A book I've found extremely enlightening on both the modus operandi of the Bush presidency and the war on terror is the recently published memoir of retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to the War and Betrayed My Wife's C.I.A. Identity.

Ambassador Wilson relays the sad and frightening tale of how he was asked by the C.I.A. to return to Niger, a country where he had spent years in the foreign service, to ascertain whether Iraq had sought to purchase uranium there, presumably to build weapons of mass destruction. After his extensive in-country study, he concluded that the rumor carried no water. Not letting truth get in the way of his plans, President Bush blatantly lied in his 2003 State of the Union speech when he said that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."

Six months later Wilson, who left the State Department in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed piece headlined: "What I Didn't Find In Africa." Within two weeks, columnist Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover C.I.A. agent. Further investigation by NBC commentator Chris Matthews revealed that White House political guru Karl Rove had told him that "Wilson's wife is fair game." These were moves that Wilson, and many others, saw as retaliation for his Times piece. It was yet another example of the Bush administration's retaliatory strikes against its critics.

As David Corn of the Nation first noted, the breach of security in the public outing of a covert C.I.A. agent is a criminal offense. Eventually the Justice Department was forced to open an investigation that required even President Bush to undergo an interrogation with an attorney at his side.

The most penetrating review of Bill Clinton's autobiography came from David Maraniss, a Washington Post reporter who had earlier written an excellent Clinton biography, First in His Class. Maraniss quickly focused on the duality in President Clinton's life. Clinton admits that "I am a living paradox—deeply religious, yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility, yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity. . . . I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day. . . . I view [people], some of whom are very dear to me, who have never learned how to live. I desire and struggle to be different from them, but often am almost an exact likeness."

Maraniss sees this as the root cause of both Clinton's strength and his downfall—Monica, Gennifer, Paula, et al. Still, My Life has been lauded as the best presidential autobiography since Mark Twain helped Ulysses S. Grant write his.

WHY WE READ BOOKS—So why are political books so popular right now? One obvious reason often given is that it's a presidential election year. But the head of the Brookings Institution Press, Christopher O'Brien, told me that in addition to the issue of the election, political books are popular because "9/11 and the Iraq War make people think that they have to be more aware of what's going on in the political world."

The president of the Association of American Publishers, former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, confided that "political books are as important this year as they were in 1776. This suddenly gives me terrific confidence. Electronic media took a pass—their critical thinking skills took a pass—on reporting the full story of 9/11 and the war on terror. Many people thought: 'There's more to the story than we're getting.' And books are the only place where people can develop a thought. If you do see someone on the news, you know there's more to the story and people want to know more, so they read books."

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who is now out with her own book, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, put it succinctly when she said that the "neo-cons controlled much of the media, but then their war started going badly and people wanted to find out why, so they turned to books." Another Times columnist, Paul Krugman, is now out with a paperback edition of his The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, a collection of his razor-sharp critiques of the Bush administration.

In November, Verso Press is releasing The Record of the Paper: Fifty Years of the New York Times on U.S. Foreign Policy, by Howard Friel and Richard Falk. The study contends that over the last half-century the paper of record has misreported facts relating to the wars waged by the United States, from Vietnam in the 1960s, to Nicaragua in the 1980s, to Iraq today.

Off the radar of all pundits is a little-known, least-selling 2002 study that may very well best describe what the 2004 presidential electorate is thinking—or isn't. In The U.S. and the Wealth of Nations authors Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen conclude that, for complex reasons, the average brainpower of a nation ultimately determines its economic strength. The citizens of China, Japan and Korea have been shown to have a higher average IQ than Americans. The analysts' breakdown of our various states reveals the status of American minds in 2000.

With an IQ of 100 being the average, the top seven states were: Connecticut (113), Massachusetts and New Jersey (111), New York (109), Rhode Island (107), Hawaii (106), and Maryland (105). All voted for Gore. The bottom seven states were: Mississippi (85), Utah and Idaho (87), South Carolina and Wyoming (89), South Dakota (90), and Oklahoma (90). They all voted for Bush.