Nonfiction

The Oil and the Glory
By Steve LeVine
(Random House, 496 pages, $28)
The Caspian Sea region’s oil was commercialized in 1886, when Zeynalabdin Tagiyev—known as the Azerbaijani Eunuch Maker—struck a gusher that spewed more crude into the sea than all the world’s functional wells were producing at the time. As LeVine’s engaging account details, the area has since been discovered, plundered, and forgotten time and again. But now, with the opening of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline in spring 2006, the Caspian may well be the key to our energy independence from the Middle East. A former Wall Street Journal writer, LeVine brings this all alive by introducing us to regional strongmen, American fixers, Western oil-company executives, and shady energy traders who, since the breakup of the Soviet empire, have jostled for Central Asia’s enormous oil prize while Mother Russia looms menacingly in the background. The deft political portrait of this strategic, volatile area makes the book essential reading, but it’s LeVine’s fine writing that makes it a pleasure. —Andy Young

The Panic of 1907
By Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr
(Wiley, 272 pages, $30)
In this slender, sometimes slow-moving volume, Bruner and Carr (faculty members at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business) detail what happened when an ill-informed public met a credit crunch a century ago. From the Knickerbocker Trust Co.’s implosion to Theodore Roosevelt’s meddling, the book breaks down the perfect storm that brought on this panic, taking relish in the late-night heroics of J.P. Morgan, who all but bailed out the nation. Sadly, one of financial history’s most inherently thrilling narratives gets bogged down in stilted jargon, but the text improves when it begins analyzing the crisis, drawing eerie parallels to our tenuous modern-day circumstances. —Julia Ramey

Overtreated
By Shannon Brownlee
(Bloomsbury U.S.A., 343 pages, $26)
In this exhaustive takedown of the U.S. health-care system, Brownlee argues that as much as one-third of the money we spend on care does not improve our health and may even harm or kill us. Though it sometimes overlaps with Michael Moore’s Sicko (the album Ronald Reagan made for the A.M.A. in the 1960s, which warned that Medicare could lead to a Stalinist dictatorship, makes a cameo in both), Overtreated eclipses Moore’s reporting and eschews his polemics. By piling on facts, Brownlee shows why Americans spend so much on health care yet are in measurably poorer shape than the residents of just about every other developed nation. —Jen Itzenson

Innovation Nation
By John Kao
(Free Press, 306 pages, $26) 
The U.S. has lost its head start. According to Kao, a former Harvard Business School professor and founder of an advisory firm, we no longer lead the world in innovation. Our competition now stretches beyond India and China to smaller players like Singapore, home to Biopolis, a 2 million-square-foot research complex that will house 10,000 scientists. To bounce back, Kao suggests revamping America’s education system and wooing promising foreigners. While much of his vision is broadly theoretical, Kao’s views on the globe’s newest innovators are illuminating. —Jessica Liebman