Best nonfiction books of 2008

For a slideshow of the Monitor's nonfiction book  jackets from 2008, click here.

The Nuclear Jihadist
By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins (Twelve Books, 448 pp., $25)
A husband-and-wife reporting team tell the how A.Q. Khan brought the nuclear bomb to the Muslim world. (1/15/08)

The Telephone Gambit
By Seth Shulman (W.W. Norton & Co.,256 pp., $24.95)
Technology journalist Seth Shulman casts doubt on Alexander Graham Bell’s role as the creator of the telephone. (1/8/08)

Overtreated
By Shannon Brownlee (Bloomsbury USA, 352 pp., $25.95)
Award-winning science journalist Shannon Brownlee analyzes another phase of the US healthcare crisis: patients who are overtreated. (1/2/08)

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust (Alfred A. Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95)
Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust makes a convincing case that the heartbreak of the Civil War irrevocably altered the United States. (1/30/08)

Can’t Buy Me Love
By Jonathan Gould (Harmony, 672 pp., $27.50)
Jonathan Gould offers a worthy addition to “Beatle lit” in this biography chronicling the enduring appeal of the Fab Four.  (2/5/08)

The 10-Cent Plague
By David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pp., $26)
Journalism professor David Hajdu writes a revealing new history of the 1950s comic-book panic. (3/28/08)

In Defense of Food
By Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press, 244 pp., $21.95)
Journalist Michael Pollan shows how nutritionism has unnecessarily complicated the act of eating. (4/3/08)

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