2. Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant
Years, 1917 - 1932
By John Richardson
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
608 pages
$40.00

This third installment of a majestic multi-volume biography finds Picasso in transition from his Bohemian youth to wealth, fame and marriage, and then to a romance with a very young mistress. As always Richardson is tart, judgmental, thoroughly knowledgeable and very readable.

3. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
By Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pages
$22.00

Beah was separated from his parents at age 12 when rebel soldiers attacked his village in Sierra Leone. By 13 he was a soldier, a killer many times over, armed to the teeth and wired on a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder. Beah's memory of his season in hell, and his eventual rescue and rehabilitation, are painfully sharp, and his memoir takes readers behind the dead eyes of the child-soldier in a way no other writer has.

4. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
By Tim Weiner
Publisher: Doubleday
448 pages
$27.95

The infinitely fascinating, endlessly depressing history of the Central Intelligence Agency, much of which amounts, in Weiner's assessment, to one mistake and misfire and missed opportunity after another, in China, Iran, the Soviet Union, India, the Middle East and just about everywhere else the U.S. desperately needed inside information and didn't get it.