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4. The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin , by Garret Keizer (Jossey-Bass). Readers of Books & Culture may recall seeing an excerpt from this book in our September/October issue. Keizer is an essayist, novelist, Episcopalian minister, and former high school teacher in Vermont. At a time when so much "issue-oriented" writing is dumbed-down and desperate to "connect" with readers—in prose that resembles TV commercials—it's a joy to read a book written for adults, in language that's neither academic nor juvenile, on a subject of universal interest. Distinguishing between healthy anger and anger gone awry, Keizer is a teacher who delights as he instructs.

5. Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance , by Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna (Vendome Press). Translated from the Japanese by Daniel Wheeler. This is the single most beautiful book I've seen this year. Its price puts it out of range for many readers, but be sure your library orders a copy—and get on the list. Of course, for the cost of a couple of nights at the movies plus a nice dinner for two, or something else equally disposable, you could set aside most of what you'd need to buy the book, and you'd have it to keep. Among the artists represented are Albrecht Durer, Piero della Francesca, Matthias Grunewald, and the Brothers van Eyck. To see the way the Christian story dominated the European imagination in this period of cultural flourishing is at once exhilarating and melancholy, full of light and shadow, joy and sorrow, and tinged with irony.

6. Larry Burrows: Vietnam (Knopf). Introduction by David Halberstam. Certain subjects seem to be exhausted for the time being, polluted by overposure, and I didn't expect to have a strong reaction to this book of the photojournalist Larry Burrows, who died in 1971 when the helicopter he was in was shot down at the border of Vietnam and Laos. The cover photo of an exhausted, helmeted American soldier was expert but rather generic, and what more did I expect to learn about the war in Vietnam, anyway? But learning takes many forms, and by the time I finished this book, in tears, all my defenses were down. Of the countless books on Vietnam, this is one of the most powerful, telling a story that doesn't need words. Even in this image-saturated time, the eye of an artist can allow us to see afresh.

7. No Way to Treat a First Lady , by Christopher Buckley (Random House). Any book that makes me laugh out loud gets serious consideration for this list, and no book published in 2002 made me laugh harder than Christopher Buckley's new novel, which involves the death of a Clinton-like U.S. president and the subsequent trial of his wife, who is in some way Hillaryesque but in most ways not. It's not as good as my favorite Buckley novel, Thank You for Smoking, or his previous one, Little Green Men, which made this list a couple of years ago. But I'll take it. (Buckley fans will note that characters from earlier novels make cameo appearances in this one, but the device—which could have been great fun—sputters a bit.)

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46