Ten best crime novels: 2009

Bill Ott named his ten best list of 2009 crime novels (defined as books reviewed in Booklist between May 1, 2008, and April 15, 2009).

One title on Ott's list:

Liars Anonymous. By Louise Ure. 2009. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $25.95 (9780312375867).

Jessica Dancing Gamage got away with murder and has been living with it ever since. Now the past comes back full force when she is forced to return to her home turf. This masterfully constructed psychological thriller, which rests on fiercely moral underpinnings, cements Ure’s position alongside such masters as Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters.

Read about another book on Ott's list.

The Page 69 Test: Liars Anonymous.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: John G. McCurdy's "Citizen Bachelors"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States by John G. McCurdy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed “a man without a wife is but half a man” and since then historians have taken Franklin at his word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation. Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and this debate was instrumental in the creation of American citizenship.

In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America, McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the United States and for most of the seventeenth century their presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without marital consequences. At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social, and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor was welcomed into American society.

Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that has subsequently come to define the very essence of American citizenship.

Read more about Citizen Bachelors at the Cornell University Press website.

Learn more about the author and his scholarship at John G. McCurdy's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Citizen Bachelors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Matthew Aaron Goodman's "Hold Love Strong"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Hold Love Strong by Matthew Aaron Goodman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this poignant tale of self-discovery, a young man struggles to survive the New York City housing projects in the face of familial, communal, and personal devastation.

Born to a thirteen-year-old in the bathroom of his family's small apartment, Abraham Sing leton enters a world laden with the obstacles inherent in an impoverished community. In spite of the crack epidemic and the HIV crisis that ravage their neighborhood, the Singleton family -- cousins, an uncle, an aunt, Abraham, and his mother -- is held together by Abraham's heroic grandmother, whose deep faith and stoic nature have always given them a sense of wholeness and hope. But when the family goes through several harrowing losses, not even his grandmother may be strong enough to lead them through.

At the center of this story is Abraham, the youngest of the Singletons. Deeply intuitive and cerebral, he is determined to thrive in a place that has destroyed the dreams of those around him. College means opportunity, yet it also means leaving behind those he loves. Abraham's journey into adulthood will break his heart but ultimately offer the possibility of redemption.

In this haunting, lyrical, and evocative novel, Matthew Goodman composes a paean to the power of family and belonging in the African-American community. Hold Love Strong is a spellbinding coming-of-age tale about love, hope, and the will to survive, and a stunning universal story about the incredible capacity of the human spirit.

Read an excerpt from Hold Love Strong, and learn more about the book and author at Matthew Aaron Goodman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hold Love Strong.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about our parenting culture

Lenore Skenazy is a syndicated columnist, founder of www.freerangekids.com, and author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.

She compiled a list of seven fascinating books about our parenting culture. One book on her list:

A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano

When people ask me, “What do kids lose if we don’t let them go Free-Range?” I usually answer something like, “The joy of childhood! The exhilaration of shouting, ‘I DID IT MYSELF!!’” But in this book, Marano, an editor at Psychology Today, actually visits campuses to see how overprotected kids do once they are out on their own. She is troubled by what she finds: A lot of young adults unable to function, and even breaking down in record numbers. When parents try to do too much for their kids, she says, they end up hurting more than helping. Hers is a cautionary tale.

Read about the other six books on Skenazy's list.

Read an excerpt from Free-Range Kids and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Listen to author Lenore Skenazy discuss Free-Range Kids.

Watch author Lenore Skenazy discuss Free-Range Kids.

Visit the Free-Range Kids website.

Seven fascinating books about our parenting culture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Frank Partnoy’s "The Match King"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals by Frank Partnoy.

About the book, from the publisher:

At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression.

Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in tax havens, fudged accounting figures, off-balance-sheet accounting, even forgery. He created a raft of innovative financial products— many of them precursors to instruments wreaking havoc in today's markets. When his Wall Street empire collapsed, millions went bankrupt.

Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disaster for the Financial Times, New York Times, NPR, and CBS's "60 Minutes," recasts the life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius in ways that force us to re-think our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.

Read more about the book and author at Frank Partnoy's website, and watch Frank Partnoy on The Daily Show.

Frank Partnoy is the author of F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader and Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Greed Corrupted the Financial Markets. He has worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and a corporate lawyer, and has testified as an expert before both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. A graduate of Yale Law School, he currently teaches law at the University of San Diego.

The Page 99 Test: The Match King.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Robert Roper reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Robert Roper, author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.

His entry begins:

I just finished a two-year stint as a judge in a fiction prize competition, so most if not all of my discretionary reading time was taken up with reading all or part of roughly 80 nominated novels per year...oy vey. If you like novels do not ever accept such an assignment. Since this year's awards were announced about a month ago I've read nothing fictional, nothing at all. Maybe my novel appetite will return some day.

That said, a couple of novels from the last two years gave me a lot of pleasure. One is Finding Nouf, by Zoë Ferraris. It's a cleanly written, humanly rich nominal murder mystery set in contemporary Saudi Arabia. The author was married to a Saudi man some years ago and lived there and kept her eyes open. Imagine a modern-day Emily Bronte parachuted into the land of Wahabi restrictions on women's education and free movement. No kind of tract, the novel biopsies Saudi society with exquisite thoroughness and quietly presents an impossible love story...which becomes excitingly less impossible by book's end....[read on]

Robert Roper has won awards for his fiction and nonfiction alike. His book Fatal Mountaineer won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize given by London’s Royal Geographical Society. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches at Johns Hopkins.

Read more about his Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War at the publisher's website.

Among the praise for Now the Drum of War:

"At its heart, despite so much suffering and death, Roper's book is a moving, vivid exploration of love in many forms....One of the great strengths of Now the Drum of War, whose title is taken from a line in Whitman's poem "City of Ships," is that it extends its reach to the whole Whitman family."
—Floyd Skloot, Philadelphia Inquirer

"In Now the Drum of War, Robert Roper captures this turning point in Whitman's life -- the transformation of his poetry but also the dramatic new chapter in the story of the Whitman family."
—Daniel Mark Epstein, Wall Street Journal

Writers Read: Robert Roper.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best femmes fatales in literature

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best femmes fatales in literature.

One femme fatale on the list:

Brigid O'Shaughnessy

In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Brigid has hired private eye Sam Spade to protect her. Spade sleeps with Brigid even though he knows that she killed his former partner, Miles Archer. In the end, he turns her in.

Read about another femme fatale on Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Judith K. Schafer's "Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans by Judith Kelleher Schafer.

About the book, from the publisher:

When a priest suggested to one of the first governors of Louisiana that he banish all disreputable women to raise the colony’s moral tone, the governor responded, “If I send away all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all.” Primitive, mosquito infested, and disease ridden, early French colonial New Orleans offered few attractions to entice respectable women as residents. King Louis XIV of France solved the population problem in 1721 by emptying Paris’s La Salpêtrière prison of many of its most notorious prostitutes and convicts and sending them to Louisiana. Many of these women continued to ply their trade in New Orleans.

In Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women, Judith Kelleher Schafer examines case histories from the First District Court of New Orleans and tells the engrossing story of prostitution in the city prior to the Civil War. Louisiana law did not criminalize the selling of sex until the Progressive Era, although the law forbade keeping a brothel. Police arrested individual public women on vague charges, for being “lewd and abandoned” or vagrants. The city’s wealthy and influential landlords, some of whom made huge profits by renting their property as brothels, wanted their tenants back on the streets as soon as possible, and they often hired the best criminal attorneys to help release the women from jail. The courts, in turn, often treated these “public women” leniently, exacting small fines or sending them to the city’s workhouse for a few months. As a result, prosecutors dropped almost all prostitution cases before trial.

Relying on previously unexamined court records and newly available newspaper articles, Schafer ably details the brutal and often harrowing lives of the women and young girls who engaged in prostitution. Some watched as gangs of rowdy men smashed their furniture; some endured beatings by their customers or other public women enraged by fits of jealousy; others were murdered. Schafer discusses the sexual exploitation of children, sex across the color line, violence among and against public women, and the city’s feeble attempts to suppress the trade. She also profiles several infamous New Orleans sex workers, including Delia Swift, alias Bridget Fury, a flaming redhead with a fondness for stabbing men, and Emily Eubanks and her daughter Elisabeth, free women of color known for assaulting white women.

Although scholars have written much about prostitution in New Orleans’ Storyville era, few historical studies on prostitution in antebellum New Orleans exist. Schafer’s rich analysis fills this gap and offers insight into an intriguing period in the history of the “oldest profession” in the Crescent City.

Learn more about Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women at the publisher's website.

Judith Kelleher Schafer is the author of several books, including Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana and Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862. Visit her Tulane faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Philip Baruth's "The Brothers Boswell"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth.

About the book, from the publisher:

The year is 1763.Twenty-two-year-old James Boswell of Edinburgh is eager to advance himself in London society. Today his sights are set on furthering his acquaintance with Dr. Samuel Johnson, famed for his Dictionary; they are going to take a boat across the Thames to Greenwich Palace. Watching them secretly is John Boswell, James's younger brother. He has stalked his older brother for days. Consumed with envy, John is planning to take revenge on his brother and Johnson for presumed slights. He carries a pair of miniature pistols that fire a single golden bullet each and there is murder in his heart.

Read an excerpt of The Brothers Boswell, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

Philip Baruth is an award-winning commentator for Vermont Public Radio and a graduate of Brown University with an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine. His previous novel, The X President (Bantam, 2003) received wide critical acclaim. He teaches at the University of Vermont.

The Page 69 Test: The Brothers Boswell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books about art thefts

R.A. Scotti, author of Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa (Knopf, 2009), named her five best books about art thefts for the Wall Street Journal.

One book on her list:

Portrait of Dr. Gachet
by Cynthia Saltzman
Viking, 1998

The most vexing vanishing act since the disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 is the loss of Vincent van Gogh's last major work, "Portrait of Dr. Gachet." Van Gogh painted the portrait of his French physician in the summer of 1890. A few days later, he committed suicide. As Cynthia Saltzman recounts in meticulous detail, "Dr. Gachet" passed through many hands over the course of a century. In the late 1930s, it was seized by the Nazis and sold by Hermann Goering for $53,000. The painting was last seen in public at Christie's auction house in New York in May 1990, when Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito caused a sensation by bidding $82.5 million, an unprecedented sum, to win the work. Shortly after the van Gogh arrived in Tokyo, though, Saito's fortunes changed. He was charged with bribery, lost his business and lived his remaining years under house arrest. When he died in 1996, "Dr. Gachet" seemed to pass away with him; its fate is unknown.

Read about another book on Scotti's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Steve Luxenberg's "Annie's Ghosts"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Everyone knew it: her grown children, her friends, even people she’d only recently met. So when her secret emerged, her son Steve Luxenberg was bewildered. He was certain that his mother had no siblings, just as he knew that her name was Beth, and that she had raised her children, above all, to tell the truth.

By then, Beth was nearly eighty, and in fragile health. While seeing a new doctor, she had casually mentioned a disabled sister, sent away at age two. For what reason? Was she physically disabled? Mentally ill? The questions were dizzying, the answers out of reach. Beth had said she knew nothing of her sister’s fate.

Six months after Beth’s death in 1999, the secret surfaced once more. This time, it had a name: Annie.

Steve Luxenberg began digging. As he dug, he uncovered more and more. His mother’s name wasn’t Beth. His aunt hadn’t been two when she’d been hospitalized. She’d been twenty-one; his mother had been twenty-three. The sisters had grown up together. Annie had spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, while Beth had set out to hide her sister’s existence. Why?

Employing his skills as a journalist while struggling to maintain his empathy as a son, Luxenberg pieces together the story of his mother’s motivations, his aunt’s unknown life, and the times in which they lived. His search takes him to imperial Russia and Depression-era Detroit, through the Holocaust in Ukraine and the Philippine war zone, and back to the hospitals where Annie and many others were lost to memory.

Combining the power of reportage with the intrigue of mystery, Annie’s Ghosts explores the nature of self-deception and self-preservation. The result is equal parts memoir, social history, and riveting detective story.

Read the prologue to Annie’s Ghosts and visit Steve Luxenberg’s website, where you can see photos and documents relating to the book and read his blog.

Steve Luxenberg, an associate editor at the Washington Post, has worked for more than 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor. Post reporters working with Luxenberg have won several major reporting awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for explanatory journalism.

The Page 99 Test: Annie's Ghosts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jamie Freveletti's "Running from the Devil"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Running from the Devil by Jamie Freveletti.

About the novel, from the publisher:

A race against evil . . .

Emma Caldridge, a chemist for a cosmetics company, is en route from Miami to Bogotá when her plane is hijacked and spins out of control into the mountains near the Venezuelan border. Thrown unhurt from the wreckage, she can do nothing but watch as guerrillas take the other passengers hostage.

An endurance marathon runner, Emma silently trails the guerrillas and their captives, using her athletic prowess and scientific knowledge to stay alive. Those skills become essential when she discovers an injured passenger, secret government agent Cameron Sumner, separated from the group. Together they follow the hostages, staying one step ahead by staying one step behind.

Meanwhile, as news of the hijacking breaks in Washington, the Department of Defense turns to Edward Banner, former military officer and current CEO of a security consulting firm, for help. Banner quickly sends a special task force to the crash site, intent on locating the survivors before it’s too late.

But finding Emma and Sumner is only the beginning, as Banner starts to realize that Emma was on a personal mission when the plane went down. There is more to the beautiful, talented biochemist than anyone ever imagined, for in her possession is a volatile biological weapon in an ingenious disguise, one that her enemies have set for auction to the highest bidder.

Combining the action-packed plotting of Lee Child and Daniel Silva, and the rich scientific detail of Kathy Reichs and Tess Gerritsen, Running from the Devil is a breathtaking debut from a bold and daring new author.

Browse inside Running from the Devil, and learn more about the book and author at Jamie Freveletti's website and blog.

Jamie Freveletti is a trial attorney, martial artist, and runner. She has crewed for an elite ultra-marathon runner at 50 mile, 100 mile, and twenty-four hour races across the country, and both practices and teaches Aikido, a Japanese martial art.

The Page 69 Test: Running from the Devil.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Eugenie Samuel Reich reading?

This weekend's featured contributor to Writers Read: Eugenie Samuel Reich, author the newly released Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World. She is also a former editor at New Scientist. She has written for Nature, New Scientist, and The Boston Globe, and is known for her hard hitting reports on irregular science.

Among the early praise for Plastic Fantastic:

"Eugenie Samuel Reich offers an inside look into how the scientific establishment deals with human imperfection. Plastic Fantastic is a transfixing cautionary tale of how easily wrongdoers can hide and thrive in modern science."
—Jörg Blech, author of Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills

"In a warts 'n all expose of the scientific process, Eugenie Reich investigates the world's greatest scientific fraud. Fascinating, startling and highly readable. If you thought science was as pure as the driven snow, prepare to be shocked."
—Justin Mullins, consultant editor, New Scientist

“A riveting tale of scientific detective work, and a story about an important issue in science that is often overlooked. A well researched page-turner.”
—Amir Aczel, author of Fermat’s Last Theorem

Learn more about Plastic Fantastic and the author's other work at Eugenie Samuel Reich's website.

Find out what Eugenie Samuel Reich has been reading at Writers Read.

--Marshal Zeringue

Curtiss Ann Matlock's "Chin Up, Honey," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Curtiss Ann Matlock's Chin Up, Honey.

The entry begins:

Actors for the lead roles in a movie version of my novel? This question requires slipping fully into fantasy. I watch so few contemporary movies. The more convoluted the world gets, the more I retreat into TCM. Part of the idea for Chin Up, Honey came from a nostalgic look back to the sixties. Writing the flashbacks for Emma and John Cole gave me a great deal of fun. There’s a movie scene in the book, where Emma is watching Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

That said, I have from the beginning seen Robert Duvall in the role of the elder Winston Valentine. Winston is a secondary character who became prominent and appears in each of the Valentine series of novels. Readers, and myself, have fallen in love with him. In a movie version of the book, I see him as the town narrator.

For the lead role of emotional Emma Berry...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Curtiss Ann Matlock's website and blog.

Curtiss Ann Matlock is the author of nearly forty books and short stories.

My Book, The Movie: Chin Up, Honey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books: Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart, author of the best-selling Afghanistan memoir The Places in Between, is director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

He named his favorite travel books for The Week. One title on the list:

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Penguin, $20).

“Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs”—“I hate journeys and travelers”—is the first line. The structural anthropologist’s ironic, paradoxical insights into “primitive culture” and the illusions of foreigners are combined with an adventure up the Amazon.

Read about another title on Stewart's list.

Tristes Tropiques also appears on Jonathan Rosen's list of the five best books about the search for Eden.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patrick Allitt's "The Conservatives"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History by Patrick Allitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

This lively book traces the development of American conservatism from Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Daniel Webster, through Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover, to William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and William Kristol. Conservatism has assumed a variety of forms, historian Patrick Allitt argues, because it has been chiefly reactive, responding to perceived threats and challenges at different moments in the nation’s history.

While few Americans described themselves as conservatives before the 1930s, certain groups, beginning with the Federalists in the 1790s, can reasonably be thought of in that way. The book discusses changing ideas about what ought to be conserved, and why. Conservatives sometimes favored but at other times opposed a strong central government, sometimes criticized free-market capitalism but at other times supported it. Some denigrated democracy while others championed it. Core elements, however, have connected thinkers in a specifically American conservative tradition, in particular a skepticism about human equality and fears for the survival of civilization. Allitt brings the story of that tradition to the end of the twentieth century, examining how conservatives rose to dominance during the Cold War. Throughout the book he offers original insights into the connections between the development of conservatism and the larger history of the nation.

Read an excerpt from The Conservatives and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Patrick Allitt is Goodrich C. White Professor of History and Director of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum at Emory University. Author of six books, he is also the presenter of six lecture series with The Teaching Company on aspects of American and British history.

The Page 99 Test: The Conservatives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Rebecca Cantrell's "A Trace of Smoke"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Even though hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows all too well how tough it is to survive in 1931 Berlin, she is devastated when she sees a photograph of her brother’s body posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Ernst, a cross-dressing lounge singer at a seedy nightclub, had many secrets, a never-ending list of lovers, and plenty of opportunities to get into trouble.

Hannah delves into the city’s dark underbelly to flush out his murderer, but the late night arrival of a five-year-old orphan on her doorstep complicates matters. The endearing Anton claims that Hannah is his mother… and that her dead brother Ernst is his father.

As her investigations into Ernst’s murder and Anton's parentage uncover political intrigue and sex scandals in the top ranks of the rising Nazi party, Hannah fears not only for her own life, but for that of a small boy who has come to call her “mother.”

Read an excerpt from A Trace of Smoke, and learn more about the book and author at Rebecca Cantrell's website and blog. Watch the video trailer for A Trace of Smoke.

The Page 69 Test: A Trace of Smoke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten books on nuclear weapons & arms control

Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, Diplomat Scholar at the University of Virginia, and the author or editor of many books, including Cooperative Threat Reduction, Missile Defense, and the Nuclear Future, Space Assurance or Space Dominance? The Case Against Weaponizing Space, Nuclear Risk Reduction in South Asia, and Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia.

His latest book is Better Safe than Sorry, The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Krepon named his top ten books on nuclear weapons and arms control for Foreign Policy. One book on his list:

Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (1959).

Brodie moved to the RAND Corporation, where he wrote this work seeking to counter the prevailing winds of nuclear policy on which Kissinger had set sail. Brodie's background as a naval historian provided an excellent vantage point to assess nuclear matters. Brodie resisted enthusiasms on almost every page. This book continues to offer rewards. For example, he warned against preventive war which required "an extraordinary, indeed almost boundless, degree of conviction and resolution on the part of the President."

Read about another book on Krepon's list.

Also see the Page 99 Test: Better Safe Than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb by Michael Krepon.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Philip Ball reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Philip Ball, author of several books on aspects of science and its interactions with other aspects of culture including Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind and The Sun and Moon Corrupted (a novel).

His entry begins:

I’m not sure if this makes it a good or bad time to be asking what I’m reading: I am currently one of the judges for the Royal Society Science Book Prize (formerly the Aventis Prize), which means that the honest answer to the question is ‘too damned much’. Six boxes too much. But of course there are some pleasurable things among them, though I’m scarcely at liberty yet to say what those are.

Aside from all that, I have recently finished Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China (HarperCollins). It is extremely good. I’m embarrassed to say that, although Winchester has seemingly always been well reviewed, I’d not read anything of his before. But on the strength of this I can see why he is so highly regarded. Needham, the biochemist-turned-Sinologist who introduced the West to the history of Chinese science, had the kind of life that cried out for a biography, but Winchester doesn’t put a foot wrong, making effective use of his strong knowledge of China and providing a reliably balanced view of Needham’s successes and failures.

This encouraged me to indulge my Sinophile side by reading...[read on]

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a Consultant Editor for Nature. He worked as an editor for physical sciences at Nature for over ten years, where his brief extended from biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology.

Ball is the author of several popular books on science, including works on the nature of water, pattern formation in the natural world, color in art, and the science of social and political philosophy. He has written widely on the interactions between art and science, and has delivered lectures to scientific and general audiences at venues ranging from the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) to the NASA Ames Research Center and the London School of Economics.

Learn more about Philip Ball and his work at his website and blog.

Writers Read: Philip Ball.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten subterranean books

Stephen Smith, a writer, journalist, broadcaster, and the culture correspondent for BBC Newsnight, is the author of several books, including Cuba: Land of Miracles, Underground London, and the newly released Underground England, which "travels the length, breadth and depth of the country in search of wonders both natural and man-made, from smugglers' tunnels to Knights Templar chapels."

For the Guardian, he named his top 10 subterranean books. One title on the list:

The Time Machine by HG Wells

One of the finest works of science fiction set in the subterranean. In the dystopian future imagined by Wells, the Morlocks are a race who lived below ground. In researching my book, I was amazed to find that some of my fellow countrymen have made similar lifestyle choices to the Morlocks. It's no slight on the good people of Wolverley in the West Midlands to say that they're cavemen. There, a des res called Rock House was on the market, carved out of a cliff face and a snip at £25,000.

Read about another book on Smith's list.

--Marshal Zeringue