Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us.  Tom Vanderbilt has taken a long, hard look at this seemingly commonplace activity and distilled what he found into a book that is part scientific research study, part sociological inquiry, part self-help manual and part cautionary tale. He has certainly not solved all the myriad mysteries of the traffic puzzle, but he has produced a lively study of the problem in all its complexity.

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights. In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one. Kennan boosted Nitze's government career by hiring him to join the State Department's policy planning staff during the Truman administration, but the differences between them were wide.             

Health Care Meltdown: Confronting The Myths and Fixing Our Failing System.   This book is is very timely and amazingly lucid on a topic seen by many as beyond comprehension. LeBow has sifted through the complexity and pinpointed the key players and the major causes of a system that has "melted down" - i.e. become dysfunctional for millions of Americans. The book documents how vested interests - people who make a great deal of money by maintaining the status quo - have systematically worked to keep Americans clueless about the extent of the health care meltdown, the causes of the meltdown, and the real story about feasible alternatives.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes.  Ansary has written an informative and thoroughly engaging look at the past, present, and future of Islam. With his seamless and charming prose, he challenges conventional wisdom and appeals for a fuller understanding of how Islam and the world at large have shaped each other.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan writes about how our food is grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. And each section culminates in a meal -- a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate soufflé (made with fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game (except for Dungeons & Dragons) who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. The book is also the story of a multi-generational family curse that courses through the book, leaving troubles and tragedy in its wake.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.  From Publishers Weekly Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money.

The Paradox of Choice:  Why More is Less Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s Western world is actually making us miserable. Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies Focusing on how voters are systematically mistaken in their grasp of economics-according to Caplan, the No. 1 area of concern among voters in most election years-he effectively refutes the "miracle" of aggregation, showing that an uninformed populace will often vote against measures that benefit the majority. Caplan discusses how rational consumers often make irrational voters, why it's in politicians' interest to foment that irrationality, what economists make of the (non) existence of systematic bias.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-century’s ugliest years.

Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. The account covers Mr. Obama's early years from childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia to his college and young adult life at Columbia University and then to the south side of Chicago.  The book concludes with a visit to his late father's family in Kenya.

Things Fall Apart. One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism.

Class.  It is a humorous look at class structue in America.  The New York Times Book Review:  "A shrewd and entertaining commmentary on American mores today."

All The Little Live Things Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy and cancer. "Quite simply, a beautiful novel--strong, moving, wise, funny--as topical as today's newspaper. 

Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  The book on the decline of American community by Harvard University Public Policy Professor Robert Putnam.  It is very well documented with statistics and clear analysis