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Obsessed — and confounded — by the roller-coaster economy? To help you understand our frazzled financial situation, Laura Conaway offers three books that cover everything from the Great Depression to the "dazzling world of derivatives."

Though fierce political opponents, John McCain and Barack Obama agree on a literary matter: Each picks Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, featuring the stoic freedom-fighter Robert Jordan, as a favorite.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Agency stepped up its efforts to collect intelligence domestically by filtering millions of phone conversations and e-mail messages. In his new book, The Shadow Factory, journalist James Bamford reveals that the ultra-secret agency has half a million people on its watch lists.

If there is such a thing as a happiness bubble, it is a much tougher, resilient bubble than the stock and real estate ones that have burst recently.

Last week alone, Barack Obama outspent John McCain by about $6 million in television advertising. Jonathan Martin of Politico says there are two elements to the story: Obama's enormous fundraising advantage over McCain, and how much money the Democrat is pouring into advertising in red states.

Some feminists have had a hard time accepting Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as a symbol of women's empowerment. But political science professor Ronnee Schreiber argues that conservatism and feminism are not mutually exclusive ideologies.

Writer Alix Kates Shulman remembers the 1960s as an age where men dominated the literary scene — that is, until Grace Paley's quirky urban voice and modernist short stories began to challenge the notion of what constituted great reading.

The Swedish Academy praised Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio for his adventurous novels, essays, non-fiction and children's literature. His work is often about wanderers, people on a quest for meaning and grappling with national histories.

Alan Cheuse reviews two historical novels, both with protagonists immersed in sewing and slavery: Breena Clarke's Stand the Storm and Frances de Pontes Peebles' The Seamstress.

An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that the controversial U.S. attorney firings of 2006 were of a partisan political nature. One of the seven fired attorneys, Iglesias discusses his book, In Justice, an insider's account of the affair.