Our favorite books of 2010.

• Position: Recommended readings

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By Kate Clinton

F or five years, I have been in a book group. We meet, monthly at different members homes, order in, gossip like crazy, then discuss the book, usually a nonfiction policy tome. I generally sit at the kids' table. But even I was able to understand Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (Picador). It is a lucid dissection of Homo Economicus and of the failures of free market ideology, especially when computer abstractions meet the reality of economic collapse. We agreed that Patel's solutions were a bit wanting, so it forced us to discuss "Well, what would you do?" This summer, my partner was reading the new translation of The Second Sex , written by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. Though some sections are dated--duh--Beauvoir documents the secondary status of women from hunter-gatherer to mid-twentieth century with a staggering mass of data from biology, physiology, folklore, and literature. After a few "listen to this" readings, my galpal proposed a marathon oral reading on the streets of Provincetown. That would have taken us into December.

Instead, we started a series of Saturday night "Feminist Classic Readings" from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. outside the pizza place. At first, there were four of us, but by mid-July, crowds gathered, people came with their classics, stood up on a wrought iron chair, and read--Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Molly Ivins, June Jordan. One balmy August night, twenty-one different people read Twenty-one Love Poems by Adrienne Rich.

In these atomized, Kindled, freakishly dumb days, I recommend the solidarity of communal readings. Start a group. Stage a reading series at the mall.

Kate Clinton is a humorist. Her latest book is "I Told You So."

By Ruth Conniff

2 010 was a year of seismic changes: aftershocks from the earthquakes that caused Wall Street's collapse, millions of foreclosures, a huge economic recession, and a political and media culture that nurtured the rise of rightwing populism.

A handful of great books explain how we got here. In The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W. W. Norton), Michael Lewis chronicles, in a rollicking, raconteur style, the events that set the world economy teetering. He gets right to the rotten heart of the deals that threw capitalism into crisis--subprime mortgage trades. He introduces the people who invented these deals and then pumped and dumped them. Read it to laugh, cry, and get angry at the chutzpah and criminality of Wall Street.

In The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books), media critics John Nichols and Robert McChesney show how giant corporations hollowed out another pillar of American life--the press. It's not technology that produced the crisis in print journalism, they argue, but the concentration of media in the hands of a few big corporations.

Old media is dying because these conglomerates seek high returns on their investments--and as a profit-making enterprise, journalism is finished. Closing bureaus, trimming staff, and focusing on "lifestyle" reporting and PR are the only ways big media will continue.

There has been a 73 percent drop in newsgathering by the Baltimore Sun since 1990, the authors report. According to a Pew study they cite, 14 percent of the news in Baltimore is actual journalism, while 86 percent is now PR.

No wonder we were caught flatfooted by the housing crisis.

If news-for-profit is dead, Nichols and McChesney optimistically predict the rise of journalism as a public-interest endeavor. They show how subsidized media was part of the founders' vision of a democratic society and argue for a return to this early, public-interest model.

The best political book I read this year was set in sixteenth century England. Wolf Hall (Henry Holt) is the story of Henry VIII as told by Thomas Cromwell--the first modern political consultant. Cromwell helped the monarchy separate from the Catholic Church, played the palace court game astutely, and got rich, despite humble origins, by understanding banking and the rise of mercantile capitalism. Hilary Mantel's imaginative, poetic, and layered prose brings to life the beauty and horror of the time--from Thomas More's torture chambers, to the whispering court, to the upheaval of the Reformation. It makes you glad to live in a modern, secular democracy. And yet so much here is so familiar that it gives you pause.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

L ast spring, I met a new medic in the U.S. Army. Just weeks before her deployment to Afghanistan, we were part of a carload headed to the Indy Motor Speedway. During that several-hour drive, she talked about her life plans, her affections, basic training (which she likened to a cost-free fat camp), her running speed (14:56 for two miles), how to do a tracheotomy, and a recent twelve-hour, soggy, mud-heavy, uphill and downhill hike carrying 120 pounds.

She is nineteen. She joined the Army to get an education. She wants to attend college on the GI Bill. She wants to become a doctor. Once she deployed, she became my Facebook friend, which lets me know she's alive and OK. But I know little of that war. I am not alone. On October 22, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote, "The idea that the United States is at war and hardly any of its citizens are paying attention to the terrible burden being shouldered by its men and women in uniform is beyond appalling."

The antidote is attention.

So I am delighted to note the existence of recent books by two talented nonfiction writers who also have huge followings.

Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (Anchor) is already a bestseller, but it's now in paperback and includes both new developments and Freedom of Information Act material Krakauer has obtained since the first edition. This is the story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who signed up with a profound sense of duty and died in Afghanistan in 2004. The Bush Administration, after trying to manipulate the resistant Tillman into a political symbol, misrepresented his death, suppressing evidence that he died under friendly fire.

Krakauer conveys a man who reads, questions, and strives physically and intellectually. (At one point Tillman, an admirer of Noam Chomsky, requested to meet him. Chomsky agreed, though the meeting never took place.)

Krakauer repeatedly shows where Tillman's life stood, for instance, at the instant of the U.S.S. Cole bombing or the day Osama bin Laden declared a fatwa...