Israel

Top ten works of nonfiction as of July 2005, compiled by the daily newspaper Ha'aretz.

1. Raise Not Thy Hand Against the Child, by Rabbi Israel Meir Lau. Israel's former chief rabbi, who as a child survived Buchenwald, tells his personal story of struggle, hope, and redemption.

2. Boomerang: The Failure of Leadership in the Second Intifada, by Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah. How incompetence and corruption, not vision and courage, led to Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

3. German Requiem, by Amos Elon. How the Jews of Germany went from being peddlers and tradesmen to purveyors of art, literature, scholarship, business, philosophy, and activism—before losing it all in the Holocaust. (Published in English recently as The Pity of It All.)

4. 1967, by Tom Segev. A controversial new account of Israeli passions, fashions, illusions, and dreams in the period leading up to and including the Six-Day War.

5. Stalin, by Edvard Radzinsky. A biography of the Soviet tyrant, by an author with special access to Russia's secret archives.

6. Standing in Line, by Yair Lapid. Israel's most colorful columnist spouts off on popular culture, restaurants, and the future of manliness.

7. What Is Love? by Yoram Yovel. Eight couples looking for love, as seen through the eyes of their psychoanalyst.

8. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, by Carlo Ginzburg. How a common man in early-modern Italy lived, worked, and endured the extraordinary trials of the Inquisition.

9. Rationality, Fairness, Happiness: Selected Writings, by Daniel Kahneman and Colleagues. A Nobel Prize winner in economics shows how passion and whimsy affect economic choices.

10. A Land Divided: Israeli Reflections on Disengagement, by Ari Shavit. Thirty-three conversations with the country's leading political and intellectual figures, by Israel's most celebrated interviewer.