12 Delights of Christmas

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(5 of 8)

This is a very discouraging account of the war in Iraq so far, from its flawed inception to its chaotic daily execution. Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, begins as an "ambivalently prowar liberal," siding with Iraqi-exile friends in their hatred of Saddam but skeptical of the Bush Administration's neoconservatives who thought that Iraq could be transformed easily into a pro-American democracy. In Packer's deeply persuasive telling, their false assumptions and inadequate planning ensure that the war will proceed down a path into deepening chaos, and it does. --R.L.

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945

Tony Judt

878 pages; $39.95

A massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable survey of the Continent's difficult passage from the devastation of World War II to the still uncompleted project of the European Community. Judt briskly reviews every part of this complex story, from the Marshall Plan, the cold war and the upheavals of 1968 to the aftershocks from the fall of the Berlin Wall, offering useful and sometimes surprising judgments on all of them. His book becomes the definitive account of Europe's rise from the ashes and its takeoff into an uncertain future. --R.L.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

Joan Didion

227 pages; $23.95

Didion and her husband had been married for almost 40 years on the night when he collapsed at the dinner table and died of a heart attack. The loss devastated Didion so completely that she entered a state of temporary insanity: she literally believed that she could bring her husband back. This memoir is the story of her slow acceptance of what had happened, her journey from madness to the duller, deeper pain of mourning. To watch one of our most acute, acerbic social observers turn her attention to the collapse of her own psyche is to witness an act of consummate personal and artistic bravery. --L.G.

AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

721 pages; $35

A painstaking account of the making and breaking of a complex man. Oppenheimer directed the successful U.S. effort to develop an atomic weapon during World War II. But after the war his opposition to the even bigger hydrogen bomb helped set in motion events that led to his being stripped of his government security clearance. The authors show how the naive Oppenheimer was complicit in his destruction, but they never lose sight of the ugliness and injustice of the process. --R.L.

1776

David McCullough

386 pages; $32

The troops were filthy and low on gunpowder, uniforms and artillery, but they were awash in rum--an average of a bottle per day per man. Their tall, charismatic commander, George Washington, had never led an army in battle. McCullough recounts the events of 1776 as if they had never been told before, with a freshness that brings home the drama and the sheer improbability of the events on which the U.S. is founded. --L.G.

MUSIC

The recording biz had its woes this year, but a lack of good music was not one of them

SPOON

Gimme Fiction; $15.98