Michiko Kakutani's Top 10 Books of 2009

Michiko Kakutani's Top 10 Books of 2009

There’s a good reason why the three daily book critics for The New York Times don’t make 10-best lists at the end of the year: we can’t. None of us has read everything. Our reviewing assignments don’t overlap. None of us has an objective overview of the year’s best and most important books, but this is what we do have: favorites. They are books we have not only admired in the abstract but also enjoyed, recommended and given to friends. Read more...
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'Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image'
By MICHAEL CASEY
This keenly observed book traces how Che Guevara went from being a symbol of resistance to the capitalist system to one of the most marketable and marketed brands around the globe, how the guerrilla fighter became a logo as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or McDonald’s golden arches. (Vintage Books, $15.95)

* Review

'The Good Soldiers'
By DAVID FINKEL
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Washington Post provides a harrowing chronicle of the Iraq war as experienced on the ground, day by day, moment by moment, by members of an Army battalion sent to Baghdad during the surge in 2007. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)

* Review

'The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon'
By DAVID GRANN
At once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing, this entertaining book retraces the footsteps of an Indiana Jones-like explorer named Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who never returned from a 1925 expedition into the dark heart of the Amazonian wilderness. (Doubleday, $27.50)

* Review

'Lit: A Memoir'
By MARY KARR
This searing volume, fueled by the author's lyrical gift for language, recounts the story of her addiction and recovery, a failed marriage and her efforts to escape the Texas childhood she delineated with such ferocity in her acclaimed 1995 memoir “The Liars' Club.” (Harper, $25.99)

* Review

'True Compass: A Memoir
By EDWARD M. KENNEDY
The late Massachusetts senator writes movingly in this deeply felt autobiography about his privileged but pressured upbringing, the assassinations of his brothers Jack and Bobby, his own career as one of America's foremost legislators, and the role that sheer will and perseverance played in his life. (Twelve, $35)

* Review

'A Gate at The Stairs'
By LORRIE MOORE
By turns heartbreaking and funny, sobering and wry, this novel chronicles the coming of age of a young woman in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95)

* Review

'Lark and Termite'
By JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
Like the author's 1984 classic “Machine Dreams,” this incandescent novel creates an emotionally piercing portrait of a family in West Virginia and the fallout that a war -- in this case, the Korean war -- has on all their lives. (Alfred A. Knopf, $24)

* Review

'Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong'
By TERRY TEACHOUT
This important new biography restores the great Satchmo to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists — as a dazzling innovator and pioneer, who indelibly shaped the emergence and evolution of jazz. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30)

* Review

'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned'
By WELLS TOWER
An arresting debut collection of stories that establishes the author as a writer of uncommon talents - a writer with Sam Shepard's radar for the surreal, Frederick Barthelme's ear for slang and David Foster Wallace's eye for the often hilarious absurdities of contemporary life. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)

* Review

'In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic'
By DAVID WESSEL
A lucid -- and riveting -- account of the financial meltdown of 2008 and the frantic efforts of the Fed chairman, the Treasury Secretary and a small group of associates to shore up the U.S. economy, as they tired to catch and stabilize one toppling fiscal domino after the next. (Crown Business, $26.99)

* Review

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