his list has been selected from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of December 2000. It is meant to suggest some of the high points in this year's fiction and poetry, nonfiction, children's books, mysteries and science fiction. The books are arranged alphabetically under genre headings. Click here for the fiction list.

THE ADVERSARY: A True Story of Monstrous Deception. By Emmanuel Carrère. (Metropolitan/Holt, $22.) Jean-Claude Romand was a pathological impostor, a liar about facts large and small. It was only a matter of time before his family smelled a rat. But he found a way to deal with that problem too.

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE: A Life. By Peter Raby. (Princeton University, $26.95.) A well-researched, graceful biography of an English naturalist, a titan of self-effacement, who just missed being a household word because Charles Darwin was ready before he was with a book proposing "the origin of species by means of natural selection."

THE ALGERIA HOTEL: France, Memory, and the Second World War. By Adam Nossiter. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) The rationalizations that let the French dispose of the past are the subject of this sensitive book, which covers the trial of a former cabinet minister, the Vichy memory hole and the interpretation of a Nazi atrocity.

ALL FOR LOVE. By Ved Mehta. (Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books, $24.95.) Mehta's latest autobiographical work steps out of chronological order into the 1960's, when the author was looking for love and not quite finding it; his recollections of four women, and his correspondence with them, poignant and occasionally hilarious, reveal a lot about the era and the man.

AMERICAN CHICA: Two Worlds, One Childhood. By Marie Arana. (Dial, $23.95.) The child of a Peruvian father and an American mother, the author regards her girlhood from a vantage point at once intimately domestic and sweepingly allegorical, concluding finally that she has no need, and no desire, to reconcile the vastly separated longitudinal end points that define her family.

AN AMERICAN FAMILY: The Kennans. The First Three Generations. By George F. Kennan. (Norton, $22.95.) The diplomat and historian tells the story of the first three generations of his family in North America.

AMERICAN SYMPATHY: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. By Caleb Crain. (Yale University, $35.) An evocative study proposing that the prominence of male friendship and the outspoken language employed to express it are vital clues to the development of early American literature.

THE APE AND THE SUSHI MASTER: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. By Frans de Waal. (Basic Books, $26.) An engaging history of primate studies, written by one of the world's most distinguished primatologists, arguing that culture owes more to the lower orders than humans comfortably believe.

AVA'S MAN. By Rick Bragg. (Knopf, $25.) A memoir of the author's maternal grandfather that gets the sentiment, independence and fears of poor white Southern culture just right; by a correspondent for The Times.

BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. By Rick Perlstein. (Hill & Wang, $30.) Combining prodigious research with journalistic flair, an independent scholar traces the origins of today's conservative movement to the candidate who was overwhelmingly defeated for president in 1964.

BING CROSBY. A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years, 1903-1940. By Gary Giddins. (Little, Brown, $30.) Written by an eminent jazz critic, a biography that scrupulously tracks the life and art of a very fine and immensely successful jazz singer and recording artist (and indifferent movie star).

BODY OF SECRETS: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. By James Bamford. (Doubleday, $29.95.) Bamford's second book on the National Security Agency is the most authoritative recent account of the world of electronic spying.

BODY TOXIC: An Environmental Memoir. By Susanne Antonetta. (Counterpoint, $26.) An arresting personal history by a poet whose early life was spent in (as now she knows) toxic territories of New Jersey; noxious 20th-century chemicals, rather than childhood trauma, became the armature on which her problems, which are many, developed.

BOOK BUSINESS: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. By Jason Epstein. (Norton, $21.95.) Essays (once a lecture series at the New York Public Library) on the lit biz by the founder of Anchor Books and a lot of other valuable things; his constant theme, which his own career belies, is that publishing was at its best in the 1920's and has run downhill ever since.

BOSWELL'S PRESUMPTUOUS TASK: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson. By Adam Sisman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The author assembles the facts (which are now very many) about Boswell's gestation into a smart, readable narrative that shows us how this rather silly, rather awful man achieved a masterpiece.

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. By Michael Pollan. (Random House, $24.95.) How the angiosperms -- the flowering plants -- have prospered by seducing other creatures, including humans, into encouraging and supporting their reproduction through rewards like food and beauty.

THE BROTHER: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair. By Sam Roberts. (Random House, $35.) An absorbing account, by an editor at The Times, of the famous spy case as seen through the eyes of Greenglass, enriched by recently declassified information about American decoding of Soviet intelligence traffic.

CARRY ME HOME. Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. By Diane McWhorter. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) A heroic, exhaustive journey, both documentary and personal, through the struggle, especially the violent summer of 1963; by a daughter of the city's white elite.

CHESTER HIMES: A Life. By James Sallis. (Walker, $28.) A smart, conscientious biography of the black novelist (1909-84) whose invention of the detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, operating in a hyperdetailed, disorienting Harlem, yielded his most incisive, radical and enduring fiction.

A COLD CASE. By Philip Gourevitch. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A real-life police procedural in which a graduate of Hell's Kitchen who kills two men to settle an argument is run to earth by patient legwork and an appealingly straight-arrow investigator.

COMFORT ME WITH APPLES: More Adventures at the Table. By Ruth Reichl. (Random House, $24.95.) This second volume of memoir by The Times's former restaurant critic invokes themes larger than mere food: commune life in Berkeley, the social texture of dining out, the longing for a child.

CONSTANTINE'S SWORD. The Church and the Jews: A History. By James Carroll. (Houghton Mifflin, $28.) Partly a Roman Catholic's memoir of a gradually arising moral reckoning in the 20th century, partly an examination of the relations between Christians and Jews, a central issue posed immediately in the first century and very often lamentably mishandled since then.

THE CREATION OF THE MODERN WORLD: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. By Roy Porter. (Norton, $35.) An English historian's spirited account of the contributions England made to the Enlightenment.

CRESCENT AND STAR: Turkey Between Two Worlds. By Stephen Kinzer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A lively account, by a correspondent for The Times, of a 99 percent Muslim country whose best friend in the region is Israel and where democracy was introduced, and is sometimes still enforced, by generals.

CRIMEA: The Great Crimean War, 1854-1856. By Trevor Royle. (St. Martin's, $35.) A well-written, thorough study of what can be considered the first modern war.

CULTIVATING DELIGHT: A Natural History of My Garden. By Diane Ackerman. (HarperCollins, $25.) The training of a poet and the methodical approach of a scientist issue in Ackerman's sensitivity to the garden she follows through 52 passages (a year's worth) of intense, joyful contemplation and enhanced horticultural description.

DANTE. By R. W. B. Lewis. (Lipper/Viking, $19.95.) A brief (205 pages), loving and learned biography of the great poet who made himself his own protagonist in the "Commedia" as well as other writings; accordingly, Lewis artfully interweaves the life and works.

DAZZLER: The Life and Times of Moss Hart. By Steven Bach. (Knopf, $29.95.) A careful, cleareyed account of the life of the playwright, director and actor (1904-61) who collaborated with Broadway's best and pleased many people many times without making large claims for his own significance.

DISPLACED PERSONS: Growing Up American After the Holocaust. By Joseph Berger. (Scribner, $26.) A memoir that examines the author's competing desires to cast off and to embrace his family's refugee legacy; Berger, an editor at The Times, arrived in this country at the age of 5 with his parents, who had spent World War II one step ahead of the Nazis.

DOUBLE FOLD: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. By Nicholson Baker. (Random House, $25.95.) A jeremiad, a philippic, an imprecation against library professionals and all their friends who are bent on discarding books and newspapers made of genuine righteous paper while recording their contents on vile, accursed microfilm.

DRAGON HUNTER: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions. By Charles Gallenkamp. (Viking, $29.95.) The life of the romantically intemperate explorer-zoologist who led five expeditions into Mongolia between 1922 and 1930, discovering the fabulous dinosaur troves of the Gobi.

THE DREAM OF REASON: A History of Western Philosophy From the Greeks to the Renaissance. By Anthony Gottlieb. (Norton, $27.95.) A fluent, lucid account of about 2,000 years of trying to think as straight as possible, by an editor of The Economist; technical terms, when they have to be used, are clearly explained.

EASTWARD TO TARTARY: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. By Robert D. Kaplan. (Random House, $26.95.) A prolific travel writer and journalist interprets the regions from Bulgaria to Baku as sites for noisy, troublesome engines of change.

THE ELEMENT OF LAVISHNESS: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978. Edited by Michael Steinman. (Counterpoint, $27.50.) She the author of more than 150 short stories in The New Yorker; he her editor; both of them articulate to a degree normal people need not bother even to aspire to. A feast.

EMERGENCE: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. By Steven Johnson. (Scribner, $25.) A skilled science-and-technology writer explains swarm logic: the process whereby a great many individually dumb ants (or brain cells, and maybe even computers) act together to perform smart things without central direction.

THE ETERNAL FRONTIER: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. By Tim Flannery. (Atlantic Monthly, $27.50.) The last 65 million years, seen through a synthesis of scientific, cultural and historical studies in a perpetual sequence of invasion, adaptation and extinction, with fresh opportunity for each succeeding species.

FACING THE WIND: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation. By Julie Salamon. (Random House, $24.95.) A breathtaking account of a man who killed his wife and children and was found insane, but soon released from custody -- and of what happened after that, by a television critic for The Times.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976. By Hunter S. Thompson. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The second volume of a projected trilogy collecting the correspondence of the monstre sacré of American journalism.

FIRE. By Sebastian Junger. (Norton, $24.95.) A collection of reports focused on danger and risk, using the techniques the author deployed in "The Perfect Storm"; one article relates his visit to Afghanistan about a year ago, presenting the anti-Taliban forces before America's military operations in that country.

FIVE POINTS: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. By Tyler Anbinder. (Free Press, $30.) A historian's report on a district that has lost its name but continues to attract immigrants and the poor, often showing a lively street culture.

THE FLÂNEUR: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. By Edmund White. (Bloomsbury, $16.95.) White, who lived there for 16 years, takes the reader on a wander through the cultures and subcultures, some of them barely perceptible to outsiders, of a city where conservatism and anarchy have long gone hand in hand.

FOUNDING BROTHERS: The Revolutionary Generation. By Joseph J. Ellis. (Knopf, $26.) A scholar's portrayal of the fraternity that founded our nation -- Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison and Burr -- and managed, usually, to solve controversies by personal honor and exertion before settled political structures fell into place.

FRANTZ FANON: A Biography. By David Macey. (Picador USA, $40.) A prodigiously researched, intellectually distinguished life of the psychiatrist from Martinique who propagandized for Algerian independence in the 1950's and sought to justify violence not only as a tactic but also as therapy for the oppressed.

FREE FLIGHT: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel. By James Fallows. (PublicAffairs, $25.) An argument, based on thorough reporting, that air travel could be made faster, cheaper and nicer by using more, better and smaller aircraft, now being made feasible by recent technological developments.

GERMS: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) Three Times reporters tell the story of biological weapons and the fight against them; the situation is viewed with alarm, and the book was written and published before the anthrax issue became red hot.

GIELGUD: A Theatrical Life. By Jonathan Croall. (Continuum, $35.) A sufficiently extensive, committed and fluent biography of the great British actor (1904-2000), who is shown as witty, charming, tirelessly self-critical, theatrical in every aspect of his life, and a much nicer man than his sole rival, Olivier.

GOING UP THE RIVER: Travels in a Prison Nation. By Joseph T. Hallinan. (Random House, $24.95.) A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, after four years of visiting prisons, reports that they have become public works projects, with brutalities to prisoners as the price.

GRANT. By Jean Edward Smith. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) The author, a political scientist, takes issue with the conventional view that Grant's presidency was a national embarrassment, a judgment he attributes to the work of snobs like Henry Adams and of scholars who favored white supremacy.

GREENSPAN: The Man Behind the Money. By Justin Martin. (Perseus, $28.) The author, a former staff writer at Fortune, has written a biography that shows how Alan Greenspan's early experiences have shaped his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN: The Life of a Storyteller. By Jackie Wullschlager. (Knopf, $30.) We would not have liked him personally; hardly anyone did, but Wullschlager shows this histrionic, effeminate, uneducated gawk working the most painful emotions into great literature in his deathless fairy tales.

HITLER. 1936-45: Nemesis. By Ian Kershaw. (Norton, $35.) The second and final volume of Kershaw's biography sees in its subject an unerring sense of other people's weaknesses, their fears, vanities, greed and blood lusts -- the mental equipment of a malign guru whose followers could (and did) project their worst fantasies onto him.

HOOP ROOTS. By John Edgar Wideman. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A distinguished writer and editor faces the fact that at 59 he can no longer hack it in playground basketball; the loss, a real one, leads him into a loosely constructed array of memories, reveries and meditations, from his childhood in Pittsburgh to his concerns as a writer and teacher.

HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy. Edited by Amanda Smith. (Viking, $39.95.) This whopping compilation (738 pages) by one of Kennedy's granddaughters shows a man of outsize sentiment and sometimes resentment, active of mind and demanding activity of others.

HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE: And Other True Stories. By Dorothy Gallagher. (Random House, $22.95.) A comic, moving, sometimes disturbing book of essays about the author's Ukrainian Jewish heritage; parts of it are far from nice but engagingly brave.

IN FACT: Essays on Writers and Writing. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) A bracing collection by a writer who kicked over academic life in 1991 for the free world, where he became fiction editor of GQ and an essayist whose tongue is sharp, whose allegiance is to the past and whose correctness isn't political.

IN THE BEGINNING: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture. By Alister McGrath. (Doubleday, $24.95.) In an engagingly breezy tone, the author documents the dominant effect that the Bible in English has had on the language.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR. KURTZ: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. By Michela Wrong. (HarperCollins, $26.) A firsthand, first-rate account, both anecdotal and documentary, of the era of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who looted his country (called, at the time, Zaire) of billions.

ISLAM'S BLACK SLAVES: The Other Black Diaspora. By Ronald Segal. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A carefully documented history of slavery in the Muslim world, a subject little studied, compared with the Atlantic slave trade.

KILLING DRAGONS: The Conquest of the Alps. By Fergus Fleming. (Atlantic Monthly, $26.) A history of exploration of the Alps, told with droll, detached amusement.

THE LAST EMPIRE: Essays 1992-2000. By Gore Vidal. (Doubleday, $27.50.) A collection of the most recent essays by this man of letters, ranging over literature and politics.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance. By Anthony Grafton. (Hill & Wang, $35.) A masterly biography of the representative figure of the Renaissance.

A LIFE OF JAMES BOSWELL. By Peter Martin. (Yale University Press, $35.) A vivid, sensitively observed narrative of the life of Samuel Johnson's biographer.

LIFE SCRIPT: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health. By Nicholas Wade. (Simon & Schuster, $24.) Informed evaluation and speculation on ending disease and living longer as possible results of the decoding of the human DNA blueprint; by an editor at The Times.

LILLIAN GISH: Her Legend, Her Life. By Charles Affron. (Lisa Drew/Scribner, $35.) A biography of the great silent screen star who refused to go under just because she was out of date, still working when she was 94; the author detects in her life a conscious shaping of her legend, particularly a sort of cover-up for the kinks of her great mentor, D. W. Griffith.

LOOKING FOR HISTORY: Dispatches From Latin America. By Alma Guillermoprieto. (Pantheon, $25.) Lucid, elegant repertorial essays, uncorrupted by big thinking, revealing how things actually look in such emotional pressure points as Colombia or neo-Zapatista Mexico.

THE LOST children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care. By Nina Bernstein. (Pantheon, $27.50.) A deeply researched, thoughtful account, by a reporter for The Times, of an attempt to reform a New York City system that seemed to discriminate unconstitutionally.

LOVING PICASSO: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier. (Abrams, $35.) Born in Paris in 1881, Olivier, apparently Picasso's first mistress, lived with him from 1905 to 1912; her notes are fascinating as a vivid record of a harsh French girlhood at the turn of the century in a culture that was just about to turn modern in astonishing ways.

MAESTRO: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom. By Bob Woodward. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) A lucid, insightful examination of the tenure of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. By Simon Winchester. (HarperCollins, $26.) A lucid retelling of the story of the first geological map of England, dated 1815, and the canal builder who made the map.

MARIE ANTOINETTE: The Journey. By Antonia Fraser. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35.) A biographer argues persuasively for a romantic view of the French queen who enraged her subjects by frivolities but transformed herself, at last, to a courageous, decisive, devoted wife and mother.

MARLON BRANDO. By Patricia Bosworth. (Lipper/Viking, $21.95.) Life and art, politics and marital complications, all are put into place and context in this life of an actor whose unpredictable verisimilitude nobody can stop watching, no matter what trivial part he has undertaken in the 54 years since "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway.

MARY SHELLEY. By Miranda Seymour. (Grove, $35.) The author (at 19!) of "Frankenstein" lived at the center of English Romanticism and knew all its characters; Seymour's new biography sketches the scientific background of "Frankenstein" and delineates the Shelley-Byron circle, including the sexual who-whom that rotated around its two dominant rich kids.

MAUVE: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. By Simon Garfield. (Norton, $23.95.) An engaging and airy history of the first mass-produced artificial dye and how it ignited a 19th-century revolution in applied science.

MILOSZ'S A B C'S. By Czeslaw Milosz. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Dozens of short, associatively shaped prose pieces, alphabetically arranged; they add up to a kind of memoir-essay on the 20th century by a distinguished poet who lived through most of it.

THE MONEY AND THE POWER: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947-2000. By Sally Denton and Roger Morris. (Knopf, $26.95.) Las Vegas arraigned for drug trafficking, money laundering and politician corrupting, with quite a lot of evidence but little sense of why people have fun there.

MORAL FREEDOM: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now. By Alan Wolfe. (Norton, $24.95.) Approaching his subjects with empathy and respect, a sociologist surveys a broad cross section of Americans on their ethical beliefs and finds that we set high standards of conduct but tend to eschew moral mandates.

NEXT: The Future Just Happened. By Michael Lewis. (Norton, $23.95.) Linked essays about the Internet as the universal solvent of the fundamental social order, best when the author personalizes change by exhibiting teenage prodigies who have outrun their elders and betters on the Information Highway.

NICKEL AND DIMED: On (Not) Getting By in America. By Barbara Ehrenreich. (Metropolitan/Holt, $23.) The author joined the ranks of the working poor, taking jobs as waitress, scrubwoman and "Wal-Martian" to test the vaunted ideal of work as a ticket out of poverty; the ticket, she discovered, turns out to be for an unplanned round trip.

THE NOONDAY DEMON: An Atlas of Depression. By Andrew Solomon. (Scribner, $28.) An exhaustively researched, provocative and moving survey of depression, engagingly rendered by a man brave enough to say that he loves his depression because it helped him find his soul.

NO PEACE, NO HONOR: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. By Larry Berman. (Free Press, $27.50.) Using recently available archival material, the author builds a case that Richard Nixon dealt duplicitously with South Vietnam, encouraging it to refuse to negotiate with North Vietnam, then betraying it by Henry Kissinger's secret deals with the North.

ON HER OWN GROUND: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. By A'Lelia Bundles. (Lisa Drew/Scribner, $30.) A biography that is also a social history of its subject's times (1867-1919); born to poverty, Walker made a fortune with a product that straightened hair and became a bold philanthropist and advocate of women's independence as well as an exemplar of black enterprise.

ON THE WING: A Young American Abroad. By Nora Sayre. (Counterpoint, $25.) The late journalist and critic recalls her days in London in the 1950's with the likes of Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler and Tyrone Power.

PRESIDENT NIXON: Alone in the White House. By Richard Reeves. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) The author's deconstructions of Richard Nixon's fevered jottings on long yellow pads, radiating both the nobility and the madness of his own most intimate intentions; moods long familiar become fresh when Reeves reads them against unexpected contexts.

THE PRICE OF MOTHERHOOD: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued. By Ann Crittenden. (Metropolitan/Holt, $25.) An economic journalist argues that the enormous costs of motherhood raise issues of social policy that have not been addressed by American society.

RACE AND REUNION: The Civil War in American Memory. By David W. Blight. (Harvard University, $29.95.) A historian recounts how the meaning of the Civil War was debated and constructed between Appomattox and "The Birth of a Nation."

REFLECTIONS ON EXILE: And Other Essays. By Edward W. Said. (Harvard University, $35.) Written between 1967 and the present by a literary critic and advocate for the Palestinian cause, these pieces often deal with the self-deceiving fictions of the colonizers about the people they oppress; others deplore some fashionable critical theories as unengaged with real life and history.

REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. Edited by Emily Bernard. (Knopf, $30.) The record of an ironic, ribald, frequently poignant interracial friendship between a poet who interpreted the black experience and a novelist who did his best to promote Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.

RIVER TOWN: Two Years on the Yangtze. By Peter Hessler. (HarperCollins, $26.) A finely drawn memoir whose author taught English in the city of Fuling, China, soon to be deluged by the completion of a nearby dam; the strangeness of the Chinese to him, and his to them, are offered in the best tradition of the old-fashioned travel book.

ROMANCING: The Life and Work of Henry Green. By Jeremy Treglown. (Random House, $26.95.) A generous, acute and above all not too long biography of the rich, publicity-shy, pseudonymous English novelist whose work ("Living," "Loving," "Party Going") was deservedly well known 50 years ago.

ROMANCING THE FOLK: Public Memory & American Folk Music. By Benjamin Filene. (University of North Carolina, cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.) A fascinating history of the shifting notions of what constitutes American folk music.

ROOSEVELT'S SECRET WAR: FDR and World War II Espionage. By Joseph E. Persico. (Random House, $35.) A deeply informed account, from the Allied viewpoint, of the clandestine side of World War II, complicated by the difficulty of establishing what, at any given time, the spymasters and their putative bosses knew and when they knew it.

SAFE AREA GORAZDE. By Joe Sacco. (Fantagraphics Books, $28.95.) Using a comic-book format, the author, a cartoonist, has created a work that combines a rare insight into the human experience of the war in Bosnia with a nuanced political and historical understanding of the conflict.

THE SANTA FE TRAIL: Its History, Legends, and Lore. By David Dary. (Knopf, $30.) The absorbing story of the 900-mile trade route to the Southwest, told by the veteran historian of the West.

SAVAGE BEAUTY: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. By Nancy Milford. (Random House, $29.95.) Millay's sometimes brilliant lyrics have been overlooked because of the hokum and manipulation all around them; this elegant biography detoxifies the poet's life.

SEABISCUIT: An American Legend. By Laura Hillenbrand. (Random House, $24.95.) A racing journalist's charming biography of the homely, slow-developing, greathearted horse whose heroic career as a pretelevision celebrity culminated in the 1938 match race with the Triple Crown winner War Admiral.

SELDOM DISAPPOINTED: A Memoir. By Tony Hillerman. (HarperCollins, $26.) A disarming survey of his life by the author of the amazingly well-informed Jim Chee-Joe Leaphorn Navajo crime novels, who is not a Navajo, was for many years a newspaperman and lost most of a foot and the sight of one eye in World War II.

THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. By Daniel L. Schacter. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A Harvard psychologist details the science behind the different forms of memory and forgetting.

THE SEVENTIES: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. By Bruce J. Schulman. (Free Press, $26.) So how did the revolutionary experimentation of the 60's turn into the Ronald Reagan 80's? This author shrewdly proposes that "doing my own thing" was the common attitude, turning Republican when it infiltrated the Sun Belt.

THE SHADOW OF THE SUN. By Ryszard Kapuscinski. (Knopf, $25.) A collection of 29 pieces representing 40 years of reporting from Africa by Poland's most famous foreign correspondent, whose reports on tyrannies abroad (Angola, Ethiopia, Iran) gave Poland's Communist rulers the fantods.

SIDETRACKS: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer. By Richard Holmes. (Pantheon, $30.) Essays by the least earthbound of biographers on subjects like the literary productivity of Romney Marsh and the youthful despair from which the author was rescued by the yet more despairing Chatterton.

SIMONE WEIL. By Francine du Plessix Gray. (Lipper/Viking, $19.95.) A highly competent and sometimes -- with justice -- deeply annoyed biography of the brilliant, headstrong, nobly ridiculous French Jew who felt the presence of Christ in her 20's and died, perhaps of anorexia, at 34.

THE STARDUST LOUNGE: Stories From a Boy's Adolescence. By Deborah Digges. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.95.) A poet's account of her troubled younger son, whose anger and wildness deeply rattled his enlightened mother's confidence; he grew up at last, but whether his mother's coping efforts helped is not clear.

STET: A Memoir. By Diana Athill. (Grove, $24.) The doyenne of English book editors recalls her years at André Deutsch, whose authors included V. S. Naipaul, Brian Moore, Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys and Molly Keane, and how changing economic (and cultural) conditions injured quality book publishing.

THE TAPIR'S MORNING BATH: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them. By Elizabeth Royte. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A year's exacting work at the Smithsonian's research center in Panama, rendered by a smart writer who has no fear of complex situations.

THE THIRD REICH: A New History. By Michael Burleigh. (Hill & Wang, $40.) An interpretation of Nazism that sees it as both a totalitarian system and a political religion.

THIS COLD HEAVEN: Seven Seasons in Greenland. By Gretel Ehrlich. (Pantheon, $27.50.) A remarkable and affectionate portrait of the Inuit Greenlanders during a time of unsettling transition, when a subsistence culture passed on by tradition is threatened by global warming, snowmobiles and the choice between formal education and unemployment.

TIGER'S EYE: A Memoir. By Inga Clendinnen. (Scribner, $24.) An intensive report from the land of the very ill, by an Australian historian of anthropological bent who investigates the occupancy of her body by herself and her disease, and who saves herself from violation by imaginative identification with a tiger.

TIP O'NEILL: And the Democratic Century. By John Aloysius Farrell. (Little, Brown, $29.95.) The life and career of the Massachusetts Democrat who never lost faith in the proposition that government could cure what ailed society, and engineered a successful resistance to President Ronald Reagan's effort to sink the New Deal.

TREASON BY THE BOOK. By Jonathan D. Spence. (Viking, $24.95.) A lively narrative examination of a thought-control episode in 18th-century China, where the emperor and his philosopher-bureaucrats (much like their successors today) sought to eliminate every vestige of incorrect thinking, by fiat if possible, by death if not.

A TRIAL BY JURY. By D. Graham Burnett. (Knopf, $21.) The foreman of a contentious criminal jury on a tawdry New York homicide case last year found the justice system a mare's-nest of incompetence and confusion, and his own experience more intense than he had bargained for; in the end, a certain common sense prevailed.

ULTIMATE JOURNEY: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment. By Richard Bernstein. (Knopf, $26.) The author, a book critic for The Times, did much the same things in the same places; it was not easy, but it brought unexpected rewards.

AN UNEXPECTED LIGHT: Travels in Afghanistan. By Jason Elliot. (Picador USA, $30.) The author explores past and present, at considerable personal risk, in the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and in the collapse that preceded the Taliban rule.

VENICE: LION CITY. The Religion of Empire. By Garry Wills. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) A cultural historian's guide to the Most Serene Republic through the arts, beliefs and ideologies that sustained it in its days as a medium-great power, able to withstand the Turks in the Mediterranean and rule much of Italy.

WAR IN A TIME OF PEACE: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. By David Halberstam. (Scribner, $28.) Reporting on the presidents of the 1990's and their foreign policy, Halberstam finds reluctance to deal with foreign issues and a power structure made of people touched in some way by the Vietnam War.

WASHINGTON. By Meg Greenfield. (PublicAffairs, $26.) The veteran journalist, who died in 1999, gives a dour, unblinkered look at the nation's capital.

WAS THIS MAN A GENIUS? Talks With Andy Kaufman. By Julie Hecht. (Random House, $23.95.) Hecht, a writer of short stories inveigled into a nonfiction assignment, spent a year interviewing the cult comedian of the late 1970's, or trying to. The product shows an annoying but sympathetic character, as so many of his fans suspected already.

WHERE DEAD VOICES GATHER. By Nick Tosches. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A search for the facts about Emmett Miller, a blackface minstrel of the 1920's and 30's whom Tosches calls "the strangest and most stunning of stylists ever to record"; and the author's meditations on creativity and originality, provoked by his incomplete quest.

WIDE AS THE WATERS: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. By Benson Bobrick. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) An ambitious and largely successful attempt to demonstrate that the English translations of the Bible provided the spiritual resource for the creation of popular government.

THE WILD BLUE: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany. By Stephen E. Ambrose. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) A colorful account of the very young men who bombed the Third Reich from bases in Italy.

WORD FREAK: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. By Stefan Fatsis. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A tour of a universe that must be real, because no one could have made it up: the very top players in the Scrabble subculture, who live only for the game.