Standard Operating Procedure
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
The Penguin Press, 286 pages, $25.95

Standard Operating Procedure—the film—is a mannered, stealthy web, the product of an artful, rather self-important yet depressed spider who sees Abu Ghraib prison as the obligingly ambivalent provocation for "an Errol Morris picture."  read more »

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
By Rick Perlstein
Scribner, 881 pages, $37.50

Every theme park has a theme. Nixonland offers mendacity in all its glory: whoppers, hyperbole, obfuscation, prevarication, perjury, forgery and self-deception. One of Rick Perlstein's favorite verbs is a necessary one: "Nixon lied," the author writes frequently in Nixonland. Many people lie, but in this expedition into a Coney Island of the psyche, the book's central subject wallows in a culture of deceit.  read more »

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria. W. W. Norton, 292 pages, $25.95.

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is one of those peculiar volumes public thinkers of a certain disposition, upon reaching a certain popular standing, seem compelled to write: an omnibus summation of the recent trajectory of their thinking—and, by extension, the state of the world.  read more »

In 1944, Lieutenant-Commander James Michener was serving as a general go-to guy for the Navy on the tiny South Pacific island of Espiritu Santu when he was confronted with an unusual problem: A sailor had been officially discharged from duty but refused to leave the area and return to his family home in Alabama. It turned out that the young man had fallen in love with a local island girl, and she was bearing his child. The sailor had no problem serving in combat against the Japanese fleet, but the idea of telling his parents in L.A.  read more »

AUDITION
by Barbara Walters
Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $29.95

Journalists are, by necessity, chameleons, or, as Janet Malcolm famously put it, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”  read more »

Attachment

By Isabel Fonseca

Alfred A. Knopf, 306 pages, $23.95

Oh, to be Isabel Fonseca! A stunning brunette with high cheekbones and that glam international surname that suggests a yummy pairing of fontina and prosecco. Second wife of Martin Amis, easily among the top five writers working in the English language (never mind those scathing reviews of his recent Sept. 11 essay collection; part of genius is just being brave and prolific)—surely they’re not snarling at each other over whose turn it is to clean the cat’s litter box. Author of Bury Me Standing, a Serious Nonfiction Work about gypsies that took her four years of intense, virtuous immersion research ... and now, with consummate versatility, of a novel as fruity and delicious as the cocktails served on the fictional tropical island of St. Jacques, where it’s primarily set.  read more »

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc modifications and additions, so that by 1972, the same basic car had become a 3,300-pound, 375-horsepower V-8 behemoth.  read more »

A WRITER'S PEOPLE: WAYS OF LOOKING AND FEELING
By V. S. Naipaul
Alfred A. Knopf, 189 pages, $24.95

If the Nobel Prize is the ticket to one’s own funeral, as T. S. Eliot once quipped, then V. S. Naipaul is taking the scenic route. His authorized (but unsupervised) biography has just appeared in the United Kingdom, where the press mined it for every mention of his nastiness toward his first wife and mistress. But before that drama replays itself here, Mr. Naipaul has published A Writer’s People, a series of essays and reminisces in which he ruminates on the reputations of fellow writers. Derek Walcott, Anthony Powell and even Flaubert come under the knife, and serve as entry points for a kind of negative introspection: Mr. Naipaul defines himself by what he’s not.  read more »

RIGHT IS WRONG
By Arianna Huffington
Alfred A. Knopf, 388 pages, $24.95

Full disclosure: Arianna Huffington and I once had a somewhat half-hearted discussion about my possibly contributing to her eponymous über-blog, The Huffington Post. Nothing ever came of it, but in my time in Washington—even though Arianna lives mostly in L.A.—she’s been a regular guest at the same parties and meetings and panels as I have. She’s even invited me to some.

She’s a unique presence in D.C.: exuberant, friendly, eager to help people network among her vast collection of acquaintances, and, perhaps most unusually for around here, always beautifully dressed. Whenever I see her, it’s our custom to compare shoes. Hers are invariably better.  read more »

THE HAKAWATI
By Rabih Alameddine
Alfred A. Knopf, 513 pages, $25.95

The Hakawati, Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine’s third novel, is a late entry to a field that includes movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and novels like The Tin Drum—stories that process situations of extreme sadness and moral complexity through the viewpoint of a child. It’s a device with great potential for showing up the childish side of adult politics, and—always the set piece of this genre—how everyday life continues in spite of it all.  read more »