The best of the real

What I didn't get to this year and wanted to: Andrew Polizzotti's biography of André Breton; John Richardson's second volume on Picasso; Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me; Richard Kluger's history of the tobacco industry, Ashes to Ashes. What I got to and happily put down: Paul Hendrickson's smug The Quick and the Dead. What I got to and unhappily put down: Simon Frith's Performance Rites, with its brilliance drowning in jargon. What I wish I hadn't gotten to: James Ellroy's odious, racist, reactionary, sleazy (stop me anytime) My Dark Places. What I had no desire to get to: Hitler's Willing Executioners. I'm shocked, shocked, to discover there was a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.

What I got to and liked, alphabetically by author:

A Tale of Two Utopias, by Paul Berman (Norton)

Subtitled The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, Berman's shrewd and reasoned critique, both clear-eyed and admiring, paid the spirit of that amazing year the honor it deserves without ignoring the excesses. Writing about the way that spirit resurfaced in Eastern Europe in 1989, Berman says, "Suddenly it was obvious that those long ago utopian efforts to change the shape of the world were a young people's rehearsal, preparatory to adult events that only came later."

Words for the Taking, by Neal Bowers (Norton)

The poet Neal Bowers's detective story of his search for the plagiarist who was submitting Bowers's poems to poetry journals under his own name. The plagiarist's brazenness and wiliness are only slightly more amazing than the indifference and charges of authorial arrogance directed at Bowers by his academic colleagues, the lawyer he consults, and the journal editors he contacts. Eloquently and without stridency, Bowers gives an accounting of just what, to their author, words are worth.

Lush Life, A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, by David Hadju (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The Billy Strayhorn standard that David Hadju's bio is named for is the epitome of sophisticated, world-weary romantic disappointment. This loving and lovely book about the man who was Duke Ellington's oft-overlooked collaborator locates that same gorgeous melancholy in Strayhorn's life, with a class and style he'd tip his hat to.

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, by Christopher Hitchens (Verso)

Who says there are no sacred cows left? Except for Murray Kempton's perceptive review in the New York Review of Books, Christopher Hitchens's passionately reasoned jeremiad against Mother Teresa has been ignored since it appeared, late in '95. What is there to lodge against this saint on Earth, you ask? Plenty. You didn't know about the quality of "care" in her missionaries (unsterilized needles used again and again)? About her insistence on foisting her asceticism on her charges (AIDS patients prevented from watching the Winter Olympics as their Lenten sacrifice)? About her bare-bones care of the sick and dying despite having an enormous global income, including stolen millions accepted from embezzler Charles Keating? Read Hitchens and let the scales fall. Orwell said all saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent. Hitchens rings down a guilty verdict on the woman he aptly calls "the ghoul of Calcutta."

The Dustbin of History, by Greil Marcus (Harvard)

Another late-'95 release. Not just our best rock critic but one of our best cultural critics, period, Marcus understands in his bones that good work can be around any corner. These essays about the struggles of people -- in literature, politics, pop music -- to be subjects, rather than objects, of history extends to readers a chance to enter into a conversation and discover for themselves the freedoms Marcus's artists have created.

Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, by Karal Ann Marling (Harvard)

A near-masterpiece. Imaginatively thought and generously felt, Graceland isn't just an essential addition to Elvis literature but a shrewd, empathetic meditation on the unexpected dignity that lurks beneath the kitsch surface of middle-class taste. Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, makes Graceland's smallness and tackiness, and Elvis's unquenchable thirst for newness, almost inexpressively, and never condescendingly, moving. "Ghosts walk through Graceland," she writes, "alongside every tourist, whispering softly about the places we call home."

Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt (Scribners)

A jewel amid a glut of memoirs, and an unexpected (and thoroughly deserving) bestseller. Like all great memoirs, Frank McCourt's tale of growing up desperately poor and hungry in 1930s Limerick is utterly bereft of self-pity. The amazing thing is how funny, how alive it is. In his first book, McCourt, for years a writing teacher in Bedford-Stuyvesant, pens prose that rolls off the page like a song. You read it and think it must have been language itself that filled his young belly for all those years.

The Missing, by Andrew O'Hagan (New Press)

This extraordinary book by the young (28) Scottish writer is an exploration not just of what it means to go missing but of what can go missing -- places as well as people, victims and victimizers, the "documentary lives" of those who join the ranks of the homeless. This book of social criticism makes almost poetic connections. It's profoundly unnerving because of O'Hagan's measured, unflinching voice, but with a deep empathy that keeps him connected to the world as he explores its potential for violence. The nonfiction book of the year.

Duchamp, by Calvin Tomkins (Henry Holt)

Tomkins sees the spirit that informs Duchamp's masterpiece The Large Glass as "epic joy," and the spirit that informed the artist's life as much the same. Stubbornly refusing to interpret, Tomkins sticks to just the facts. But he brings out the deep amusement that characterized the most playful of this century's influential artists.

Ghosts of Mississippi, by Maryanne Vollers (Little, Brown)

Don't confuse this with the atrocious upcoming movie of the same name (the makers optioned only the title of Vollers's book, not the content). This account of the 1963 murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and how his killer was finally convicted 30 years and three trials later works as detective story and courtroom drama, and as an accounting of the cost of change. If the third trial of Byron de la Beckwith is a tale of how justice delayed was finally served, it's also about how a past that seems eons ago can feel as fresh as a new wound.

-- Charles Taylor