Jonathan Yardley

A critic's favorite books of 2007.

Ten books on my list this year, four fiction and six nonfiction. It's not surprising that all but one of the nonfiction selections have to do with American history, as my interest in the subject grows ever greater as I, well, grow ever older. It's probably a bit more surprising that three of the four novels are set in the Spanish-speaking world and that two of these are translated from the Spanish, but though these novels have made my list strictly on merit, I'll admit to having been drawn to them in the first place for personal as well as literary reasons: I now live part of the year in Peru and am trying (at my age, it's a battle) to learn Spanish.

Thus I wanted to read Daniel Alarcon's Lost City Radio because the unnamed South American country in which it is set clearly is based on Peru during and after the time of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the terrorist movement that swept through the country in the 1980s and '90s. Alarcon is a native of Peru who has lived in this country since he was a young child. He writes (very well) in English but has spent a lot of time in Peru and knows the country. This, his first novel (two years ago he published an admirable collection of stories, War by Candlelight), is about a woman who broadcasts a "program for missing people" in her desperate country, but in larger terms it is about the futility and stupidity of violence, by terrorists and governments alike.

The subject of Sendero Luminoso gets passing mention in Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl, but Peru's most famous writer has other business in this witty, engaging account of a man's lifelong obsession with an alluring woman who always keeps him at arm's length even when they are most intimate. Now in his early 70s, Vargas Llosa is entitled to nostalgia for his lost youth in Lima, and he writes about that city as he knew it more than half a century ago with an agreeable mixture of affection and wry detachment. The Bad Girl is not top-drawer Vargas Llosa -- it doesn't rank with his major novels, most notably Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter -- but what he keeps in his second drawer is better than almost anyone else's best.

In this, as in just about all his recent books, Vargas Llosa's translator is the singular Edith Grossman, who is now unquestionably the leading translator of Spanish into English and who does another admirable job on Nada, by Carmen Laforet. This autobiographical first novel was originally published in Spain in 1945, when the author was 24 years old, but to all intents and purposes has been unavailable to American readers. This Modern Library edition, with a perceptive introduction by (!) Vargas Llosa, makes plain that Nada is a minor classic of 20th-century European literature, as well as proof that a coming-of-age novel doesn't have to be self-indulgent or self-pitying.

The fiction list closes out with Ian McEwan's short, intense, brilliantly written On Chesil Beach, a novel about which readers seem to have passionate feelings pro or con. Set in the summer of 1962, it describes the disastrous wedding night of a young man and woman who "were both virgins" and "lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible." Some readers have found Edward and Florence uninteresting and their behavior unconvincing. Perhaps it is because they are my exact contemporaries and because I remember that time so well, I find them heartbreakingly real, and their failure to connect either literally or emotionally strikes me as all too true to human nature. McEwan's fiction just gets better and better, and even when he's in a minor mode, as he is here, he is nothing short of amazing.

As to nonfiction, the one book that isn't about the United States is The Unnatural History of the Sea, by Callum Roberts, which explores in great depth the ways in which humankind is systematically -- and with incredible lack of foresight -- depleting the ostensibly "inexhaustible" resources of the oceans. Since the American fishing industry has contributed more than its share to the butchery of fish and seafood, obviously there is indeed some American history here, but Roberts's focus is on the entire Western Hemisphere, where there's plenty of blame to go around. No one who's been paying reasonably close attention to environmental issues will find much new here, but as a synthesis of available information Roberts's book is invaluable, not to mention deeply disturbing.

Of the works specifically about American history, the most ambitious is What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe. The newest volume in the invaluable Oxford History of the United States, this covers a period often overlooked because of intense interest in the events that preceded and followed it -- the Revolution and the Civil War -- but Howe persuasively argues it was a time of great revolutions in communications and transportation that fundamentally changed the young nation. Howe is deeply sympathetic to the now-forgotten Whig party and to John Quincy Adams, far less so to Andrew Jackson. This is history with a point of view, argued convincingly but with full acknowledgment of other positions. It's a very long and complex book, but its pace never falters.

Americans were prodigious drinkers in the years about which Howe writes, in contrast to the period covered in Michael A. Lerner's Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. This is the first full history (at least of which I am aware) of New York City in the dry years, and it is in all respects a first-rate piece of work. Lerner, too, comes to his task with a point of view, one that's just about impossible to dispute: that Prohibition "was the most ambitious attempt to legislate morality and personal behavior in the history of the modern United States" and that in virtually every respect it was a complete disaster. Focusing on New York, Manhattan specifically, he is able to show in great (and often highly entertaining) detail how New Yorkers disobeyed the law at every possible turn, how attempts to enforce it were farcical, how crime and corruption were its inevitable consequences.

During that same time there was controversy of similar intensity in Massachusetts, where two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were tried, convicted and ultimately put to death for crimes they very likely did not commit: the murders of two men in the course of a payroll robbery in the working-class town of Braintree. Zillions of words have been written about the case, which ultimately stirred powerful emotions around the world, so Bruce Watson wades into familiar territory in Sacco & Vanzetti, but his even-handed account will be a useful introduction to the case for younger readers and an excellent refresher course for older ones. Watson clearly is sympathetic to the accused men and contemptuous of the judge, Webster Thayer, who presided over the kangaroo court in which they were convicted, but he keeps everything in balance and readily acknowledges that there never will be final answers to all the questions the case raises.

Finally, two biographies. In Boone, Robert Morgan carefully separates legend from reality in the life of the country's most famous frontiersman. The Daniel Boone who emerges here is a far more interesting and appealing man than the one portrayed in "the distortions of television and Walt Disney." He was tough but also gentle, a loyal and dedicated family man, a friend rather than an enemy of the Indians. The great irony of his life, Morgan argues, is that by his very explorations of the wilderness he so loved, he opened it to the great wave of settlers who inhabited and in too many respects destroyed it. Boone's story is the story of America, Morgan says, and he's right.

Then there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He too has been the subject of zillions of words, precious few of them so well chosen as Jean Edward Smith's in FDR. In a little more than 600 pages of text, Smith has told the entire story of Roosevelt's astonishing life, yet he really misses nothing of consequence. He does not shy away from Roosevelt's shortcomings and failures -- his manipulativeness, his scheme to "pack" the Supreme Court -- but his overall judgment is overwhelmingly positive, as well it should be. Roosevelt brought the nation through Depression and world war, and made as bold a mark on his country as any other man who held the presidency.

See you next month. *

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.