Our Favorite Books of 2009

by The Daily Beast Info

The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.

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Nathaniel Rich

Boy Alone. I can't think of any work of literature that has explored the relationship between brothers with as much depth, grace, or candor as Karl Taro Greenfeld's memoir. Truly upsetting and transfixing.

Big Machine. A Stephen King of the Flushing housing projects and the blighted East Bay, Victor LaValle is a master of comic-gothic noir. Thanks to Big Machine, I have a horrible recurring nightmare about being eaten alive by feral cats.

Thy Neighbor's Wife. Gay Talese's brilliant history of morality in America was re-issued this year with a new afterword by the author. Massage parlors have never been so much fun to read about.

Michelle Goldberg, author of 2009's The Means of Reproduction

Richard Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics in 1964, and ever since then the antics of the American right have ensured its enduring relevance. This year, though, conservatives have outdone themselves—read Hofstadter and you’ll be shocked at how perfectly he described the partisans of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Previous generations had their nativists and conspiracy theorists, men who mobilized against purported Illuminatist, Masonic, and papal plots. But the modern right, argued Hofstadter, was unique in its aggrieved sense of dispossession. “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion,” wrote Hofstadter. “The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power.” Nearly every line feels completely contemporary; Hofstadter died long before the rise of the teabaggers, but no one has done a better job of explaining them.

Gerald Posner, author of 2009's Miami Babylon

Although I always promise that my spare time reading will include works of science fiction and wildly inventive novels that will take me far away from the grind of everyday news, I almost always first reach for the nonfiction tomes piled high on my ever-growing "to read" pile. Back to war, crime, massacres, economic crises, and the Cold War, it seems this year’s reading list was only broken on a lighter note by a literary glimpse at a great American novelist.

Here are a baker’s half-dozen.

Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey. When a smooth writer like Bailey gets access to a treasure trove like the journals Cheever kept during his life, the result is a refreshing and new take on Cheever’s prodigious work. It’s also filled with thoroughly entertaining tidbits that make it a fun read.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, by Neil Sheehan. One of my favorite books was Sheehan’s 1988 A Bright Shining Lie. This time he turns his meticulous reporting to the nuclear-arms race and an American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who provides the thread for Sheehan’s great narrative about the high-stakes game of chess that the Soviets and Americans played with nukes.

The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. Washington Post correspondent Finkel does the best job yet of personalizing the war in Iraq by telling the story of two infantry battalions in Baghdad during the surge. Finkel’s stark firsthand reporting delivers a vivid and sobering look at the terrors of the conflict and its devastating toll on ordinary soldiers crushed under declining morale in an unwinnable war.

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City, by John Buntin. Having published this year my own book about the excesses of Miami Beach (Miami Babylon), I thoroughly enjoyed this completely entertaining snapshot of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s. Told through the intertwined lives of mobster Mickey Cohen and police chief William Parker, L.A. Noir is a colorful and entirely different take on the vices of Tinseltown.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. A gripping history of the post-World War I generation that invented the modern central banker and their dominance of global finance. It’s a lively and well-told tale of a great boom and crushing bust, all too reminiscent of our own times. A sobering reminder that we seldom learn from past mistakes.

Columbine, by Dave Cullen. Ten years after Columbine, Cullen adeptly debunks the many myths that persist about the 1999 school shooting while delivering a fast-paced page-turner about the two troubled kids who earned a bloody place in American massacres.