Goya, by Robert Hughes (Knopf). Offers interpretations not only of Goya's style but of other artists' works, stressing the singularity of Goya's vision, so apposite to our own moment in history. -- Dore Ashton
Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, by Sally Bedell Smith (RH). The nonfiction beach book of the season . . . you need more than a scorecard to keep track of all of the women, some of them nubile staffers, who hopped into bed with the leader of the free world. -- William E. Leuchtenburg
The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West, by Joel Achenbach (S&S). Maybe the ideal reading for anyone who's ever floated on, driven over or merely gazed languidly upon the capital's mighty river and wondered about its history. Engaging and solidly researched. -- Henry Wiencek
The Great Game, by Frederick P. Hitz (Knopf). A lucid overview of 20th-century espionage that says more about the great game as it was played by Americans and their allies and adversaries than just about anything else ever published. -- Charles McCarry
Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, by Seth Mnookin (RH). Reads like a thriller, a fast-paced novel unfolding inside a newspaper long viewed as the gold standard of American journalism. -- Michael Getler
Heavenly Intrigue, by Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder (Doubleday). A crisply written chronicle of the colorful world of Johannes Kepler and his famous mentor, Tycho Brahe. Was Kepler eager enough to get his hands on data to have poisoned him? -- John Gribbin
Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray (HC). Consider this claim: that the greatest human accomplishments were achieved almost exclusively by white Western European males. Yet the book is, more often than not, brilliant. -- John McWhorter
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, by Anonymous (Brassey's). A powerful, persuasive analysis of the terrorist threat and the Bush administration's failed efforts to fight it. -- Richard A. Clarke
In the Company of Soldiers, by Rick Atkinson (Holt). Heart-pounding narratives of officers directing combat in Iraq. . . . does a fine job of recreating the division's battles from various threads of information. -- Anthony Swofford
Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, by Thomas Lippman (Westview). Skillfully excavates the Saudi-American modus vivendi in the mid-20th century, a period that now seems as remote and innocent as a flickering home movie from Eisenhower's America. -- Peter Bergen
Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, by John Keegan (Knopf). Original and provocative. The range is wide -- from Lord Nelson's pursuit and defeat of a French fleet off the coast of Egypt in 1798 to the German assault on Britain in 1944. -- Thomas Powers
The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood (Farrar Straus Giroux). The writing is alive, crackling and sparkling with electric energy. -- George Garrett
Israel on the Appomattox: From the 1790s Through the Civil War, by Melvin Patrick Ely (Knopf). Former slave families were installed on Randolph properties in a settlement called Israel Hill, and many achieved substantial economic independence. Ely's story is rich and compelling -- and persuasively documented. -- Edwin M. Yoder Jr.
John Fowles, by Eileen Warburton (Viking). Reads like a novel. Most heartbreaking is the sad figure of his lover's tiny daughter, Anna, whom Fowles referred to as "it." -- Elizabeth Hand
John James Audubon, by Richard Rhodes (Knopf). A skilled researcher and historian proves there is still fresh ground to be worked. . . . the most three-dimensional portrait yet of the man. -- Kenn Kaufman
John Stuart Mill, by Nicholas Capaldi (Cambridge). If Mill's father monopolized his youth, Harriet Taylor monopolized his mature life. They did the "honorable thing" by not sleeping with each other -- and by her not sleeping with her husband. A thoroughly sympathetic view. -- Gertrude Himmelfarb
Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, by Jennifer Gonnerman (FSG). The story of a woman who served 16 years in New York state prisons on a drug charge before being granted clemency. . . . a remarkably balanced triumph of immersion journalism. -- Michael Schaffer
Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic, by William C. Davis (Free Press). Magisterial. Davis recognizes that the American march westward was irresistible; revolution was inevitable, and overall this was no bad thing. -- T.R. Fehrenbach
The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan, by Ben Macintyre (FSG). A lost chapter from the annals of romantic travel to the East. The stuff of a rollicking boy's adventure tale. -- Matthew Price
Margot Fonteyn, by Meredith Daneman (Viking). That Daneman understands the ballet world so well is one of the book's greatest assets. Here fans may learn things about Britain's greatest ballerina that they'd rather not know. Deborah Jowitt
The Midnight Disease, by Alice W. Flaherty (Houghton). A practicing neurologist, who suffered post-partum depression and then experienced an overpowering urge to write, combines science and art as she attempts to explain why some have the bug and some don't. A tremendously exciting book. -- CS
Missing Men, by Joyce Johnson (Viking). Unlike so many memoirs in which authors repay the real or imagined grievances inflicted upon them by others, Johnson's reaches out to these complicated people and thanks them for what they gave her. . . . a big-hearted, thoroughly adult book. -- JY
Monte Cassino, by Matthew Parker (Doubleday). Those with a romantic, sentimental view of World War II are advised to spend a few hours with this grim depiction of the battle to gain control of central Italy . . . an exemplary, heartbreaking book. -- JY
Moscow 1812, by Adam Zamoyski (HarperCollins). By the end of the book, the tragedy is so vast that it's hard not to feel some more recent echoes. Napoleon's wasteful, hubristic march was truly a harbinger of the greater devastation to come. -- Anne Applebaum
My Life, by Bill Clinton (Knopf). A memoir suited for the Age of Oprah. It captures and conveys, in ways that are sometimes brilliant and at other times unintentional, the essence of his personality and presidency: fascinating, undisciplined, deeply intelligent, self-indulgent and filled with great promise alternately grasped and squandered. -- Walter Isaacson
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Norton). The strength is in its narrative power; by telling all the little stories, it reveals the big story in a different way. We see the bland evil of the plotters, the Hamlet-like indecision of government officials, the bravery amid chaos of the firefighters. -- David Ignatius
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test-Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution, by Robin Marantz Henig (Houghton). Sheds a great deal of light on this too-little-appreciated set of scientific breakthroughs, and stresses the odd ways in which women were thrust onto the sidelines. -- Liza Mundy
The Path to Victory, by Douglas Porch (FSG). An indispensable single-volume guide to World War II in the extended Mediterranean. No other treatment approaches Porch's narrative and thematic sweep, his eye for telling detail and forcefully expressed judgments. -- John Whiteclay Chambers II
Paul Bowles on Music, edited by Tim Mangan (Univ. of Calif.). Whether one agrees with Bowles is not the point. He is an uncommonly plausible and stimulating critic, and this handsome, meticulously edited volume adds significantly to our understanding of American musical life. -- Tim Page
