Our Favorite Books of 2008.

• Position: Recommended readings

By Kate Clinton

2008 was a year when "the right to comfort" seemed to achieve constitutional status. It was practically a felony to discomfort anyone with the actual facts about class, race, or gender. Everyone became like Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck : "I don't wanna talk about it."

In The Child , author Sarah Schulman discomforts the reader with a tightly told story of a troubled gay teen, an Internet pedophilia sting, a senseless murder, a murder trial, and a child molestation trial. With crisp dialogue and a clearly detailed sense of place, Schulman bores in on the main characters and their supporting or non-supporting systems. Through them, she illuminates homophobia, victimhood, and the justice system.

The Child is Schulman's eleventh novel and was ready for publication in 1999 but wasn't published until 2007. Her coda, "Challenging the Myth of Merit-Based Publishing," is a must-read examination of the resistance to discomforting truths about gay and lesbian lives.

Respectably Queer , by Jane Ward, assistant professor of women's studies at UC-Riverside, is a fascinating case study of three nonprofit queer organizations: the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, Christopher Street West, and Bienestar, an HIV services organization for gay Latinos. Ward traces class and race conflicts in each group with a focus on the misuses of diversity culture. She gets into the nitty-gritty of on-the-ground founders, funders, and clients of three evolving organizations. It is a cautionary tale about using corporate-style diversity measurements while trying to grow a progressive LGBT movement. She finds cold comfort in the corporatization of queer resistance.

Both Sarah Schulman's fiction and Jane Ward's nonfiction chronicle the mainstream drive toward the containment and domestication of difference as it is mirrored in the LGBT movement.

Kate Clinton is a columnist for The Progressive.

By Ruth Conniff

A s the news focused on America's economic meltdown, I was reading the massive new biography of the richest man in the world. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life , by Alice Schroeder, is the entertaining story of our country's leading capitalist, and a valuable portrait of American capitalism.

Buffett comes from mixed political lineage--Calvin Coolidge Republicans on his father's side and William Jennings Bryan Democrats on his mother's. Over the course of his career, Buffett invested in and got to know everything about businesses as diverse as textiles, furniture, newspapers (his friendship with Washington Post publisher Kay Graham is fascinating), and investment banks, including Salomon Brothers, which he saved from a disaster resembling the current Wall Street mess.

Schroeder gives an excellent description of the house of cards on Wall Street that continues to fall on us all.

Sketches of Buffett soulmates like the indomitable, 100-year-old Rose Blumkin, who emigrated from Minsk to found a furniture superstore in Omaha, are nicely drawn.

The book begins with an anecdote about Buffett "spitting in the champagne" of New Economy billionaires at the height of the tech boom. His beliefs about risk and sound business are unchanging. He predicted the collapse of an unregulated market back in 2003, to the amusement of Alan Greenspan, who mocked him for calling derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."

Born in the Depression to a father who hated FDR's "socialism," Buffett focused on becoming rich from a very young age. He sold gum and soda as a kid, and filed his first tax return as a paperboy, for $7, after deducting the bike and watch he used on his route.

He was a bookie in high school with a pinball machine racket, and developed a golf ball resale business that led him to send a hapless friend in a homemade diving suit to the bottom of local lakes in search of balls.

While you can't help but admire Buffett's brilliance and drive, the flip side is that, as he builds his empire, or "snowball," he hardly notices events like the civil rights movement unfolding around him.

Buffett's rightwing Congressman father lost a reelection bid thanks to his vote for the anti-labor Taft-Hartley bill. But Buffett became increasingly liberal after his father's death. Buffett now is a champion of confiscatory estate taxes and tough financial regulation.

Ironically, the worshipful response to Buffett's wealth has gained a huge audience for his denunciations of greed.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.

By Anne-Marie Cusac

I had a disconcerting experience when I visited my local bookstore to ask for a copy of Alan Weisman's The World Without Us . The bookseller's face turned gleeful as he recalled the description of the demise of Tucson. Without humans, the city would disappear quickly because people really shouldn't be living there, he said.

Feeling queasy, I bought the book anyhow. But the bookseller's exhilaration foreshadowed my own reaction. It's macabre to imagine the end of human existence, yet religions have preoccupied themselves with the subject for centuries. For the secularists among us, Weisman's detailed prediction of how the natural world would respond with fecundity to the absence of humans is almost thrilling, as the human landscape would turn into a green and crawling one.

Behind the book lies the distinct possibility that we humans are destroying our planet's ability to sustain us, that an Earth without humans--and without the other species we are liable to bring down with us--could indeed be real in a century or two.

Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania also addresses the environmental crisis intelligently. In the face of a bottled water industry that has grown globally to $60 billion today, Royte provides evidence that U.S. tap water, despite some health concerns, is better regulated than bottled water, and generally safe. Bottlemania would be better without the tedious narratives about the battle against Nestle's control of spring water in Fryeburg, Maine. The book could also lose some of Royte's asides. "So there is...