Best Books of 2009

Everyone is coming out with their lists. Here are my top 12 books published in 2009.
(1) How Markets Fail by John Cassidy
(2) The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
(3) Lords of Finance by Liaquet Ahamed
(4) The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
(5) Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen
(6) The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday by Neil MacFarquhar
(7) The Healing of America by T.R. Reid
(8) Guardians of the Revolution by Ray Takeyh
(9) Dangerous Games by Margaret MacMillan
(10) How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
(11) Justice by Michael Sandel
(12) In Fed We Trust by David Wessel

There are some books that I haven't started or finished which may end up on the list:
The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham
Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood
The Arabs by Eugene Rogan

Here is my top ten published in 2008:
(1) Fixing Climate by Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunzig
(2) Predicatably Irrational by Dan Ariely
(3) The Purpose of the Past by Gordon Wood
(4) Nixonland by Rick Pearlstein
(5) The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
(6) The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris
(7) The Great Warming by Brian Fagan
(8) The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester
(9) The Shadow Factory by James Bamford
(10) The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd
Also considered are Outliers by Malccom Gladwell, The Logic of Life by Tim Harford and While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein.

Here are top three (or so) for other years:
2007: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb; A More Perfect Constitution by Larry Sabato; The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes
2006: War of the World by Niall Ferguson; Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan; The Prince of the Marshes by Rory Stewart
2005: Postwar by Tony Judt; Collapse by Jared Diamond; My Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion; Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
2004: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll; The Americanization of Ben Franklin by Gordon Wood; The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton; Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
2003: Master of the Senate by Robert Caro

Who can believe that it has been nine years since Gladwell's The Tipping Point and over ten years since Germs, Guns and Steel by Jared Diamond and Righteous Victims by Benny Morris? Time flies. And The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman was published in 1962. Hard to believe this wasn't taught in our boring high school history classes. But we now know, as my friend Vern says, that everything we were taught about history there was a lie.