A modern portrait of American soldiers' life after war. A powerhouse work of reporting on an important and undercovered issue. Go read it.

Scenes from Detroit in decline, by a local reporter and native son. A very good, and very sad, book. Takes you much deeper than any of the national media coverage.

A series of essays on the experience of modern aviation. Langewiesche is at his absolute best when writing about flight (besides being an experienced pilot himself, his father literally wrote the book on aviation). Just about every chapter in this book is riveting. Highly recommended.

A collection of Weingarten's best longform journalism for the Washington Post. At least three stories in this book are on my list of all-time favorite articles. Read it.

Case studies in the fuzziness of photographic truth. Although all the discussions in this book center around photographs, it's not really about photography, it's about epistemology, and the insidious ways we accept a certain "truth" based on false assumptions, about how we sometimes assume there is a single "truth" when there might be many or none. I have trouble summarizing this book but Morris is a master of taking something most people would accept at face value and pulling on the thread until you're reconsidering everything you ever thought you knew. Highly recommended.

All about maps and the weirdos who love them. Jennings is a man after my own heart, someone who likes details for the way they point to bigger things, and maps are a great example of that. This is a great book, full of humor and warmth.

A madcap story of three competitive birders criss-crossing North America in an effort to spot the most bird species in a calendar year. I could care less about birds but I absolutely loved this. A perfect light, inconsequential, totally engrossing adventure story.

A journalist's account of a year embedded with an army unit in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. The best book I've read so far about the individual soldier's experience in modern warfare. Highly recommended, the ground-level complement to a broader view like The Forever War.

Memoirs of a fire lookout in the mountains of New Mexico. This is a nice mix of history, personal reflection, and the sort of idiosyncratic bits you would expect from someone who spends half the year by himself in a tiny room in the middle of the wilderness. A nice, very atmospheric book with hints of Thoreau and Muir throughout.

A ridiculously detailed fly-on-the-wall account of the 1988 presidential election. This book is the opposite of a light read. It's not something you can just have on the nightstand and casually dip in and out of every once in a while. It's a book that you wrestle with. That being said, it's probably one of my favorite books of all time. Even though the book is twenty years old, it feels totally relevant. Cramer does more than anyone else I've ever read to actually make sense of the absurd machine of modern American politics, to diagram how all the different pieces - the candidates, the money, the media, the handlers, the voters - fit together. You get to understand what kind of bubble candidates and officeholders live in, and the conflicting incentives at play. More than anything he does a damn good job of answering the core question of the book, which is, what kind of person has the gall to think they ought to be president? In the end, this book is part farce, part tragedy, and it's hard to which is sadder: what happens to the people who don't win, or what happens to the people who do. I could go on about this book for hours - it really and truly blew me away.

A behind-the-scenes account of Ed Rendell's first term as mayor of Philadelphia. I don't know if a better book has been written about local politics. This book may be one of the best ones I've read about politics, period. It's a dizzying portrayal of a big city mayor trying to navigate public employee unions, the media, state and federal government, job loss, white flight, and more. It's not perfect (Bissinger lays it on a bit thick sometimes), but overall I loved it.

An exploration of running culture in modern America and among a rural Mexican tribe known for its running prowess. I really hate running, so when I say I loved this book, it's not because I'm a running geek. This book is tough to summarize, and it confounded my expectations. I expected a run-of-the-mill pop journalism exploration of a sport subculture, complete with all the obligatory expert visits, university studies, and so on, but this book reads like a movie (and I have no doubt the rights have already been sold). It's just flat-out fun: a great story, memorable characters, exotic locales, and no small amount of suspense.

The author's undercover look at Mexican immigrants in America. To call Conover's project "undercover" is a little misleading, since as a white, blond American he can't exactly pass for Mexican, nor does he try. What he does do is insinuate himself into a group of migrant workers and document their experience. He works the orchards in Arizona, visits their Mexican hometown, and makes illegal border crossings. This book is over 20 years old, but it doesn't feel dated at all, and Conover resists the temptation to preach. It's a great, thought-provoking read.

The author chronicles a year spent trying to adhere to biblical rules as closely as possible. I expected this book to be entertaining and full of fun facts I would end up annoying people with at parties (it was both of these things), but I wasn't prepared for how sincere and reflective it turned out to be. Jacobs successfully walks the fine line between being funny and going for cheap laughs at the expense of religion. He seems to be making an honest effort to reconcile his lapsed Jewish sensibilities with a very alien culture and get a better understanding of his ancestry and of the modern sacred. Highly recommended.

Gawande's first book, about the dimensions of medical fallibility. Not as good as Better, but still well worth a read. He captures some of the tensions that exist in the American health care system that get in the way of ideal patient outcomes, and, more than anything else, gives you a new appreciation for how hard it is to be a good doctor.

Two comedy writers compete in an around-the-world race without using airplanes. Absolutely hilarious. Read it.

A first-hand account of the invasion of Iraq from a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with the Marines' 1st Recon Battalion. This book is impressively restrained in its politics. Rather than focusing on the right or wrong of the invasion, the focus is squarely on the Marines he accompanies. He takes you inside the camps and the convoys and shows you what the soldiers go through with sharp, funny prose and a great eye for detail.

Bissinger spends a year in Odessa, Texas in the late 1980's chronicling the high school football team and the town that surrounds it. An outstanding book, and one that's only tangentially about football. The football team is really just a foil to discuss small town America, economic transition, race relations, and teen angst. An outstanding piece of journalism.

Ken Jennings explores the history of trivia and looks inside some of its many subcultures, from college quiz bowl to game shows to pub quiz nights. Jennings surprises as a really sharp, funny narrator. This book is equal parts autobiography, history lesson, and trivia almanac, and has a lot more heart than you'd expect.

The classic sci fi comedy novel. Its fame is well deserved. Read it if you haven't.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about comic book writers in mid-20th century New York. To call this book ambitious would be an understatement, and I probably only absorbed a fraction of its different layers. It's worth reading for the sense of place alone. Chabon is a master of description who gives an unbelievably vivid sense of settings ranging from the Prague ghetto to postwar Manhattan to Antarctica.

Bill Bryson tries to walk the Appalachian Trail and, in so doing, get back in touch with America after spending much of his adult life in England. One of the review blurbs on the back of this book referred to the Appalachian Trail as "the last great American wilderness." I assume that person has never been to Alaska or Utah or the Sierra Nevadas or, for that matter, anywhere west of the Mississippi. But I digress. This book is a really fun read, and a classic Bryson mix of sarcasm, sincerity, and historical anecdotes. In the end, the book is a kind of loving elegy for the Appalachian wilderness and an appreciation of the physical and emotional tonic nature can provide. Highly recommended.

A book about performance, the pursuit of perfection, and the social and personal barriers to better medical care. Portions of this book are repurposed from Gawande's New Yorker articles, but even if you've read them, the book is utterly fascinating. Gawande uses case studies like executions, the history of hand-washing, and combat medics to make his larger points about achievement in general and the modern medical profession in particular. This is a really ambitious book that sticks the landing.

A look at how Americans create and eat their food, organized into three sections: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer. Pollan's agenda (monocultures are bad, mass-produced meat is bad, our subsidies are bad, fast food is bad, etc.) is clear throughout, but the book is also consistently interesting and full of things you didn't know before. Pollan is a great storyteller and his closing pitch, that you should develop a closer relationship with your most basic necessity, is powerfully made. This book will change the way you look at your food for at least a week, until you revert to all your old habits.

A.J. Jacobs tries to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. This book is one of my favorites, which may say more about me than it does about the book. It obviously has its share of fun facts, but it's also full of very sincere, human moments. Jacobs does a beautiful job of capturing the joy of new knowledge and of tearing down the false dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom.