Salon Book Awards 2007

"The Father of All Things" by Tom Bissell

The two books about Vietnam on our list this year prompt a question: When is a war truly over? Can a soldier ever really "get out"? Tom Bissell's engrossing memoir about his relationship to his father, a Vietnam veteran, offers a sobering illustration of how a war's legacy can extend across generations. Tom Bissell wasn't born until after his father returned from Southeast Asia, yet in his mind the collapse of South Vietnam and the crumbling of his parents' marriage are "endlessly connected." At the heart of "The Father of All Things" is a journey the two men took together to Vietnam, 40 years after Bissell's father last set foot in that country. By turns hilarious, grief-stricken, perplexed and enlightening, Bissell's account of that trip offers a new understanding of the war, one designed for all those Americans who, though too young to remember it, still live in its shadow.

"Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations" by Georgina Howell

Born into Victorian wealth and propriety in 1860s Britain, Gertrude Bell abandoned convention in her 30s to become a mountain climber and explorer, crisscrossing the Arabian desert on her own in the years before World War I, excavating archaeological sites, befriending chieftains and sheiks and writing best-selling books about her adventures. Her political expertise and influence in the region were so prized by Winston Churchill that after the war she became, with T.E. Lawrence, the chief architect of modern Iraq. Unfortunately, her personal life was less successful; ill-fated love affairs and family tragedies took their toll. A woman of great physical courage, panache and intelligence (she spoke six languages, wrote and translated poetry, drew maps for the British Army and photographed ancient ruins), Bell is a dream subject for any biographer, and Howell turns her story into a ripping yarn, complete with detailed accounts of Bell's early, life-and-death exploits while mountaineering in the Alps.

"Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner

Before Sept. 11, most Americans (not to mention foreign nationals) would probably have described the Central Intelligence Agency as a puppet-master operation with eyes everywhere, skillfully manipulating world events from behind the scenes. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the revelations of faulty intelligence contributing to the buildup to the Iraq war, we've caught a glimpse of a different but equally troubling CIA. Tim Weiner's fascinating and masterfully reported "Legacy of Ashes" locks this new image in place. It reveals an agency chronically and often disastrously short on solid intelligence, and all too prone to embarking on half-baked covert operations with little concern for the long-term consequences (or even the short-term ones). Weiner, working from impeccable sources, documents that the CIA's recent bumblings represent more than just a temporary difficulty adjusting to the post-Cold War world; incompetence has been a major problem since the agency's inception. The implications of this story are scary (America is in desperate need of a decent overseas intelligence service), but the telling is never less than compulsively readable.

"The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" by Judith Freeman

Raymond Chandler -- the supreme master of hard-boiled prose and founder of the bruised-romantic school of noir heroes -- is also the poet laureate of the seedy side of Los Angeles. Judith Freeman, a novelist fascinated by the intersection between Chandler's detective fiction and his real life, became curious about the writer's unusual marriage to a woman almost 20 years his senior. Material on Cissy Chandler's life is scarce (her husband burned all her papers after her death), so Freeman decided to exercise her fiction-writer's skills on the clues that remain: a long inventory Cissy kept of Ray's collection of glass animals, a remark he made about his wife's habit of doing housework in the nude, a handful of photographs and poems, etc. Most evocative are the excursions Freeman makes to houses and apartments the Chandlers rented throughout the city (the couple moved a lot), extended wanderings through a city that seems both lost and timeless. Her version of L.A. is as moodily unforgettable as Chandler's, a fitting tribute to the "new kind of American loneliness" born there and the man who made it his muse.

"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

"Imaginative" is not a word customarily applied to environmental reporting, but Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" deserves that praise. Rather than trying to dent our apathy with dire images of melting glaciers and megahurricanes, he takes the opposite approach, describing how quickly and utterly the planet would be changed if the human race simply vanished. Within days, New York's subway tunnels would flood, leading to the corrosion of steel supports and the eventual collapse of the streets: Lexington Avenue "becomes a river." Suburban subdivisions fare no better, shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. Our cats would do just fine, but the dogs ... not so much (too dependent on humanity and vulnerable to larger predators). The earth's air and water would soon sweeten without us around to poison it, but our plastic crap, all those bottles and bags, will be sticking around until some microbe figures out how to turn them into lunch. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing, perhaps because it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power -- picturing a much healthier planet -- and considering a less drastic way to get there.

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