Our 15 favorite books of 2005, including an atlas we can't keep our hands off, followed by additional New & Notable books of the year.

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	Atlas Maior  •  Peter van der Krogt ART & ARCHITECTURE •  2005 •  HARD COVER  • 626 PAGES A richly embellished, gloriously annotated collection of maps from the largest, most complete atlas of its day, published between 1662 and 1672 by Amsterdam mapmaker and entrepreneur Joan Blaeu. The gold-heightened, hand-colored 11-volume original, from which this sumptuous book is taken, is the showpiece of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Editor Peter van der Grogt provides a history of this exceptional example of art and cartography. (MAP22, $200.00)
	The Explorer's Eye, First-Hand Accounts of Adventure and Exploration  •  Fergus Fleming  •  Annabel Merullo  •  Michael Palin EXPLORATION •  2005 •  HARD COVER  • 264 PAGES A gripping tale of 50 heroes and explorers from Alexander Von Humboldt to Robert Peary, Jacques Cousteau and Neil Armstrong, featuring a choice selection of archival photographs. Fleming once again dishes up surprises, telling quotes and even-more-telling photographs in this collection of diary excerpts, quotes and archival illustrations. Well done indeed. (EXP40, $45.00)
	Finding George Orwell in Burma  •  Emma Larkin TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 304 PAGES An American journalist fluent in Burmese, Emma Larkin (a pseudonym) masterfully interweaves her travels in the footsteps of the British colonial officer with interviews and an astute, moving history of modern Burma. (BMA40, $15.00)
	Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed  •  Jared Diamond HISTORY •  2006 •  PAPER  • 575 PAGES Big, wildly ambitious, provocative, this is Jared Diamond at his best. He tackles nothing less than the history and fate of civilization in this compelling book in which he offers case studies, present and past, of societies that work and societies that do not. He devotes 100 carefully reasoned pages, for example, to the fate of the Norse settlements in Greenland (climatic change, Inuit) and another big section on Easter Island (deforestation, hubris). It's a fitting follow-up to his Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel. (GEN324, $18.00)
	The Gods Drink Whiskey, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha  •  Stephen T. Asma TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 288 PAGES Asma, a university professor and a Buddhist, writes with verve and humor of his stint teaching at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh. The book is both an introduction to Theravada Buddhism and a portrait of contemporary Cambodia. He confesses in his preface quite pointedly that it is his mission to take "California" out of Buddhism and his earthy account of his (mis)adventures is refreshingly free of cant and high-minded prattle. He is also acutely aware of his position as a western scholar in a Buddhist country (albeit one where Buddhism was outlawed by the repugnant Khmer Rouge). (CBD46, $14.95)
	Feet on the Street, Rambles Around New Orleans  •  Roy Blount, Jr. TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2005 •  HARD COVER  • 144 PAGES Organized as eight wonderfully digressive, personal rambles around a favorite city, Feet on the Street takes in the neighborhoods, music, history, food and local characters of New Orleans. A book in the exceptional Crown Journeys series, which marries writers and places. (USS370, $16.95)
	Into a Paris Quartier, Reine Margot's Chapel and other Haunts of St. Germain  •  Diane Johnson TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2005 •  PAPER  • 204 PAGES An affectionate, personal portrait of place, Johnson writes with insight, verve and wit of her neighborhood on the Left Bank. She weaves history, anecdote, and tales of the many, mostly American, expatriates of St. Germain. The book, a volume in the National Geographic Directions series, works as both a history and walking guide. (FRN491, $10.95)
	The Fate of Africa  •  Martin Meredith HISTORY •  2006 •  PAPER  • 752 PAGES Ambitious in scope, immensely readable -- and as big as a doorstop -- Martin Meredith's overview of the tumult, horrors and strides made in Africa since independence is invaluable. A veteran newspaperman and historian, Meredith has written biographies of Mandela and Mugabe. He is particularly strong in sketching the personalities and events in South and East Africa. (AFR154, $21.95)
	A History of the World In 6 Glasses  •  Tom Standage FOOD •  2005 •  PAPER  • 240 PAGES A history of the world as seen though six key beverages, from the stone age to now. Standage argues, the drinks that mattered are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Each is a tale of politics, prestige, imperialism, commerce and society. The technology editor for The Economist, Standage documents social and technological trends through the ages in this highly enjoyable chronicle. (GEN333, $14.95)
	Why Birds Sing, A Journey Through the Mystery of Bird Song  •  David Rothenberg NATURAL HISTORY •  2006 •  PAPER  • 272 PAGES Rothenberg, a jazz clarinetist and philosopher with a strong interest in the interconnectedness of things, weaves music, poetry and science in this intriguing series of essays. It's a riff on the meaning and pleasure of birdsong, including, of course, a chapter on the nightingale. He opens the book with an account of a jam session with -- and for -- the birds of the national aviary. This paperback edition includes an accompanying 63-minute CD of music and birdsong. (BRD23, $19.95)
	The City of Falling Angels  •  John Berendt HISTORY •  2006 •  PAPER  • 414 PAGES Berendt here does for Venice what he did for Savannah, Georgia in the phenomenally popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. His central hook is the investigation of the devastating fire of January 29, 1996, which destroyed the Venice opera house. What follows is intrigue, political machinations, financial chicanery, and, of course murder. Berendt succeeds in conveying a certain essence of what it is like to live in modern Venice. (ITL644, $15.00)
	Hungry Planet, What the World Eats  •  Peter Menzel  •  Faith D'Aluisio FOOD •  2005 •  HARD COVER  • 160 PAGES As in their mind-expanding, gorgeously photographed and provocative Material World, Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio once again present diverse families around the world, this time focusing on what people eat. The photographs themselves (of 30 families in 24 countries with a week's worth of groceries arrayed around them) are fascinating -- and the accompanying sidebars and statistics on food habits, diet, and economics are just as riveting. With essays by Michael Pollan, Alfred Crosby, Carl Safina and others. (WLD65, $40.00)
	Istanbul, Memories and the City  •  Orhan Pamuk BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR •  2006 •  PAPER  • 320 PAGES In this dazzling if somber elegy, Orhan Pamuk writes with quiet grace of the city celebrated in his many novels, a city of crumbling wooden mansions and Ottoman riches, a city of Asian, Islamic, secular and European influences. With a selection of excellent photographs by Ara Guler. (TKY99, $15.95)
	AA Gill is Away  •  A. A. Gill TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2005 •  PAPER  • 307 PAGES In Britain, AA Gill is a household word, as an exceedingly popular restaurant and media critic for the Times of London. He hates to travel, but his readers love it when he does, because he so frequently comes back with a hilarious, intricately observed report. This book is a collection of those essays. The range is staggering -- included are reports from famine-plagued Sudan, Tokyo, Scotland, Tanzania and the Kalahari, and Los Angeles where he investigates the adult-film (AKA porn) industry. Gill manages to be both very funny and very moving throughout this book: no mean feat. One caveat: despite the introduction written specifically for an American audience, these essays remain very British, with a fair amount of mystifying slang. (TVL76, $14.00)
	Understanding Iraq  •  William Polk HISTORY •  2006 •  PAPER  • 221 PAGES A brisk, well-informed analysis of the present situation in Iraq in the context of Iraqi history from Babylonian and Assyrian antecedents, Mongol invasion, British rule, to U.S. policy. A professor of history at the University of Chicago and Harvard, an Arabic and Turkish speaker and member of the State Department policy staff, William Polk is an excellent guide to the history of Iraq. His book is ambitiously subtitled The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, From Genghis Khan's Mongols To The Ottoman Turks To The British Mandate To The American Occupation. (IRQ14, $13.95)

	Why Geography Matters  •  Harm de Blij   • REFERENCE  •  Harm de Blij calls for a renewed focus on geography in this engaging, personal overview of today's geopolitical challenges, including climate change, the rise of China and global terrorism. With 47 maps and charts. (MAP20, $16.95)
	The Devil's Picnic, Around the World in Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit  •  Taras Grescoe   • FOOD  •  An entertaining, enlightening journey through the world of forbidden pleasure from gum in Singapore to coca tea, bull's testicles, baby eels and Cuban cigars (in San Francisco). (TVL83, $14.95)
	A Crack in the Edge of the World, America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906  •  Simon Winchester   • HISTORY  •  Geologist, master storyteller, traveler and journalist, Simon Winchester succeeds again in this fast-paced, utterly fascinating account of the great 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco. (CAL193, $15.95)
	Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves  •  Adam Hochschild   • HISTORY  •  Hochchild's riveting history of the remarkable British abolition movement in the late 18th century in which a few dedicated Englishmen (and women) precipitated the end of slavery in the British Empire. (WLD69, $16.00)
	Little History of the World  •  E. H. Gombrich   • HISTORY • MIDDLE READERS (Age 9-12)  •  This splendidly written, sweeping history for younger readers covers the history of the world in 40 concise chapters. With the original 1936 woodcut illustrations, this beloved book has finally translated into English by the author. (REF12, $12.95)
	Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945  •  Tony Judt   • HISTORY  •  A keenly observed, lively history of Europe, its politics, society and ambitions since WWII. (EUR195, $20.00)
	The Lost Painting  •  Jonathan Harr   • ART & ARCHITECTURE  •  The absorbing account of the rediscovery of Caravaggio's Taking of Christ (painted in 1602 and famously lost to history until 1990) by a young graduate student at the University of Rome. The book is appealing on many levels, not least as a police procedural (with the benefit of being all true). Harr provides masterful detail not just on the search but also the art historians, scholars and others on the trail. (ITL676, $13.95)
	A Land of Ghosts, The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia  •  David Campbell   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Campbell writes with flair and insight of the people, history and ecological discoveries in the far western reaches of the Amazon Basin, a place where he has focused much of his work. (AMZ90, $18.95)
	Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat and Camel  •  Jeffrey Tayler   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  The eye-opening account of an American journalist's trek across the Sahel, the southern region of the Sahara Desert, which encompasses Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, Chad and Senegal. (WAF83, $25.00)
	Assassination Vacation  •  Sarah Vowell   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  An irreverent tour of American history by way of its presidential assassinations by a popular NPR commentator and essayist. Informative and thoroughly enjoyable. (USA119, $14.00)
	Come Back to Afghanistan, A California Teenager's Story  •  Said Hyder Akbar   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  A refreshingly candid, unsentimental portrait of post-Taliban Afghanistan. This book grows out of the teenage author's totally engrossing radio pieces for This American Life, in which he accompanies his expatriate Afghan father from California to Afghanistan. His father sold his clothingstore in California to take a position in Afghanistan as Hamid Karzai's spokesperson. (CAS119, $16.95)
	Golden Boy, Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood  •  Martin Booth   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  Booth writes with warmth of his youthful rambles in this sharp-eyed, affectionate memoir of coming of age in colonial Hong Kong. The book is a portrait of place, of a lost time, and most especially of his friends and family. (HKG23, $14.00)
	Mao, The Unknown Story  •  Jung Chang  •  John Halliday   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  In this extraordinary biography Chang (Wild Swans) and her historian husband reveal Mao as a brutal, power-hungry monster with close ties to Joseph Stalin. (CHN301, $18.95)
	Mark Twain On Travel  •  Mark Twain  •  Terry Mort   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  A journalist, wanderer, opinionated and marvelously entertaining, Mark Twain wrote five well-received travel books over his long career. Editor Terry Mort handpicks choice selections for this satisfying anthology, organized geographically. (TVL77, $15.95)
	On The Road with Francis of Assisi  •  Linda Bird Francke   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Assisi wandered for 20 years, affording Newsweek editor Francke and her patient husband plenty to see and do in the piazzas, sanctuaries and chapels of Assisi, Siena, Bologna, Venice, Gubbio, Rome and other choice spots. (ITL647, $15.95)
	Quicksands, A Memoir  •  Sybille Bedford   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  British novelist Bedford looks back at a long life, well lived, in this lyrical memoir. (GBR587, $14.95)
	Seamanship, A Voyage along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles  •  Adam Nicolson   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  Nicolson offers an engrossing account of a coastal voyage from Cornwall, along the western coast of Ireland, out to the Faeroes and to Orkney in this brief hymn to the sea. (GBR561, $13.95)
	The Last Gentleman Adventurer, Coming of Age in the Arctic  •  Edward Beauclerk Maurice  •  Lawrence Millman   • EXPLORATION  •  Maurice's poignant tale of coming-of-age with the Hudson Bay Company in the Canadian Arctic in the 1930s. Posted to Pangnirtung as a remarkably unlikely 17-year-old recruit, Maurice grew into a man with the fur traders and Inuit of Baffin Island, earning the name of Issumatak (One Who Thinks). (ARC173, $14.95)
	The Orientalist, Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life  •  Tom Reiss   • BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR  •  A storyteller of the first order, Reiss weaves much information about the cultures and religions in the Caucasus in this wonderful tale of the remarkable life of Lev Nussimbaum -- a fabulist, interpreter of cultures, novelist and rogue who reinvented himself as Kurban Said. (CCS27, $15.95)
	Theatre of Fish, Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador  •  John Gimlette   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  A rollicking account of Gimlette's adventures in Newfoundland and Labrador on the trail of a great-great grandfather. It's a witty tale, soaked in fishy history, myth, lore and incident. (CND234, $15.00)
	Travels with My Donkey  •  Tim Moore   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  A wickedly comic account of grand adventures on the 500-mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Campostela with a French-speaking donkey. Moore salts his anecdotes of fellow travelers and grand adventures with an informative account of the history and culture of the medieval Way of St. James. (SPN242, $13.95)
	Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape, Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks  •  Bill McKibben   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  In this entry in the excellent Crown Journeys series, McKibben (The End of Nature) recounts a three-week trek from his new house in Vermont to his old place in the Adirondacks, meeting friends along the way and meditating on the meaning of wilderness. (NYS32, $16.95)
	Where God Was Born, A Daring Adventure Through the Bible's Greatest Stories  •  Bruce Feiler   • TRAVEL NARRATIVE  •  This third of Feiler's books on the Bible and the Middle East, takes him to Israel, Iraq and Iran. He interweaves his own spiritual quest with interviews and an account of travels with archaeologist Avner Goren. (MDE91, $14.95)
	Saving Fish from Drowning  •  Amy Tan   • LITERATURE  •  Tan interweaves history, incident and magic in this beguiling novel of Americans on tour who disappear into the jungles of Burma. (BMA44, $15.00)
	Shalimar the Clown  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE  •  Rushdie's sprawling novel overflows with allusions, ideas, characters and commentary. As told through the life of Shalimar, it concerns the fate of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim animosity, adultery and contemporary Los Angeles. (IDA270, $14.95)
	Small Island, A Novel  •  Andrea Levy   • LITERATURE  •  A marvelous novel of family, displacement, belonging, race and empire, set in a Jamaican immigrant community in post-WWII London. (GBR560, $14.00)
	The Lighthouse  •  P. D. James   • MYSTERY  •  Set on an island off Cornwell, where you can almost hear the crashing of waves and the taste of the salt air, an unpleasant and famous novelist is bizarrely murdered. It's the classic whodunit by the reigning queen of the genre. (GBR604, $13.95)
	The Turning, New Stories  •  Tim Winton   • LITERATURE  •  These 17 overlapping stories, steeped in everyday life on western Australia, follow the fates of a handful of characters in a small coastal town outside Perth. Winton, short-listed twice so far for the Booker Prize, has published a string of memorable novels, children's books and stories, all richly set in the working class milieu of the sparsely populated coastal desert. (AUS169, $15.00)
	Chasing Neotropical Birds  •  Vera and Bob Thornton   • NATURAL HISTORY  •  A Neotropical sampler, featuring 116 color photographs of dazzling, rare and charming birds of Central and South America. (SAM76, $34.95)
	Dancing at the Dead Sea, Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots  •  Alanna Mitchell   • SCIENCE  •  Mitchell deftly combines the personal, political and scientific in this engaging report on scattered threatened habitats and places around the globe. (TVL66, $25.00)
	Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs  •  Robert Sabuda  •  Matthew Reinhart   • SCIENCE • FAMILY  •  Sabuda turns his magic on prehistory in six dazzling double-page marvels of paper engineering, each featuring a full-color 3-D dinosaur in a visually animated background. (SCI102, $27.99)
	National Geographic Complete Birds of North America  •  Jonathan Alderfer   • NATURAL HISTORY  •  This wonderfully comprehensive oversize companion to the popular National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (FG09) includes 4,000 illustrations, 150 color photos and 750 maps. (USA122, $35.00)
	The Bedside Book of Birds, An Avian Miscellany  •  Graeme Gibson   • NATURAL HISTORY  •  Gibson brings together literary excerpts, paintings, drawings, and essays for this terrifically illustrated ornithological miscellany. (BRD31, $29.95)
	The Naming of Names, The Search for Order in the World of Plants  •  Anna Pavord   • SCIENCE  •  An enthusiastic and terrifically illustrated history of botany and botanical nomenclature by the author of Tulips. (NAT91, $45.00)

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