Favorite books of 2003.

Fox News could not have met a better match than comedian Al Franken, author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. From his chapter "Ann Coulter: Nutcase" to "Bill O'Reilly: Lying, Splotchy Bully," Franken bear-baits the Right's biggest blowhards. It couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. I laughed out loud at "Hannity and Colmes"--throughout the book, Fox's liberal punching bag, Alan Colmes, appears with his name in minute type. Unlike too many liberals, Franken relishes a fight. His relentless fact-checking and phone calls nearly drove Bill O'Reilly insane with rage (and that's before O'Reilly's failed lawsuit over this book).

Franken's chapters on rightwing sanctimony about the uncivil "tone" of politics are dead-on. He cites the push-poll Bush used against John McCain in South Carolina, asking voters whether, if they knew McCain fathered an illegitimate black child, they would be more or less likely to vote for him. He suggests a counter-poll: "If you knew that, during the five-and-a-half years John McCain was being tortured in Hanoi, George W. Bush snorted five-and-a-half kilograms of cocaine, would you be more likely to vote for Governor Bush or less likely to vote for Governor Bush?"

Joe Conason covers much of the same ground as Franken in Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth but without the humor. In his chapter "Male Cheerleaders and Chickenhawks," Conason, like Franken, takes on conservative draft-dodgers who charge that liberals are unpatriotic and "hate America." But then he spoils his point with his own tone: "Rank and file reactionaries out in the red-state hinterland may believe this tripe, but Republican insiders [who live in 'major cities like New York and Washington'] know better." I prefer Franken's folksy false modesty. Besides that, Conason attacks "a handful of annoying academics and activists" on the left who give credence to rightwing caricatures. It's true that there's bad blood between leftwing activists and free-trading Clintonites. But it's a buzz kill to pick at those wounds in books that are really about catharsis and rallying the troops.

The most serious work in the liars' club is David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Corn has broken big stories for The Nation, especially on the White House leak that blew a CIA agent's cover. Here, he traces Bush's mishandling of terrorism, the President's lies about his tax policy and energy plan, and the selling of the Iraq war.

Corn, Conason, and Franken all blame the pack mentality of the media for giving Bush a free ride. The conventional wisdom that Bush is a well-meaning bumbler has ruled press coverage since the 2000 campaign. But as David Greenberg points out in his thoughtful book Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, nothing galls a jaded reporter like being taken for a sucker. Once the pack starts focusing on a pattern of lying, and if they pick up the scent of blood, treatment of the President can go from fawning to feral overnight. These books may be the first growl.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

The poet, essayist, and translator Kenneth Rexroth cultivated his outsider status, in part for political reasons. A pacifist and an anarchist, he became a conscientious objector during World War II. The U.S. policy of rounding up and imprisoning Japanese Americans during that war had a profound effect on Rexroth. "He declared his 'disaffiliation from the American capitalist state' complete--and for the remaining years of his life, he would act in American letters and history not as a disaffiliated passive bystander recollecting in tranquility or in bitterness, but as an alienated activist-poet, a devoted social commentator and agitator," writes editor Sam Hamill in an introductory essay to The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

In that role, Rexroth had a profound effect on the direction of American poetry. He hosted the reading that led to the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the subsequent obscenity trial.

Though he is often called the grandfather of the Beats, Rexroth's relation to that movement in poetry was an uneasy one. "An entomologist," he said in response to efforts to designate him a Beat poet, "is not a bug."

This much-needed volume contains poems of erotic love, reverence for nature, ecological dismay, erudition, and political commitment. One of the great pleasures of reading Rexroth poetry is that a single poem may engage many of these subjects. In "Gic to Hat," he writes of picking up the volume of the encyclopedia with those letters on the back. The entry for "Grosbeak" occasions this recollection:

I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse, And instantly and clearly the revelation Of a song of incredible purity and joy, My first rose-breasted grosbeak, Facing the low sun, his body Suffused with light. I was motionless and cold in the hot evening Until he flew away, and I went on knowing In my twelfth year one of the great things Of my life had happened. Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek. The farm has given way to an impoverished suburb On the parched lawn are starlings, alien and aggressive. And I am on the other side of the continent Ten years in an unfriendly city. Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo is an energetic, tender novel about family on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The stories within the big story of the Reyes family are often pleasing in themselves, the voices full, and the writing hilarious. It's easy to get caught up in these things and not realize at first that you are in the middle of a profound passage. Other paragraphs feel more like a window shattering, the impact is so strong: "Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot. Everyone, the women frying lunch putting warm coins in your hand. The market sellers asking--What else? The taxi drivers racing to make the light. The baby purring on a mother's fat shoulder. Welders, firemen, grandmothers, bank tellers, shoeshine boys, and diplomats. Everybody, every single one needs a lot. The planet swings on its axis, a drunk trying to do a pirouette. Me, me, me! Every fist with an empty glass in the air. The earth throbbing like a field ready to burst into dandelion."

Caramelo is the kind of novel that can make you look closely at life and see even its most embittering moments as part of a grand and satisfying gift.

Each of the stories in All the Men Are Sleeping, by D.R. MacDonald, is linked to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like Mexico, the Canadian Maritime Provinces have suffered decades of economic depression and generations departing for U.S. jobs.

"Oh, Jesus, them hardwood batons," reminisces the character Little Norman, remembering a steel strike from the early 1920s. Decades later, on the morning his fellow striker...