Our favorite books 2009.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Bibliography

By Kate Clinton

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the cold early months of 2009, to save money on home heating, we burned all our old anti-Bush books. No more bitter cold for us. We were warm and toasty into spring. And it made way for some new books on the shelves.

Nancy Polikoff's Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law (Beacon Press) was a great read for me--one of the last unmarried, childless, petless lesbians this side of the Mississippi, who is constantly asked, "Sowhenyagettinmarried?" Polikoff writes a helpful critique of the same-sex marriage movement. After a nifty summary of legal history in marriage and social movements, she argues for greater forms of family diversity and presents concrete proposals to shift legal priorities to individuals, whether in or out of relationships.

Martin Duberman's third volume of memoir, Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008 (New Press), begins with AIDS as a NYC backdrop and the gay community under conservative onslaught and pens a page-turner of a narrative right up to the disheartening assimilationist tactics of the current LGBT movement. Duberman's memoir is poignant and also deep-dish salacious and wickedly ironic.

I have not yet finished Nomi Prins's It Takes a Pillage: Behind The Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley), but I can already assure you that she, as a former Wall Streeter, delivers on all those promises in the subtitle in engaging and enraging detail. There'll be no need for home heating this winter. If you need more fuel to bank your fires, go see Michael Moore's brilliant documentary Capitalism: A Love Story . It's the show of what Prins tells.

Kate Clinton is a columnist for The Progressive. Her latest book is "I Told You So."

By Ruth Conniff

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Penguin Press), by Liaquat Ahamed, is a series of interlocking biographies of four central bankers of the United States, England, France, and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.

Ahamed explores, in rich detail, how a small, clubbish group of bankers and the very wealthy steered the world economy into disaster, Depression, and World War II. Filled with entertaining anecdotes about larger-than-life figures, especially John Maynard Keynes, the book is instructive but also highly readable.

Keynes appears throughout as a kind of Greek chorus, predicting economic disasters, twitting the elites' attachment to the gold standard, and making a fortune as a currency speculator along the way. He is almost alone in his criticism of the central bankers' inclination to combat inflation at all costs, impose ruinous reparations on Germany, and remain tethered to gold.

Ahamed shows how astonishingly powerful central bankers are, and how interdependent national economies have long been. The author is an investment manager and adviser to hedge funds. He knows his subject and brings what could be dull material vividly to life. But he stops short of drawing any radical parallels to today: "In the current crisis," he writes in his epilogue, "the authorities seemed to have at least staved off a catastrophe" through bank bailouts. It's a pallid conclusion to a colorful book that leaves you gasping at the sheer chutzpah of the handful of powerful men who plunged the world into chaos for a time.

In Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (Rodale Books), William Greider covers some of the same highly relevant historical ground as Ahamed, including the development of the Fed, the gold standard, and class conflict over inflation policy. But while Ahamed seems taken with the aristocratic world he writes about, Greider cares more about barefoot farmers and working folks. In this book, he boils down decades of reporting and writing on economics for the lay person and promotes his unapologetically progressive vision. His ringing endorsement of democratic values is inspiring. And he urges people to revolt against not only "Wall Street's greed and reckless overreaching," but also "the Federal Reserve--sheltered from public scrutiny and protected from political accountability--that engineered America's great shift in fortunes."

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Elizabeth DiNovella

H ilarious. Tender. Brutal. These are the trademarks of one of Americas most dazzling writers, Sherman Alexie. His latest book, War Dances (Grove Press), a collection of poetry and short stories, renders emotional landscapes-anger, joy, anxiety, grief, fear--with skill.

In "War Dances," the short story that lends its name as the book's title, the narrator remembers visiting his sick father in the hospital. His dad, post-surgery, is cold in bed, and the narrator asks a busy nurse for a blanket.

"With blanket in hand, I walked back to my father," the narrator notes. "It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact it was too thin. It wasn't really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn't even good enough for that. It was more like the world's largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health...