Our favorite books 2006.

By Kate Clinton

In a year when Oprah had blown a righteous gasket at being pretexted by James Frey, I waded cautiously into the memoir genre. But the following memoirs invite such deep experiential reading, all caution is gone with the wind.

If the Creek Don't Rise: My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War, by Rita Williams, is her story of being orphaned at four and being raised by her resentful Aunt Daisy in the Colorado Rockies. The long lunacy of slavery fuels Rita's story of extended family, legacy, and ambition in the 1960s and '70s. Williams is a great storyteller, and at excruciatingly personal moments, layered with adolescent angst and racial isolation, I hoped she was lying, but knew she wasn't.

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World, by Eve Ensler, is a mix of personal history and reportage. She candidly reveals the terror beneath her secure-seeming childhood and connects that with the terror told to her by women in Mexico, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and America in the age of 9/11 and Katrina. Ensler's voice is of a practical and spirited spirituality. I kept thinking of Mae West's devastating, "Most men want to protect me; can't figure out from what."

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, lacks the long clarifying subtitle that is apparently mandated in publishing law, but it is a stunning and poignant memoir. And you thought Jim McGreevey's memoir was graphic. This is a memoir that keeps on giving. I reread it. I stared at individual pages. Through nearly obsessive, perfectly rendered detail and spare prose, Bechdel documents her coming of age as a woman and lesbian in the context of her relationship with her closeted father.

Somewhere the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?" and answered, "The world would split open," must be smiling.

Kate Clinton is a humorist.

By Ruth Conniff

In Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, I was surprised to learn that Jeffrey Goldberg was so personally involved in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A funny, observant writer with incredible contacts in Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the governments of Israel and Palestine, Goldberg has written unforgettable pieces for The New Yorker. In one, after having the naive temerity to penetrate a radical madrassa in Afghanistan, he described a teacher who gave a particularly chilling rant about the scourge of the Jews. Goldberg piped up, cheerfully informing his hosts, "I'm Jewish."

It turns out that Goldberg is not just the engaging reporter familiar to New Yorker readers. He is also a former immigrant to Israel. In his twenties, he lived on a kibbutz, studied Hebrew, then did his mandatory military service at the notorious Ketziot prison. Goldberg sets up the drama of the book around this revelation.

His cover is blown during a reporting trip to Palestine. He is arrested, and a Palestinian security officer informs him, "We know you were in Ketziot." The bulk of the book, after this dramatic moment, is a flashback to his experience as a prison guard, and all that followed.

Goldberg grew up in a secular, socialist family on Long Island. His ardor for Israel was sparked at hippie Zionist/socialist summer camp, and by the anti-Semitic schoolyard bullies in his largely Catholic, working-class neighborhood.

His utopian image of Israel is shattered, though, first by the cranky kibbutzniks, then by his rather brutal experiences in military training and as a prison guard. "I'd always wanted to be a Freedom Rider. Now I felt like Bull Connor," he writes about his guard duty.

Through it all, Goldberg retains his self-deprecating sense of humor and humanity. He searches for common ground with his prisoners, and is roundly derided by prison officials. He calls himself a "moral coward" for not reporting abuses, but also refuses to carry out orders for collective punishment, provoking sneers when he invokes the Geneva Conventions.

Progressive readers may be turned off by Goldberg's centrist, pro-Israel take on Middle East politics. "Though I've come to realize my Americanness is unconquerable, Zionism is no worm-eaten ideology to me," he writes. "I am still susceptible to the demands of blood and tribe." But his focus on the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, and his careful parsing of the topic, is more compelling than ever. So is his quest for peace.

One of Goldberg's former prisoners, Rafiq Hijazi, becomes a graduate student in statistics at American University. Long after their friendship begins at Ketziot, the author and Rafiq continue to argue about religion, war, and peace, in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop, in Gaza, and at each other's homes. The ups and downs of their friendship, swaying between conciliation and polarization, cover the ground from the first Intifada to Oslo to 9/11 and beyond. In the end there is tenuous, doubtful, fluttering hope.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems: 1947-1997 is an antidote to a culture determined to stifle.

The new collection shows off the poet's diversity--something not always associated with Ginsberg. In some poems, he sounds bitterly wise:

   The weight of the world
      is love.
   Under the burden
      of solitude,
   under the burden
      of dissatisfaction

      the weight,
   the weight we carry
      is love.

A few pages away, in his famous poems, he blasts conventions against explicit homosexual subject matter: "Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! / The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!"

Or Ginsberg turns satirical anger on America: "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb."

Ginsberg's poems are reminders that those who face a culture's disapproval can approve themselves. "America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel," Ginsberg wrote in (and the date always surprises, it seems so early, the poem so courageous) 1956. Would that he were still here to do that.

In a newly translated autobiographical series, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish entwines his life story with that of his country. Each is a ghost of the other. A grievous delight of this book is its insistence on rendering the most precious moments alongside examples of destruction, such as soldiers uprooting date and olive orchards that belong to Palestinian families:

   I look out like a balcony on what I
      want
   I look out on my friends carrying
      the evening mail
   wine and bread
   novels and records ...

   I look out on a sea gull and on the
      trucks of soldiers
   changing the trees of this place.

In the painful last poem, a soldier occupies the family home. But every object in the house contains evidence of the ones who yearn to return:

   Say hello to our house, stranger
   Our coffee cups
   are still as they were. Can you smell
   our fingers on them?

Finally, a plug for a little anthology entitled Gathering Ground. Ten years ago, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady started summer retreats for African American poets. They called the group Cave Canem. Ten years later, this energetic volume. I loved so much of it, but here's one pick, from Patricia Smith in honor of Aretha Franklin. It's entitled "Asking for a Heart Attack."

"The goddess of steamed cornbread and bumped buttermilk know Jesus by His first name," Smith writes:

      So Jesus blessed her, opened
   her throat and taught her to wail
      that way she do,
   she do wail that way don't she do
      that wail the way
   she do wail that way, don't she. Now
      when 'retha's
   fleeing screech reach been-done-wrong
      bone, all the
   Holy Ghost can do is stand at a
      respectable distance
   and applaud. And maybe shield
      His heart a little.

If you choose not to shield your heart, this anthology will hit it.

Anne-Marie Cusac teaches in the Communication Department at Roosevelt University. Her second book of poems, "Silkie," is forthcoming from Many Mountains Moving in early 2007.

By Elizabeth DiNovella

When the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed in 2002, a colleague acted as if she had lost a family member. She was grief stricken. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it. Global warming may be the defining predicament of our times, but talk of melting glaciers makes my eyes glaze over. It's all too abstract for me.

But this year I picked up Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert, and I finally get it. Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, lucidly explains why and how our planet is heating up.

The book reads like a travelogue. She makes permafrost sound intriguing.

Kolbert spends the first half of this slim volume amassing the evidence. She doesn't shy away from complicated scientific findings, but she also explains things using common household terms. The amount of energy the Earth radiates back into space is 235 watts per square meter, "or roughly the power of four household light bulbs," she writes.

The second half of the book addresses the politics of global warming. In the United States, the public debate rests upon the false notion that there is no scientific consensus about the causes of climate change. This past summer, the general manager of the ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, Maine, told his reporters to stop doing global warming stories, since the science is far from conclusive.

But the science is conclusive. In study after study, scientists have been measuring the effects of global warming. The oceans, the glaciers, the atmosphere, both flora and fauna, even archaeological evidence, tell us that our Earth is getting hotter.

If we do not cut carbon emissions, we will reach the point at which the arrival of catastrophe becomes unavoidable.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe is disturbing. But it doesn't shriek. Kolbert gives the reader a chance to soak it all in. Despite the grim forecast, I didn't feel despair at the end; I felt informed. And now, I have a whole new understanding of those glaciers.

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive.

By Susan J. Douglas

Yellow and tattered, still hanging on our kitchen cabinet, is the full-page ad that Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities placed in The New York Times in October of 2002. The ad read, "They're Selling War. We're Not Buying" and warned "War Will Breed Terrorism," "War Will Discredit America in the World's Eyes," "War Will Take a Terrible Toll in Human Life," and "They're supporting it with a 'multimillion-dollar PR blitz.'" Check and double check. Now, four years later, a torrent of books documents all this and more: the combined deceit, arrogance, and utter incompetence of the Bush Administration that got us to where we are today.

One of the very best is Frank Rich's beautifully written and passionate The Greatest Story Ever Sold. How any of us would have survived the Bush Administration without Rich's searing and spot-on Times columns over the last six years is beyond me. Rich, in fact, is one of the few people in the mainstream media who debunked Team Bush's propaganda-driven policies early on. Rich's purpose is not so much to itemize the venality of the Bush League (although there's a good dose of that) but rather to document its quite extraordinary success--for a time, anyway--of selling an unnecessary war and an utterly anti-democratic agenda to the country using state-of-the-art PR techniques that, in the end, amounted to bald-faced lying. The book chronicles how Team Bush "unfurled a brilliantly produced scenario" to sell its agenda, which was, ultimately, to "amass power and hold on to it."

For Rich, the ability of Team Bush to peddle its various bogus stories about WMDs, yellow cake, and "mission accomplished" rests crucially on the collapse of news standards in the 1990s in which "an overheated 24/7 infotainment culture ... trivialized the very idea of reality." The substitution of shark attacks, missing interns, and verbal food fights for hard news contributed to one of the country's "longest running naps" and helped make the public especially susceptible to Bush's post-9/11 stagecraft. Reminding us of this broader cultural and historical context that permitted such propaganda to succeed is one of the many strengths of the book. Rich is also detailed and merciless in his account of how everything about Bush and his policies--from Bush being repackaged as a retro-Texan and recovered alcoholic to the marketing of the war--was cynically constructed in defiance of the facts. Readers will find Rich's timelines at the end of the book, in which he juxtaposes what went on behind the scenes with what was sold in the media, to be especially devastating. This is the book to buy for everyone you know who cares about a return to what a Bush aide once snidely dismissed as "reality-based" politics and journalism.

Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and author, most recently, of "The Mommy Myth."

By Barbara Ehrenreich

I read fiction addictively, to get as far out of this flat and blighted "real world as I can. But for it to work, I need a writer who's smarter than I am, more prophetic, and more open to the mystery behind the "real." In 2006, the following novels qualified:

In the category of novels not written by members of my family, the best one I read this year was Cloud Arias, by David Mitchell (first published in 2004). It starts out as a nineteenth century story of colonialism and genocide in the South Pacific, then--wham--we're in rural Belgium in 1931, with a mad young composer fleeing from his creditors. At first, I was irritated by the sudden shifts in century and genre--period piece, thriller, arch-comedy, sci-fi. Then I was so drawn in I had to stop and read a dimwitted thriller just so I wouldn't go through Cloud Atlas too fast. It all makes sense in the end, which is also the end of the world: We don't matter, except to each other, but our stories and symphonies--the artful patterns that connect us--do, and they reverberate through the universe forever.

In the other category, there's my son Ben Ehrenreich's debut novel, The Suitors. I opened it with some trepidation: What if it was a fictional version of Mommy Dearest?. But it's like nothing I could have imagined, and as unclassifiable as Cloud Atlas: At once love story, apocalyptic sci-fi, Rabelaisian comedy, and clear-eyed allegory of imperialism and greed, all written with so much wild virtuosity and passion that I found myself savoring pages over and over. For a plot line, it follows the story of Odysseus and Penelope, but with more sex, orgies, violence, and heartbreak than even Homer could have dreamed of. If The Suitors is "about" anything, it's the impossible yearnings, for both love and adventure, which make us human.

Finally, but not an also-ran, is Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, which takes us into a parallel universe where the Aztecs beat Cortez and now more or less rule the world, draining Europe of captives for their sacrificial rituals. In Foster's Aztec metaphysics, both universes play out at once, with our hero doubling as an Aztec warrior/priest and a grossly exploited Latino worker in a filthy, modern-day L.A. slaughterhouse. Blood flows everywhere here, human and animal, but so do the laughs. Foster is profoundly disorienting, as are the other two authors, but that's what we need from novels. You should put them down, rub your eyes, and see that the world isn't so flat after all.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "Bait and Switch."

By Andrea Lewis

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats is a large-format book that s worth the weight. The husband-and-wife team of journalist Faith D'Aluisio and photographer Peter Menzel invited themselves to dinner with thirty different families in twenty-four countries to find out how globalization, migration, and capitalism are changing the way the world eats. As D'Aluisio writes in the book's introduction: "To learn more, we watched typical families the world over as they farmed, shopped, cooked, and ate.... The sum, we hope, is a culinary atlas of the planet at a time of extraordinary change."

The couple journeyed to Greenland, Bhutan, India, Cuba, Australia, Ecuador, and an eclectic mix of other locations. The centerpiece of each chapter is a photograph of the featured family gathered around a week's worth of food, alongside a comprehensive list of each item and its cost.

The Le Moine family of Montreuil, France, for example, had a food expenditure of $419.95 for one week. Their favored food choices, on display in their cozy modern kitchen, included such non-French items as Chinese takeout, McDonald's, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

Meanwhile, the Aboubakar family of the Breidjing refugee camp in Chad had a one-week food expenditure of $1.23. The regal family is seen sitting on a blanket fronted by a few remarkably small plastic bags of grains, dried vegetables, and other rations.

By contrast, the piles of processed food consumed by the three American families profiled are a nutritional eyesore.

Hungry Planet, which contains essays by food gurus Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan, is a satisfying meal for the mind and eye that will leave your stomach growling for a snack.

"For every dollar owned by the average white family in the United States, the average family of color has less than a dime." So reads one of the many surprising statistics found in The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. Co-authored by a multiracial group of experts connected to the Boston-based economic education group United for a Fair Economy, this is a highly readable collection of statistical research, personal stories, and multicultural economic history.

The five women authors put special emphasis on the numerous ways that public policy has denied people of color full participation in government wealth-building programs that have benefited mostly white Americans.

Rebecca Adamson tells us exactly how much money the California state government was willing to pay for severed Indian heads and scalps during the Gold Rush.

Rose Brewer discusses how redlining and weak fair housing laws continue to affect the economics of African American communities.

Betsy Leondar-Wright discusses why the New Deal was a better deal for white people.

Meizhu Lui and Barbara Robles offer equally fascinating information about Asians and Latinos in the U.S. economy.

The Color of Wealth argues that racial and economic justice will not prevail until government policy seriously addresses disparities of income and wealth. After digesting the information found in these pages, it's hard to argue with that analysis.

Andrea Lewis is the co-host and producer of KPFA radio's "Morning Show" in Berkeley.

By John Nichols

Reporting a story on California politics several years ago, I encountered a smart, well-informed liberal legislator who informed me that she was the granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan. About this, she was apologetic, recalling Bryan's role as the Bible-thumping disbeliever in evolution who collapsed after defending the indefensible in the Scopes trial. I allowed as how I agreed with her on the particular issue, but reminded her that Bryan was a hero of the struggle to prevent the United States from embarking upon a career of empire. The complexities of Bryan are such that he can be hero and villain to the same people.

That has created a good deal of confusion with regard to the man whose 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech began the modern Democratic Party. It also created the demand for a contemporary biography of the three-time Democratic nominee for the Presidency--a demand met with historical rigor, scholarly nuance, and rare insight by Michael Kazin's A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

Just as Kazin's book unlocks the mysteries of the man and the moment that transformed the Democratic Party, so labor historian James Green's Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America explains through the story of one dramatic nineteenth century incident the roots of the contemporary trade union movement's strengths and weaknesses. Green's research methods are those of a detective, his writing style that of a novelist, and his product is a book about the most fateful labor rally in American history. As Studs Terkel observed about the Haymarket martyrs: "Whatever benefits American working people have today didn't come from the big-heartedness of those who employed them. They were hard-fought gains, through hard-fought battles."

History is a weapon in those battles, especially when it is employed for the purpose of teaching Americans the truest values of their national experiment. No 2006 book performed that task more ably than Saving General Washington, J. R. Norton's exceptional examination of the disconnect between the patriotism of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and the charlatanism of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld. Norton opens his book with a quote from Jefferson: "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true right, restore their government to its true principles." If we could get a copy of Saving General Washington into the hands of every American, and if we could get them to read and recognize its wisdom, we would soon see the reign of our witches pass.

John Nichols is the author, most recently, of "The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism."

By Amitabh Pal

Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves details the seemingly hopeless task that British abolitionists set themselves in 1787. Hochschild's follow-up to his absolutely magnificent King Leopold's Ghost echoes many of the same themes and strengths of his earlier work. Hochschild again writes in a lucid and compelling manner, does incredible research, and establishes amazing linkages across space and time.

I predicted that Orhan Pamuk would win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and his Istanbul: Memories and the City reveals why. His prose beguiles the reader right from the opening sentence: "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double." Pamuk is too harsh on a city that I loved when I visited it four years ago, but his writing is mesmerizing.

Vikram Seth's Two Lives deals with Seth's great-uncle Shanti and great-aunt Henny. Shanti was a dentist who emigrated to Britain from India after finishing his studies in Germany at the cusp of the Nazi takeover and married Henny, who fled Germany in 1939. Seth fashions a captivating book that touches on a multitude of grand themes: "Many of the great currents and movements of the century are reflected through the events of their lives and those of their friends and family," Seth writes. The characters and the reader encounter the Indian freedom movement, the Nazis, the Cold War, Israel and Palestine, and much more.

Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope is written in an easy-to-read, conversational style. Ebadi (whom I had the privilege of interviewing for the magazine) became one of the first female Iranian judges until the Islamic Revolution denied all women that post. When women were allowed to resume legal practice in 1992, she took to defending the rights of political prisoners, women, and children. Her tribulations have included being imprisoned, and dealing with the execution of her brother-in-law for belonging to a guerrilla group. She warns against the use of U.S. force and seems resigned, no matter what happens, that reformers will suffer: "It is simply a reality that people like myself or the dissidents I represent will be lost along the way."

Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power is an idiosyncratic, progressive take on that unique institution. Carroll's father served in the Pentagon, which lends poignancy to his story. Creepy figures such as Leslie Groves, Curtis LeMay, James Forrestal, and Dick Cheney haunt the pages of this book and the corridors of the Pentagon, a building that takes on almost a life of its own in Carroll's story. He warns of "men who fell under the thrall of new machines, who lost the tie between means and ends, or who refused to acknowledge the limits of American power--and also innocence."

Amitabh Pal is the managing editor of The Progressive.

By Matthew Rothschild

In this year dominated by the denial of rights and the affirmation of torture, I recommend two personal accounts. The first is Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, by Moazzam Begg. He is the British citizen whom the United States snatched in Pakistan on January 31, 2002, and held for almost three years. He recounts the torture he and other detainees endured, two homicides of detainees that occured while he was there, and the quotidian sadism that many American guards exhibited. When Begg objected to his treatment, one FBI agent explained life in the Bush Age: "After 9/11, Moazzam, the rules changed. We have new laws, and according to them, you're already convicted."

James Yee, in For God and Country, has his own harrowing story to tell. This West Point graduate served as the chaplain down in Guantanamo. There he heard guards yell at detainees: "Satan is your God, not Allah! Repeat that after me!" Yee tells how the Army arrested him and threatened him with espionage charges that carried the death penalty. He says his Kafkaesque detention "changed my life, tore apart my family, and destroyed my military career." Though exonerated, he has never received so much as an apology from the Army.

Finally, a plug for a novel: the ambitious and entertaining Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The great Kenyan writer spins a yarn about a homeless man in a fictional African country who has magical powers. The hero falls in love with the secretary of a real estate firm, who by night is a revolutionary. She is fighting the dictator, who has applied to the Global Bank for a loan to build a tower into the heavens in his honor. Ngugi's spoof of the dictator is hilarious, and his denunciation of "corporonialism" also hits the mark. And along the way, he confronts the AIDS epidemic and wife beating. All the while, he upholds the power of resistance and love. I'm for that.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive.