Editor's note: The 9/11 Commission Report, which began with a 600,000-volume press run at $10 a copy, is now number one on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. Reviewers call the well-written and unflinching, 567-page report a "compulsively readable" collection of facts that are "devastating for the Bush administration." And now the New York Times has brought out a cut-rate, $7 version of the report with 200 additional pages of background and analysis by Times reporters who covered the 9/11 Commission hearings.

Also on the Times best-seller list is Imperial Hubris, by an unnamed C.I.A. officer who calls himself Anonymous. It is a critical commentary on the United States and its allies for losing the war on terror.

There is more to come. Not all of it gets the attention it deserves. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the senior member of Capitol Hill's "upper body," is just out with a devastating book new on the Times best-seller list, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency.

Byrd accuses President Bush of "a slow unraveling of the people's liberties" under cover of "the war on terror," and says that since 9/11 Congress has been "unwilling to assert its power, cowed, timid, a virtual paralytic."

And now comes Obliviously On He Sails, a hilarious collection of Calvin Trillin's sarcastic and biting anti-Bush poetry from the Nation magazine. For those more serious—and worried about—what Democrats can do in this election year to undo the Bush regime there is the how-to combat handbook Stand Up and Fight: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps and the Politics of Revenge, by E.J. Dionne, the pragmatically liberal Washington Post columnist.

For readers who disagreed with our estimate that the Democratic convention this year was boring—and as we go to press the Republicans are making us yawn as well—we recommend a new book, Happy Days Are Here Again, by Steve Neal, on the stirring, pre-TV 1932 nominating convention, which marked the start of Franklin D. Roosevelt's four-term presidency. Those were the good old days.

The spiraling number of fast-selling books that attack the Bush administration moved us to ask our old friend Fred Maxwell, to scan this year's pre-election pile of political cookbooks. Fred is the author of Bad Boy Ballmer, a scathing profile of Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft. Its international reach has resulted in trans-lated editions published in China and Japan.

In January 1994 Fred, who has also done a great deal of magazine writing, gave the Washington Spectator a stirring feature on the opening, at the National Archives, of more than a million pages of documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Now he offers a report on his recent coverage of BookExpo America, an annual gathering of authors and publishers, and the political food fight launched by the scores of anti-Bush authors. They have made pre-election appeals to Americans in a way that has affected the conservative-dominated book world, shifting the emphasis to readable volumes that call a spade a spade.

merican book publishers are loving the recent popularity of political books. From Senator Hillary Clinton's Living History (1.6 million copies sold), to Bill Clinton's My Life, the memoir of the former president (2.6 million copies in print), the country is buying, reading and talking about political books at a rate unrivaled since the post-Watergate period.

The Washington Spectator asked me to research this phenomenon. That included talking with some top authors and publishers at the booksellers' annual convention, BookExpo America, at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago.

WHY THEY SELL—I asked many publishing professionals why they think political books are selling so well. Using the two Clinton autobiographies as bookends is a way to think about the various titles published over the past year, illuminating some of the reasons that politics is something that Americans love to hate.