Our favorite books 2004

Finally, there is the journey of a life still being lived. Alice Walker: A Life, by Evelyn C. White, will inform, awaken, debunk, and demystify notions about one of the most important figures in American literary history.

White spent ten years researching and writing this biography, with Walker's generous cooperation. A former reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle and editor of The Black Women's Health Book, White unfolds Walker's life story with both skill and ease.

She steers a course directly through the controversies that have marked Walker's life and career, from the criticisms of Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (and the making of the movie) The Color Purple, to Walker's crusade against female genital mutilation in Africa, to her marriage during the civil rights era to Jewish activist Mel Leventhal.

"With regard to the white man with whom she now shared her life," White writes, "Alice later said that she refused to allow the Swahili-obsessed 'revolutionaries' living in Newark and Chicago to denigrate a marriage forged in the menacing face of the Klan."

Whether you revere or revile Walker, this book is fascinating reading.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and the co-host of "The Morning Show" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.

By John Nichols

Tom Paine, whose little books inspired so many revolutions, would be proud. In a year when weblogs, talk radio, and cable TV shout shows were supposed to be driving American politics, books turned out to be the most powerful tools of all. The best books of the year reshaped the dialogue about the Bush Administration and its war. Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill told us more about dark intrigues of the Bush White House than four years of New York Times and Washington Post reporting, while James Mann's brilliant Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet laid bare the ideological underpinnings of the neoconservative clique that ruled while Bush vacationed on the ranch in Texas. Too much attention went to the sorry apologias for the President penned by Bob Woodward and others who traded access for accuracy; Suskind and Mann produced profound insights into the most secretive Administration in American history.

Four other books went beyond the story of one Administration to explain the bigger picture of our moment. Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic is the most important of these, if only because it reintroduced the terms "empire" and "imperialism" into the general discourse. Nomi Prins's Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America and Representative Sherrod Brown's Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed are essential primers on the economic crisis the United States has already entered into. Finally, Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America tells us more than any of us wants to know about why it has proven so difficult to challenge the lies of empire and economics that continue to define our lives.