explanation of what went wrong and why.

MEG WOLITZER
Author of “The Position” (2005) and “The Wife” (2004).
Elizabeth Strout
‘Abide With Me’

There was a time when so called “quiet fiction” could make a pretty big sound. But in recent years, with a few exceptions (“Gilead,” notably), the trend has been toward the show-offy novel, and some of the softer, deeper ones haven’t received the attention they deserve. This is true of “Abide With Me” (Random House, 304 pages, $24.95), Elizabeth Strout’s beautifully observed follow-up to her best-seller “Amy and Isabelle” (1999). Whereas her first novel had teenage sexuality and mother-daughter tensions as its engine, this one is propelled forward by questions of faith and loss. The story takes place in 1959 Maine, after the wife of a minister, Tyler Caskey, has died, leaving him crushed and thoroughly unprepared to take care of his children, particularly his older daughter Katherine, whose behavior has become disturbing and unsettling. Ms. Strout is a natural, elegant writer, but she’s also very, very funny, and her ability to take on the complex tragedy of one family as well as the small-minded and maddening responses of a community is nothing short of wonderful. And loud, in its own modest way.

JUDITH MILLER
Writer in New York
Bob Woodward
‘State of Denial: Bush at War’

What went wrong in Iraq? For the past year I’ve been reading the mostly disappointing books that attempt to account for the mess in Iraq and the root of it all in Washington. Those seeking accuracy and insight should turn to Bob Woodward’s latest book about the Bush presidency.”State of Denial” (Simon & Schuster, 576 pages, $30) recounts in painstaking detail the arrogance, ideological blinders, bureaucratic warfare, scheming, fear-mongering, and at times sheer incompetence that led senior Bush administration officials to ignore and deny inconvenient facts that might have prevented events in Iraq from unfolding as they have. Dispassionate in tone and devoid of the conspiracy theories that mar so many of its rivals, Mr. Woodward’s book is a heartbreaking account of policy and character failure at the highest levels of government. While his earlier books were more charitable toward President Bush, this portrait of a White House in utter disarray was so thoroughly depressing that I was relieved when I came to the last page.

I fled to two wonderful books of short stories, both of them by friends. Olaf Olafsson’s “Valentines” (Pantheon, 224 pages, $23) and James Salter’s “Last Night” (Vintage, 144 pages, $12) are both about love affairs, but different in every other way. I recommend them both.

MAX BOOT

Senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Robert Kagan
‘Dangerous Nation’
Frederick W. Kagan
‘Finding the Target’

Modesty prevents me from nominating my own book — “War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today” (though not from mentioning it!) — so instead I’d like to mention two important books published this year by the fabulous Kagan boys. That would be the historians (and brothers) Frederick Kagan and Robert Kagan. Bob’s book is called “Dangerous Nation” (Knopf, 544 pages, $30), and it’s a diplomatic history of America from its founding until 1898. His in-depth research and strong writing explodes the widely held conceit that America began life as an isolationist nation that pursued an unideological, inward-looking foreign policy. To the contrary, “Dangerous Nation” shows that America was expansionist from day one, and that expansionism was motivated by ideological factors (the desire to spread Anglo-Saxon civilization),as well as by sheer greed. Fred’s book,”Finding the Target” (Encounter Books, 432 pages, $29.95), casts a skeptical idea on many of the policies pursued by the Department of Defense in recent years under the rubric of “transformation.” Fred argues that reformers such as Don Rumsfeld have been too mesmerized by the concept of “network-centric warfare,” thereby failing to create the kind of military force needed to battle our actual enemies, whether in Afghanistan and Iraq today or possibly in China or North Korea tomorrow. Both “Finding the Target”and “Dangerous Nation”are essential for anyone interested in understanding American foreign and national security policy.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Robert Kagan
‘Dangerous Nation’

When a state is founded on principles of freedom and equality, and develops the economic, demographic, and military resources to see such ideals reified, watch out! Robert Kagan wants to remind any doubters that America has hardly been an insular agrarian republic of an isolationist bent.

No, we always interfered in the Americas, and when our power allowed, overseas as well. But what makes Mr. Kagan’s “Dangerous Nation” (Knopf, 544 pages, $30) fascinating are the strange eddies and currents that his main thesis then follows: Leftists are apparently right that America overthrew and intervened as we pleased, sometimes arrogantly and capriciously so; but wrong that it was always in some conspiratorial mode to secure profits and power — rather than an often naïve and poorly thought out pursuit of perceived benefit to all involved. And those of us who resisted such messy interventions — such as Southern states’ righters — often did so for narrow self-interest, rightly afraid that such muscular utopianism abroad might be redirected at them at home in illiberal matters such as slave-owning.

This is not so much a neoconservative take on American diplomatic history as a tragic admission that the American character always wishes to do right, usually has the power to match word with deed, but not always the patience or wisdom to succeed. Volume II — which will presumably apply these lessons of the past to make sense of things from Vietnam to Iraq — will follow, and probably cement Mr. Kagan’s reputation as America’s most original and controversial diplomatic historian.

PHILIP BOBBITT

Author of “The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History” (2002).
Laurence Wright
‘The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11′

“The Looming Tower” (Knopf, 480 pages, $27.95) is a riveting story of the fatal dance between Al Qaeda operatives and the American counterterrorism officials who struggled to prevent the atrocities of September 11, and failed. It is written with a cinematic clarity and vividness and yet it never lapses from the most rigorous standards of contemporary history. There is no better portrait of Ayman al-Zawahiri — the deputy to bin Laden and the chief ideologue of Al Qaeda — nor of John O’Neill, the FBI official who made it his mission to defeat Osama bin Laden but lost his wife at the World Trade Center. It is a story that few would credit as a movie or novel but for the attacks of September 11th. Mr. Wright — both a screenwriter and novelist, as well as a staff journalist for the New Yorker — tells a story that is rich in analysis and cultural understanding, and insistently commands the reader’s attention. Though it did not win the National Book Award for which it was nominated, it is clearly the book of the year.

ALEX KATZ
Painter in New York
Jack Weatherford
‘Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World’

‘Genghis Khan” (Three Rivers Press, 352 pages, $14.95) by Jack Weatherford is an account of Genghis Khan based on new information available only after the communists retreated, about 10 years ago. What emerged was a man of exceptional rational intelligence who contributed to making Europe modern. His social and military approaches and changes were new. His development of business and commerce were unprecedented. The book is written in a clear style that is a pleasure to read.

ANDREW STUTTAFORD
Contributing editor of National Review Online
Mark Steyn
‘America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It’

If, in those happy, optimistic months just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, someone had told me that 17 years later a well-researched work of non-fiction would have appeared predicting a Europe facing collapse, I would have thought that he was joking. And if that someone had told me that the same book would also be brutally funny, I would have thought that he was insane. I would have been wrong: Mark Steyn’s essential, disturbing and darkly hilarious “America Alone” is the most amusing description of the destruction of a great civilization since that sly historian Gibbon put down his pen.

To put it very simply, Mr. Steyn’s key argument is that old, enfeebled Europe is going to succumb to the greater vigor and ever-increasing numbers of its rapidly radicalizing Muslim population. Even if it’s true that he is rather too prone to extrapolate tomorrow’s demographics (and its politics) from today’s trends, his refreshingly blunt analysis of how Europe has got into its current mess, and how it is not doing anything about it, is thought-provoking, perceptive and, much more often than not, spot-on. As a result, it’s as tragic as it is funny.

Yes, the book’s language is occasionally overstated, but when a wise man sees that a building may be about to burn down, his warnings are better shouted than whispered.

CHRISTOPHER PELLING
Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford University
John Haffenden
‘William Empson: Against the Christians’

I’ll go for volume two of John Haffenden’s great biography of the literary critic William Empson (Oxford University Press, 797 pages, $65). It picks up Empson at the age of 36 in 1940: By this time he has already had a false start as a mathematician, published at the age of 24 “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” one of the great books of literary criticism and one (it seems) largely based on his undergraduate essays, and been expelled from Cambridge for having a stock of condoms in his room. What makes the book fascinating is the number of odd worlds he found himself in: BBC propaganda aimed at the Far East during the war; being a disquietingly naïve apologist for communist China; wearing, not very tactfully, Chairman Mao apparel to lecture a Cold War American audience on the dangers of believing that the world actually liked them; living in squalor in a basement in Sheffield, England; encouraging with gusto his wife Hetta’s extramarital affairs. I like what Empson says about literature, but I’d have found him thoroughly exhausting as a man, and probably not very pleasant (he did not often take a bath). What this book does is to make one fascinated with a person without having to like them, and not many biographies do that.