Time for Lists of Best Books

It's time already for may lists regarding 2009's best this-and-that. Here's a nine of 10 books on the 'best books' list from a New York Times blogger, Dwight Garner. The 10th book was fiction.

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, By Rebecca Solnit

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, By Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman, “stirring and humane military history . . .”

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, By Novella Carpenter, “Fresh, funny and jagged around the edges . . . about the author’s attempts to start a busy farm on a deserted lot in an Oakland ghetto.”

When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood, By Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, “delicate, discerning memoir . . . reads like a peculiar bedtime story.”

The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, By T.J. Stiles, “A mighty — and mighty confident — biography"

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, By Beryl Satter, "A panoramic and often personal retelling of Chicago’s race-driven real-estate wars . . ."

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, By Richard Wrangham, “A new theory of human evolution . . . in plain-spoken, gripping language.”

Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee, By Chloe Hooper, "A haunting, morally complicated examination of the death of an aboriginal man in a small-town Australian prison."

Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, By Bill Streever, "flinty and tough-minded look at a vanishing world . . ."