BEST NONFICTION OF 2008

THE AGE OF REAGAN:

A History, 1974-2008

By Sean Wilentz

(HarperCollins; 564 pages; $27.95)

Wilentz explains how a 69-year-old former actor built a powerful political machine out of evangelical Christianity, anti-communism and Wall Street. While sharply critical of Reagan's tenure, Wilentz also acknowledges its accomplishments.

ALFRED & EMILY

By Doris Lessing

(Harper; 274 pages; $25.95)

Lessing combines, in a most idiosyncratic fashion, personal history, public history and imagination to tell the story of her parents and their lives in the British Empire in Africa.

ALFRED KAZIN: A Biography

By Richard M. Cook

(Yale University Press; 452 pages; $35)

Cook is attuned to his subject and understands the forces that made this complex and difficult man tick. He does not minimize the critic's faults - arrogance, insecurity, prickliness, hostility.

AMERICAN BUFFALO:

In Search of a Lost Icon

By Steven Rinella

(Spiegel & Grau; 277 pages; $24.95)

The most promising debut by a nature writer in years. Deadpan in his prose and attuned to oddities, Rinella has composed a hymn to a complicated human-animal relationship without an ounce of sentimentality.

AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House

By Jon Meacham

(Random House; 483 pages; $30.

Looked at through Meacham's astute eyes, Jackson is a fascinating figure. Within that spindly frame were many of the competing impulses that typify America today: grace and rage, generosity and violence.

THE AMERICAN RESTING PLACE: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

By Marilyn Yalom; photographs by Reid S. Yalom

(Houghton Mifflin; 336 pages; $30)

Yalom, of Palo Alto, visited many cemeteries and highlights those that display a vivid social context or capture an evolutionary moment in gravestone expression - as, during a period of optimism, the cherub replaced the death's-head - or cemetery design (grim Puritan to bucolic to environmentally sound).

BACARDI AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR CUBA: The Biography of a Cause

By Tom Gjelten (Viking; 413 pages; $27.95)

An appealingly smooth and colorful history of a company that rose in step with Cuban nationalism but is no longer an expression of cubanismo, merely another global multi-brand.

BEAUTIFUL BOY: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

By David Sheff (Houghton Mifflin; 326 pages; $24)

A frightened, beautiful memoir in which the Marin author beats back the cliches of addiction with the honesty of his own story and well-researched acknowledgement of how sadly ordinary addiction is.

BIG BOY RULES

By Steve Fainaru

(Da Capo Press; 254 pages; $26)

A dramatic, journalistic narrative that explores the kidnapping of five Crescent Security Group staffers in Iraq. It's an eye-opener - and in the end a tear-inducer - about the loose ties and loose management of contractors' employees.

BONK: The Curious Coupling of

Science and Sex

By Mary Roach

(Norton; 319 pages; $24.95)

The Oakland author ferrets out basic truths and endless absurd details amid mountains of dry science on sex. Her mostly witting collaborators, sex researchers throughout history, provide plenty of source material. It's a wonderful read.

CHAMPLAIN'S DREAM

By David Hackett Fischer

(Simon & Schuster; 834 pages; $40)

Fischer comes at the French explorer with freshness of purpose and a faith that historical knowledge will deliver something of value: Who was this man? Why should we care? "The answers to all these questions make a story," he says. Yes, they do, and a good one.

CHASING THE FLAME: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

By Samantha Power

(The Penguin Press; 622 pages; $32.95)

Power's impressively researched book chronicles the making of the unlikely humanitarian who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq.

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND:

50th Anniversary Edition

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(New Directions; 94 pages, plus CD; $23.95)

Like the best books of its generation, this one has lost none of its luster over time. It is also bracingly superior to a lot of poetry it has influenced.

THE CORPSE WALKER:

Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up

By Liao Yiwu; translated by Wen Huang

(Pantheon; 320 pages; $25)

This collection of oral histories introduces us to people who find themselves at the bottom of society because of political persecution or economic conditions.

DESCARTES' BONES:

A Skeletal History of the Conflict

Between Faith and Reason

By Russell Shorto

(Doubleday; 299 pages; $26)

By detailing the odd, picaresque tale of Descartes' exhumed, revered, lost and vandalized mortal remains, Shorto furnishes us with a metaphor for the rippling effect that Enlightenment thought had on the development of our world.

DESCENT INTO CHAOS: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan,

Afghanistan, and Central Asia

By Ahmed Rashid

(Viking; 484 pages; $27.95)

The author of "Taliban" leaves one with the unmistakable impression that the bungling of the war in Afghanistan was even worse than the troubled execution of the war in Iraq.

DREAMS AND SHADOWS:

The Future of the Middle East

By Robin Wright

(Penguin Press; 464 pages; $26.95)

With many years of experience reporting from the region, Wright demonstrates a clear understanding of the complexities involved.

AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT

OF MY IMAGINATION

By Elizabeth McCracken

(Little, Brown; 187 pages; $19.99)

McCracken's memoir never seeks to trivialize the loss of her child, but it does show how honesty and humor can help people survive grief, and how hearing other people's stories makes us feel less alone.

FACTORY GIRLS

By Leslie T. Chang

(Spiegel & Grau; 420 pages; $26.)

Chang deftly weaves her family's story of migrations within China and to the West into her fascinating portrait of two migrants.

THE FIRES OF VESUVIUS:

Pompeii Lost and Found

By Mary Beard

(Harvard University Press; 304 pages; $26.95)

A wry and lively story of what is known and what is conjectured about life in Pompeii before the fall.

FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century

By David Lida

(Riverhead; 336 pages; $25.95)

Lida's study offers an unvarnished, off-the-grid tour, full of singers, hustlers and artists, and insight into an ancient, booming but seriously ailing metropolis.

THE FOREVER WAR

By Dexter Filkins

(Alfred A. Knopf, $25)

In blunt prose, rich with details both grotesque and sublime, the New York Times war correspondent illuminates a dark face of a conflict rarely seen save by combatants themselves.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

By Eric Weiner

(Twelve/Hachette Book Group; 329 pages; $25.99)

A lucidly and entertainingly written account of exploring SWB - subjective well-being - in terms of how the World Database of Happiness statistically defines it.

GOD'S CRUCIBLE: Islam and the

Making of Europe, 570-1215

By David Levering Lewis

(Norton; 473 pages; $29.95)

A persuasive case that the Arabs' failure to advance beyond the Pyrenees was a great loss to Europe, which owes much of its Renaissance and modern culture to Muslim civilization.

'HAVE YOU SEEN ...?': A Personal

Introduction to 1,000 Films

By David Thomson

(Knopf; 1,007 pages; $39.95)

The film historian's remarkable collection of essays is as entertaining and enlightening as his magnum opus, "A Biographical Dictionary of Film."

THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO:

An American Family

By Annette Gordon-Reed

(Norton; 798 pages; $35)

A deeply researched and superbly told story that's intended as a biography of the enslaved Hemings family. But it's as much about Thomas Jefferson, who controlled the fate of three generations of Hemingses and many other slaves he owned.

HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS AND HOW EASILY

IT CAN BE BROKEN

By Daniel Mendelsohn

(HarperCollins; 456 pages; $26.95)

What you get in Mendelsohn's criticism is originality and, where necessary, iconoclasm that bear fruit in a fresh look at whatever is under discussion.

HOW FICTION WORKS

By James Wood

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 266 pages; $24)

The critic examines works by such writers as Austen, Flaubert, Kafka, Roth, Tolstoy, Updike and Woolf and explains how they achieve (and fail to achieve) what he calls "lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry."

AN IMPERFECT OFFERING: Humanitarian

Action for the Twenty-First Century

By James Orbinski, M.D.

(Walker; 448 pages; $27)

In his sweeping memoir, Orbinski, a Canadian physician and humanitarian, exposes the surrealism of his work - and of humanitarianism in general - in the most ghastly places on earth.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD: An Eater's Manifesto

By Michael Pollan

(The Penguin Press; 244 pages; $21.95)

In this thoughtful, entertaining and helpful book, Pollan writes that we are victims of the ideology called "nutritionism."

KING: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop

By Harvard Sitkoff

(Hill & Wang; 270 pages; $25)

Sitkoff offers no new revelation about his subject. What he achieves is something at this point much more valuable: a terse account of King's life and legacy, which provides a lucid, nuanced account of the man.

MY LIFE AS A TRAITOR

By Zarah Ghahramani, with Robert Hillman

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 242 pages; $23)

The power of Ghahramani's chilling memoir is in the discovery - hers and ours - that in Iran routine student activism can have devastating consequences.

McMAFIA: Journey Through

the Global Criminal Underworld

By Misha Glenny

(Knopf; 375 pages; $27.95)

This daring attempt at a panoramic primer on shadowy and overlapping global crime syndicates is a bravura piece of globe-trotting reportage.

THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter

Investigates the Darkest Story of

His Life - His Own

By David Carr

(Simon & Schuster; 400 pages; $26)

Carr approaches his memoir of addiction like a reporter writing a profile of someone else and finds that his friends' memories are often different from his own. The result is smooth, personal and thoughtful.

NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

By Rick Perlstein

(Scribner; 881 pages; $37.50)

Perlstein's impressive book is a blow-by-blow account of how the right went from obsolescence to ascendancy, a turnaround that transformed American politics for a generation.

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF

By Julian Barnes

(Knopf; 244 pages; $24.95)

In this surprisingly jocular - although earnest - meditation on mortality, Barnes reports that he thinks about death daily.

ON THE LAPS OF GODS: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation

By Robert Whitaker

(Crown; 386 pages; $24.95)

Whitaker unearths the 1919 "Elaine Massacre," in which more than 100 black Arkansas sharecroppers were murdered for organizing to secure a more equitable price for their cotton, and five white men were killed.

OUTLIERS: The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell

(Little, Brown; 309 pages; $27.99)

In his inspiring book about the myths and the realities of success, Gladwell comes closer than ever before to telling his own unique rags-to-riches story.

PROMISED LAND:

13 Books That Changed America

By Jay Parini

(Doubleday; 385 pages; $24.95)

In our increasingly anti-intellectual culture, the underlying premise of Parini's essays - that books have the power to shape outlooks and influence history - is a welcome beacon.

RIDING TOWARD EVERYWHERE

By William T. Vollmann

(Ecco; 206 pages; $26.95)

Buying a ticket is no way to travel, Vollmann concludes in his unflinching account of train hopping.

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano

By Katie Hafner

(Bloomsbury; 259 pages; $24.99)

For readers familiar with Gould's recordings, or those with a curiosity about how things like pianos get to be the way they are, this book is a source of delight and illumination.

SWIMMING IN A SEA OF DEATH:

A Son's Memoir

By David Rieff

(Simon & Schuster; 180 pages; $21)

The subtext and the strength of Rieff's book are his struggle as he watches the final months of his mother, Susan Sontag, unfold. Truth is at the core of his narrative, and it is hardly sweet.

THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: The Great

Comic-Book Scare and How

It Changed America

By David Hajdu

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 435 pages; $26)

Hajdu explains how early 1950s comic books, considered lowbrow rubbish by the intellectual elite, wound up at the center of a clash of conservative and subversive forces that permanently altered the culture.

THAMES: The Biography

By Peter Ackroyd

(Nan A. Talese; 512 pages; $40)

In myth, in metaphor and in fact, a river has no beginning and no end, and embarking upon a riverine biography might seem a fool's journey. In Ackroyd's sure hands, it is instead a revelation.

THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND:

Reports From a Divided Nation

By Barbara Ehrenreich

(Metropolitan/Henry Holt; 235 pages; $24)

The author of "Nickel and Dimed" finds herself again in a dreadful place where greedy people have forced the middle class onto a narrow ledge. She rages against injustices that will boil the blood of any compassionate reader.

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING:

Death and the American Civil War

By Drew Gilpin Faust

(Knopf; 342 pages; $27.95)

Faust identifies and explains the complex social and political implications of the changing nature of death as the Civil War attained its full dimensions.

THIS COMMON SECRET:

My Journey as an Abortion Doctor

By Susan Wicklund, with Alan Kesselheim

(PublicAffairs; 268 pages; $24.95)

Wicklund's portrait of her tribe of providers is an invaluable contribution, a clear-eyed account that rises above the incessant squawking that characterizes our national obsession.

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY

By Sarah Manguso

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 184 pages; $22)

The writer recounts her struggle with a paralyzing disease and touches upon her life after remission: landing in the psych ward, heavy drinking and then sobriety. Her lessons offer much hope.

A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE:

Rediscovering the New World

By Tony Horwitz

(Holt; 445 pages; $27.50)

The author of "Confederates in the Attic" revives the little-known history of pre-Mayflower America in this wonderful book.

WARTIME WRITINGS: 1943-1949

By Marguerite Duras; translated by Linda Coverdale

(The New Press; 296 pages; $26.95)

In this collection of newly discovered diaries and rough drafts, those familiar with Duras' work will recognize the source material for much of the writing to which she would return throughout her life.