The Best Books of 2001 By Steven Martinovich web posted January 14, 2001 Two-thousand and one shaped up to be a pretty good year for books, at least judging by many of the reviews that Enter Stage Right published over the past year. In no particular order, here are the books that impressed ESR's book editor: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein Hill & Wang, 671 pgs. Left-leaning writer Rick Perlstein manages a mostly evenhanded account of Barry Goldwater's horrifically inept 1964 campaign against Lyndon Baines Johnson. As Perlstein points out, Goldwater may have lost that election but he also provided the spark that would one day see a resurgence of conservatism that culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 win. He may have lost the big battle, but he ultimately won the bigger war. Read our full review here In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 320 pgs. The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the 112 hours that several hundred survivors spent in shark infested waters has been an oft-told one, but rarely was it done with the personality that Doug Stanton managed to infuse. Reportedly optioned by Hollywood with Mel Gibson tapped to play Captain Charles McVay, Stanton's tour de force manages, as our original review states, to put the reader in the water with the ship's men, dying one by one until a chance encounter with a U.S. Navy patrol plane. Read our full review here Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 342 pgs Written with some panache, Smith's effort "isn't a mundane guide to picking stocks but rather it is a study of the modern stock market beginning in 1901, a time that Smith says major trends began to manifest themselves that would define what today's market has become." If you lost money in the dot.com debacle, you'll be happy to know that it isn't the first time that the markets have punished irrationality. Read our full review here At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election by Bill Sammon Regnery Publishing Inc., 294 pgs. Bill Sammon's account of the November 2000 election and the resulting debacle may not add much in the way of new information but At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election is still an enjoyable look at the 46 days which alternately repelled, embarrassed and enthralled the American people. Sammon, who makes it fairly clear that he wasn't behind the Gore-Lieberman ticket, attempts to build the case that Gore out and out tried to steal the election from George W. Bush. Read our full review here Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia by Catherine Merridale Viking 402 pgs. That Russia and Russians have known enormous suffering is a fact that should never be taken for granted. Since the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many have wondered how tens of millions of people could simply disappear and how Russians today were coping with what must be tremendous grief over the past. Catherine Merridale's Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia doesn't completely answer the question but it does offer tremendous insight into a part of the Russian soul usually closed off to the west. Read our full review here Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution and the Courts by Richard A. Posner Princeton University Press 266 pgs. Whether you accept Richard A. Posner's version of events and his analysis may ultimately depend on who you voted for in November 2000. That said, Posner's look at the election that wouldn't end is penetrating and insightful and unlike many other authors, he actually bothers to throw his two cents into the debate on how to avoid future struggles over the highest office in the United States. Read our full review here Pearl Harbor Betrayed by Michael Gannon Henry Holt 339 pgs. The debate over whether FDR knew an attack on Pearl Harbor was coming will probably rage as long as their are people willing to believe that the official version of history is filled with holes. Michael Gannon takes on those who believe that the attack was allowed to proceed unopposed by Roosevelt so that America would be drawn into a war with Japan and the rest of the Axis powers. Read our full review here The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War by Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe and Martha Mendoza Henry Holt, 284 pgs. American soldiers usually serve as the saviors of people and nations, but as the authors point out, sometimes a nation trying to do good ends up committing the most heinous evils. An expanded version of a Pulitzer Prize winning 1999 series by a team of Associated Press reporters, The Bridge at No Gun Ri tells the story of American soldiers tasked with defending South Korea in 1950 and the refugees they were there ostensibly to protect. Instead, some gunned down untold numbers of their charges thanks to a combination of racism, incompetence and fear. Read our full review here The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by Bjorn Lomborg Cambridge University Press, 515 pages Bjorn Lomborg proved in 2001 that breaking away from the herd can get you in real trouble. A soft-left former card carrying member of Greenpeace, Lomborg set out to prove Julian Simon's optimistic view of the Earth and its passengers as wrong. Instead, the Danish professor confirmed what Simon had said for decades: the Earth isn't dying, humanity isn't at the edge of collapse and things are getting better. Read our full review here The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 568 pgs. There's a lot to hate in The Corrections, especially if you're a social conservative. That said, Franzen's novel on the American family also happened to be one the best written efforts of the year and lived up to the hype that proceeded it. Although most people know Franzen as the man who spurned Oprah Winfrey, we at ESR suspect that in the future he'll be held in the same regard as other eminent American novelists. Read our full review here Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com