6 Seth Mnookin | Feeding The Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top | Simon & Schuster | Mnookin, a Vanity Fair contributing editor (and former Phoenix contributor), spent more than a year behind the scenes at Fenway Park, during which he had unfettered access to all layers of the Red Sox organization. Covering the tumultuous 2005 season, he lays bare the workings of one of the biggest and most beloved franchises in sports. At the same time, one of his central theses is that, despite the three-ring-circus atmosphere and incendiary fan interest, this is in many ways — sorry, folks — just another baseball team.
7 Tom Piazza | Why New Orleans Matters | Regan/HarperCollins | Novelist and critic Piazza is a New Orleans transplant (he moved there in 1994), and he knows how to focus on the tourist-accessible pleasures of the Crescent City. But his book is a real argument, laid out to build a case. He woos us with favorite music and food, then moves into an analysis of the primal importance of such pleasures, meanwhile giving vivid portraits of New Orleanians, from Mardi Gras Indian chiefs to gas-station attendants. That he is preaching to the converted — who else will read this book? — matters little.
8 Geoffrey Robertson | The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story Of The Man Who Sent Charles I To The Scaffold | Pantheon |Until now, lawyer John Cooke has been remembered by a single word: “regicide.” Yes, he did invent a new crime, tyranny, and then accused Charles I of having committed it. (Charles went to the ax in 1649.) But Cooke is also responsible for our practice of prosecuting malevolent presidents and dictators under the law rather than assassinating them in their beds, and his many legal-reform efforts predate and rival those of the American Founding Fathers. Robertson, a British human-rights lawyer, gives an incisive, detailed account.
9 Eliot Weinberger | What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles | New Directions | New York editor and translator Weinberger’s collection of essays first appeared in European and Asian newspapers and on the Web. His “What I Heard About Iraq in 2005” is typical, each sentence beginning “I heard,” so that we get “I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘I don’t believe anyone that I know in this administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.’ ” Understated in tone, elegant in form, Weinberger’s essays are the reports of “one man who reads the newspapers,” a version of the man in the street, and an antidote to the media’s professional blowhards.
10 Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 | Knopf | Wright revisits and expands on his earlier excellent reporting for the New Yorker, not only chronicling the origins and the inner machinations of al-Qaeda but also offering an analysis of the complex, almost symbiotic relationship between Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Much of this ground has been covered in other books, but nowhere in a more accessible and engaging narrative.
