Our favorite books of 2005.

• Author: Clinton, Kate

By Kate Clinton

Perhaps it was finding out that Starbucks will be putting religious messages on its coffee cups or getting a prayer card on my "lunch" tray on Alaska Airlines (the prayer wasn't for a real sandwich) that made reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith almost a sinful pleasure. Critics of his book have said that it is cheeky, smart-alecky and, well, irreverent, it is The Daily Show's "This Week in God" with a doctorate from Stanford. It is an argument to root out religious irrationality and all its works. But it takes a wrong turn at the end when Harris's vigorous atheism, in its argument for just war and just torture, becomes just as irrational as religion.

My culturally induced, adult-onset ADD caused me to abandon most fiction I started this year. Andrea Levy's Small Island was just the Ritalin I needed, and her multiple narratives and flashbacks were perfectly suited to my condition. She tells a story set in Jamaica and England, before and after World War II. It is a narrative of race and class told through impeccable detail, perfectly pitched dialogue, and fully realized characters. Finally, a "couldn't-put-it-down."

I had the pleasure of getting Leslie Feinberg's first novel, Drag King Dreams, in galleys and it wasn't paginated. Even if I'd dropped it, I would have been able to reassemble it since the plot barrels along. It is also an island novel about class and race during wartime. The island is Manhattan, and the conflict is Bush's Iraq War. Feinberg, long a respected transgender activist, adds gender to the mix with a community of characters who are sexual immigrants and refugees. You will be able to pick the book up in February 2006.

Kate Clinton is a humorist and the author of "What the L?"

By Ruth Conniff

This was a good year for a close examination of bullshit, provided by philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt in his monograph On Bullshit. As the country wakes up to the heavy load that has been dumped on it by the Bush Administration, Frankfurt's parsing of his theme is particularly appropriate.

"The realms of advertising and public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept," Frankfurt writes.

Frankfurt's main concern--separating bullshit from lies--could be the central problem for anyone seeking to understand the Bush White House. "It's impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Frankfurt writes. How much does Bush know? Did he really think the mission was accomplished in Iraq? That Brownie was doing a great job? How much of the simplistic hokum he spouts does he himself believe? And how much is a brilliant--though quickly unraveling-concoction of Republican handlers?

Unlike the simple liar, who seeks to disguise a particular truth, the bullshit artist cares nothing for reality. In its place, he constructs a whole edifice of his own, Frankfurt suggests--a towering sculpture of manure.

Think of Karl Rove. Think of the whole structure of loose associations brought together to garner support for this Administration: God, yellow ribbon bumper stickers, family values, the President's alleged "decisiveness" and "compassion," and all that other bullshit.

As I was reading Frankfurt, I was reminded of a radio call-in show I heard recently, in which a Republican caller lambasted the liberal guest for suggesting that the President had lied to get us into the war in Iraq. "In order to know whether he lied you would have to know what was in his heart!" the caller said. She went on to describe what she felt was in the President's heart--honor, integrity, and Christian values.

By thus focusing on the bullshit and leaving aside the facts, Bush's supporters have managed to sustain positive feelings about the President in the face of overwhelming failure and even demonstrably false representations of reality in Iraq and here at home.

Frankfurt explains the prevalence of bullshit in our culture in three ways. First, people are pushed to talk about things they know nothing about (punditry). Second, people feel they ought to have opinions about things without having any information. "The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility ... to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world." Finally, general skepticism about reliable information (bombardment of TV news and ads) increases the sense that we are drowning in bullshit.

In this atmosphere, the author suggests, people retreat to valuing sincerity rather than the truth. The world may be full of bullshit, but we can value people who are true to themselves, who seem somehow authentic.

This brings me back to the caller to the radio show.

Some voters, apparently, chose Bush in response to this feeling of being overwhelmed by bullshit: "I can't know all the facts, I can't trust the news, but he seems like a good guy. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

But there are some situations (hurricanes, quagmires, indictments) you can't bullshit your way out of. Next year may be different.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

E. L. Doctorow's The March traces the Civil War experiences of the people who followed William Tecumseh Sherman's scorched earth campaign. We meet emancipated slaves seeking freedom and safety, soldiers, Northern opportunists, Southern white sympathizers and those with few options. In the complexity of Doctorow's vision in this work of historical fiction lies its moral power.

"War is ... all hell," Sherman famously said, and this novel's depiction of plunder for the sake of plunder, and violence for the love of revenge and emotional release, seems to enact that observation. The Civil War may have been the war that ended slavery, but the novel contains little evidence of principled or inspired action. It is clear, for instance, that many Union soldiers shared the racism of their Southern counterparts. Some, while freeing the slaves, found opportunities to profit from their forced labor. One general conscripts a former slave to act as his personal chef. Nor does Doctorow shy away from the appalling face of war.

But Doctorow's novel also suggests that, as Sherman himself believed, the slaveholders would never give up slavery as long as the economic infrastructure of the region permitted it. "There was such wealth to be got from slave labor," notes one soldier, "it was no wonder these people were fighting to the death." The burn, plunder, pillage, destroy policy, which the book enacts in detail and which Sherman used against Native Americans in the years after the Civil War, destroyed the Confederacy. At the same time, in taking the crops and the riches of the South for...