Christopher Whitcomb

Christopher Whitcomb is a 15-year veteran of the FBI and author most recently of Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (Little, Brown & Company, $25.95). Here he chooses his six favorite books.

A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin (Avon, $8). This novel brilliantly frames the human spirit with the depravity of war. I love all of Helprin’s books, but this story of an old infantryman recounting his adventures to a young boy strikes me as timeless. It bleeds.

Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Stephen Pressfield (Doubleday, $28). I have never read a better depiction of combat, or of those who wage it. Pressfield re-creates one of the most heroic battles in history, not in terms of sword and shield, but of the humanity behind them. Men of war are a separate breed. Gates of Fire defines them.

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Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Pocket, $7.99). This epic reaches outside the bounds of plot and setting to celebrate some of the most remarkable characters in American fiction. I’ll never see the Old West, but in McMurtry’s writing I can smell the mesquite fires, taste the dust storms, and feel the excitement of the cattle drive. I read it once a year.

Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace, $25). It’s hard to pick a favorite from Eco’s remarkable library, but this novel satisfies my appetite for extended metaphor. Eco speaks volumes about the complexity of the human psyche. When I read him, I feel like I’m on a great treasure hunt for my own soul.

The Physician of London: The Second Part of the Seventeenth-Century Trilogy of Nicholas Cooke by Stephanie Cowell (out of print). Brilliant prose by one of the best historical novelists I have ever read. Cowell re-creates Elizabethan England and its personalities with the beauty and art of a Flemish tapestry. I don’t know Chris Marlowe, but I get the feeling she does.

The Bible (Cambridge University Press, $17). Brilliant. It never reads the same way twice.