"She liked to look. She might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath. When others wanted to look away, she'd want to look more closely. Wounded and dead bodies fascinated her." This is what Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review, and collaborator with Errol Morris in the making of the movie and book Standard Operating Procedure, tells us about Specialist Sabrina Harman--the MP who took many of the infamous pictures at Abu Ghraib. Those pictures, and the stories told through interviews with the soldiers who participated in the humiliation and, yes, torture at that prison, are the basis of the book and the movie.

What interests me is how much more immediate and inflected and human Gourevitch's writing is than I found the movie, filled with "re-creations," to be. Gourevitch, who has prominently taken some issue with the idea of "objective" journalism, writes in a way that without being polemical tells you exactly where he stands. At its best, it transcends outrage and achieves a kind of surreal bafflement about this notorious and shameful episode in our history.

Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train is a book for geeks, in the best way. Marcus writes distinctly about American musicians -- Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis -- and what they and their music reflect about this country.

Here’s the geeky part: In the recently released fifth edition (it was first published in 1975), the Notes and Discographies section is longer than the book proper. The primary section of essays comes in at an economical 177 pages, while the discography, in which Marcus goes through each featured artist’s catalog, track by track, spans 192 pages. It includes passages like this one, about A Legendary Performer, an Elvis compilation:

Helene Cooper's forebears are two important Liberian families, both of which were among those American slaves who returned to Africa and established the capital of Monrovia. The author spent her childhood in a huge mansion near the ocean, a child of privilege who, with her sister, enjoyed European vacations, fancy cars, and the attentions of many servants. The family adopted another girl, Eunice, who became the third sister in this apparently lucky trio. But then a violent hell broke loose in this nation, when the government of William Tolbert was overthrown, and the Coopers and rest of Liberia's wealthy families became prey for the rebels. The Coopers fled to America--all but Eunice. And this book tells the story not only of the idyll of childhood and the terror of political and military upheaval but of the author's return to her native land and her search for her adoptive sister. Compelling and fascinating, especially about caste and class in this African nation.

Adiga's first novel gives the reader a realistic, often grimly comic look at the matter of class in contemporary India. The narrator, Balram Halwai, is a murderous and deeply prejudiced driver for a rich man. Balram has pulled himself out of the nation's lower strata and goes to to Delhi after being hired to drive a limousine. The narrative is told in retrospect, in the form of letters from Balram to the premier of China, who is about to visit India. The voice is plain and sometimes cruel, but, then, Balram the chauffeur is the victim of cruelty and disdain from his employers. Everything goes better for him after he kills his boss and leaves Delhi. Despite his scapegrace behavior and racist convictions, Balram somehow manages to win the reader over. Maybe it's because of his scapegrace behavior.

In December 2004, Harper's Magazine published a piece by Tom Bissell called "War Wounds: A father and son return to Vietnam." In it, Bissell wrote, "Sometimes it feels as though Vietnam is all my father and I have ever talked about; sometimes it feels as though we have never really talked about it."

I imagine most sons, of any generation, can relate to that sentence on some level. The entire piece was gripping, and it was followed, in 2007, by a full-length book on the same subject, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The subject is timely, as a new generation of soldiers and families deal with the traumatic aftereffects of war, but it's not mere timeliness that makes Bissell's work stand out. He's a thoughtful writer on any subject and this book, his third, might be his best.

Last fall, I read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the first time. To do justice to my fanatical love for it would take thousands of words. I'll spare you.

It was so good, and so driven by James' appealing voice (the text was taken from a series of lectures he gave in the early 20th century) that it sent me scurrying to learn more about James himself. Luckily, Robert D. Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism had recently been published in paperback.

I'll also spare you my theories about the different ways in which biographies can go wrong. Richardson avoids every possible pitfall. It doesn't hurt that his subject was a brilliant, ebullient man who helped found the philosophy of pragmatism, worked (often ahead of his time) in the field of psychology, and "took stairs two or three at a time until he was past fifty."