I’ve been distracted with journalism and will inaugurate the first post of 2008 with a books round-up of 2007. Possibly this is the last "best of" list for ’07 or, at least, the most belated.
Here are my picks for Slate.
In addition to those excellent volumes, it’s been a productive year for my friends. Deborah Siegal published Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. Harriet Washington brought forth the NBCC-nominated Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. The paperback of The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner came out in June. Alissa Quart’s Hothouse Kids: How the Pressure to Succeed Threatens Childhood was released in paperback one month later. Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World came out in paperback in October.
The just-released, and I believe very bestselling, The Sweet Far Thing was written by the ingenious Libba Bray.
Looking ahead, the paperback of Josh Prager’s The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World will be published on March 11 and Gary Bass’s Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention is coming out in hardback on August 19. Happy reading!