I updated my book panel with one I just finished reading, one that I just started, and one that I recently re-examined. Information about each can be found by clicking the photos.
A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly is a bit of historical fiction that might allegedly be for young adults, but people of all ages can enjoy it. It involves a young woman (sixteen) with hopes of college, but a current life of trouble and poverty in upstate New York, 1906. Donnelly uses stories she has been told and a real life murder case for background and color, but the core story is Mattie Gokey's, who intelligence, heart, and strength could be used these days as well. The book is very well written and has a wonderful sense of time and place.
The W Effect: Bush's War On Women is a collection of essays, edited by Laura Flanders, that discuss the state of affairs for women in Bush America. It's point of view is progressive, and the title should not fool you -- it is not only concerned with one man, its goals surely won't be fulfilled once he is no longer in office, and it is not even only concerned about women per se. In fact, the photo supplied has a better subtitle (different from my copy): "Sexual Politics in the Bush Years and Beyond."
Freedom Law's: The Moral Reading Of The Constitution by Ronald Dworkin is around eight years old, but its arguments on constitutional ideals, true democracy, abortion rights, the confirmation battles of Judge Bork and Thomas, and more continues to be quite relevant. A collection of essays mostly from the New York Review of Books that are geared to the lay reader, easy to digest and well reasoned. Professor Dworkin is a bit too sure of himself at times and as a guide for judges per se, his views are a bit too idealistic. All the same, the basic legal philosophy behind much of the book is quite sound, and worth reading even when it is not.