Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffrey Stone (Norton). Stone's masterful history . . . explains how Americans could come to fear their own founding documents. We have long needed this book, though perhaps never as badly as we do today. -- Christopher Capozzola
Politics, by Hendrik Hertzberg (Penguin). Long after we've forgotten Pat Robertson's presidential bid or John Tower's confirmation battle, these essays will bear re-reading. They're keepers because they don't just plead the case for contemporary liberalism but -- with their wit, humanity and exquisite understatement -- illustrate it. -- David Greenberg
A Pretext for War, by James Bamford (Doubleday). Highly readable and well-researched. Offers new insights into how the Sept. 11 hijackings occurred, while also showing how terribly ill-equipped and unprepared our defense systems were. -- Douglas Farah
Public Enemies: The Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934, by Bryan Burrough (Penguin). Significant and very readable. It is hard to imagine a more careful, complete and entrancing book on this subject, and on this era. -- Lawrence M. Friedman
Pushing the Limits, by Henry Petroski (Knopf). A fascinating potpourri of history, engineering and imagination, all presented in the fluid, humane writing style that we have come to expect from this author. -- James Trefil
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, by John Guy (Houghton). A gripping narrative that combines the sleuthing skills of a private detective with the skill of the master historian . -- Lisa Jardine
A Question of Loyalty, by Douglas Waller (HC). The timely story of the court-martial of Gen. Billy Mitchell, who publicly attacked his generation of leaders for failing to imagine and fully prepare for the growing threat that could be posed by air power. -- John Lehman
The Rare and the Beautiful, by Cressida Connolly (Ecco). Consider the case of the beautiful Garman sisters, whose lives described a glittering arc through London's High Bohemia between the two world wars: One had an affair with Vita Sackville-West, another with the poet Laurie Lee and the painter Lucian Freud. -- Amanda Vaill
Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann (Viking). Offers brief biographies of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz. An informative, well-researched and largely nonjudgmental book that reveals the complex web of relationships and the powerful assumptions they came to share about America's role in the world. -- Alan Brinkley
The Roads to Modernity, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Knopf). An exceptionally well written and clever attempt -- all the more clever since its political aims are never made explicit -- to employ a redefined Enlightenment as a bulwark for neoconservatism and as a device for explaining current conflicts. -- Stephen Eric Bronner
The Rose Man of Sing Sing, by James McGrath Morris (Fordham Univ.). By the climax, the most brilliant city editor of that lurid era has become a bloody monster in his own tabloid. And then, lo, he is one of the redeemed. Reversal of fortune is a damned good story in any era. -- Shelby Coffey
Saboteurs, by Michael Dobbs (Knopf). In asserting its authority to secretly detain suspected terrorists and prosecute them outside the criminal justice system, the Bush administration has cited FDR's handling of Nazi agents. Dobbs skillfully tells the fascinating and timely story of that episode, Operation Pastorius. -- John Lehman
The Scientists, by John Gribbin (Random House). A handy reference work. Offers general audiences an engaging and informative view of modern science's prodigious accomplishments since the Renaissance. -- Marcia Bartusiak
The Second Bill of Rights, by Cass R. Sunstein (Basic). In his spirited and perfectly conceived new book, Sunstein celebrates what he calls "the speech of the century," Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union Address, delivered as a fireside chat. -- Jamin B. Raskin
A Secret Life, by Benjamin Weiser (Public Affairs). A real-life spy thriller. A fascinating portrayal of a man who decided that the best way to serve Polish nationalism was to become a spy for the West. -- Peter Eisner
Separate and Unequal, by Harvey Fireside (Carroll & Graf). A riveting account of Plessy v. Ferguson. Most of the facts have been noted by others, but they are no less fascinating in the retelling. The central irony was that Homer Adolph Plessy looked white. -- Paul Butler
Shadow Divers, by Robert Kurson (RH). A group of daredevils salvages a small but intriguing scrap of history: a relic from the critical World War II struggle for control of the North Atlantic. The divers' story supplies the remarkable narrative spine of this captivating book. -- Robert J. McCartney
Skeletons on the Zahara, by Dean King (Little, Brown). The tribulations of a crew of American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured, sold into slavery, fed almost nothing, forced to drink camel urine, and then schlepped all over the desert sands. . . . a page-turner, right out of Homer -- Grace Lichtenstein
Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf). A portrait unprecedented in its intimacy and horrifying in its implications, not merely because it shows that the engineers of one of history's greatest holocausts were depraved but also because they emerge in these pages as surprisingly normal. -- David Satter
Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Penguin). I can't remember when I've read a book as thrilling and hypnotic, as perversely magnificent as this. Likened, with justice, to The Iliad. -- MD
Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, by John Lewis Gaddis (Harvard). A short book with a long view. Gaddis compares foreign policy reactions to three attacks on America -- the British burning of Washington in 1814, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. -- John Lehman
A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz (Harcourt). It appears to merely chronicle Oz's life from childhood in British-ruled Jerusalem to literary fame, but every event, every factual detail, every discovery opens myriad doors to unexpected revelations. -- Alberto Manguel
The Ticket Out, by Michael Sokolove (S&S). Sokolove knows a good story when he sees one, and the tale he tells about the lives of Darryl Strawberry and his high school baseball teammates is powerful indeed. -- Sean Callahan
To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr's Sacred Mission to Save America, by Stewart Burns (HarperSF). The perfect biography for the age of Sept. 11: one that highlights the terrifying uncertainties of a struggle against evil. -- David L. Chappell
Tommy the Cork, by David McKean (Steerforth). Though Thomas Corcoran became famous in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and died in 1981, his life story makes for a surprisingly timely book. He was the founding father of modern influence peddling. An engaging biography of one of the great characters of 20th-century Washington. -- Robert G. Kaiser
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke (RH). Never mind that many of those names are long forgotten -- if ever they were known at all. Here we see Capote at his witchy, bitchy best, leaving us longing for more. -- JY
Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford). Describes in moving detail the military campaign of 1776-77 and the British, German and American soldiers who fought it. Washington stands firmly at the book's center. -- Pauline Maier
What's the Matter with Kansas?, by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan). The real problem for the working class is not that they vote Republican but that most of them don't vote at all. -- Corey Robin
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton). A masterful storyteller; his prose is elegant and subtle and his imagination is rich and interesting. When he focuses on Shakespeare's texts, as he does in his chapter on the sonnets, he is brilliant. -- Arthur Kirsch
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, by Kevin Bazzana (Oxford). Obviously a must for any fan of this great pianist, but it is more than that: a study worthy of its subject -- expertly paced, admiring yet sensible, touched with wit and intensely readable. -- MD
The Working Poor: Invisible in America, by David K. Shipler (Knopf). Should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter. Now that this invisible world has been so powerfully brought to light, its consequences can no longer be ignored or denied. -- Eric Schlosser
The Yom Kippur War, by Abraham Rabinovich (Schocken). The best available on the war to date. . . . a seamless, riveting narrative reminiscent of the books of Rick Atkinson or Stephen Ambrose. -- Michael B. Oren
