Danny Goldberg

Danny Goldberg, CEO of Artemis Records, is the author of Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit (Miramax, $23.95).

Collected Poems, 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg (Perennial, $25). No matter how many times I read “Howl” or “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” I am dazzled by the verbal brilliance of the greatest 20th-century American bard. Allen Ginsberg transformed American culture with cosmic insights that have as much relevance today as they would if they’d been written five minutes ago.

The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (Ballantine, $17). This is the all-time classic political history. Somehow David Halberstam found a poetic voice with which to convey the flawed intellectual thought process that produced America’s greatest foreign-policy failure of the 20th century—Vietnam. His willingness to question mere intellect echoes profoundly in the current situation.

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Political Fictions by Joan Didion (Vintage, $14). Joan Didion says everything I want to say about American politics from 1988 to 2000, except she says it more elegantly and more thoughtfully. So much recent political writing is mired in greasy spoonfuls of conventional wisdom. Didion has cold-eyed genuine wisdom.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic, $7). Our kids were 7 and 4 in 1997, when the first Harry Potter book came out, and my wife and I took turns reading it out loud to them, realizing along the way that we were enjoying it as much as they were. Like C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the Potter series operates effortlessly on many levels, like great stories always do.

Bad Boy Brawley Brown by Walter Mosley (Warner Books, $7.50). Of all the novelists who have kept alive the concept of the lone detective, courageously and cannily following his own moral code, no one has done it more elegantly, more literately, or more soulfully than Walter Mosley, who takes the genre into the realm of the great Raymond Chandler.

Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta