The Year in Books
My favorite new nonfiction book this year is Tulia, by Nate Blakeslee. It's the story of the wrongful prosecution of 47 residents of the town of Tulia, Tex.—38 of them black—based on the made-up testimony of one rogue cop. Some of the defendants got virtual life sentences before the case unraveled. Blakeslee broke the story for the Texas Observer. His book has movie deal written all over it. There's a rich and unlikely mix of characters—devious bad guys, likable victims, and valiant lawyer-heroes who wield their briefcases to save the day. It all makes for a satisfying tale about fighting the good fight.
The best book of "recent history" this year is Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore, by James T. Patterson. After his 1996 Bancroft Prize-winning tour de force Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974, what does the Brown University historian do for an encore? Turn out an equally readable, smart, and fair-minded history of the last century's final quarter. A book like Restless Giant must be impossibly hard to write, since you need to keep in focus both yesterday's news, which lies so close to our present gaze, and events that have already receded into the historical distance. Patterson pulls it off—and in the process mounts a quietly persuasive defense of the "right revolution" that he argues has been central to American politics and society in recent times. more..........
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