Ron Suskind, the Wall Street Journal's senior national affairs writer until 2000, has also written for Esquire, as the magazine's national correspondent, and for publications like the New York Times magazine and Smart Money. Along with his more recent writings, some of his stories from the Wall Street Journal — including those that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and various other awards — are collected here.

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. "Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

Maybe it's because the midterm elections went so very well. Maybe it's because at the White House, politics is the best policy. Maybe it's because it's the reign of Karl Rove. An inside look at how the most powerful presidential adviser in a century does what does so well.

The single most influential adviser to the president of the United States is going home to Texas with her family to live a simpler life. Perhaps Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, says it best: "Oh, God."

This book's subjects--winners of the John F. Kennedy Foundation's Profiles in Courage Award over the past 14 years--are profiled by writers that include Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Anna Quindlen. Ron Suskind writes about Nickolas Murnion, the lone prosecutor of desolate Garfield County, Montana. In 1993, he stood up to the Freemen, a homegrown, heavily-armed terrorist group that had taken over municipal buildings and placed bounties on the heads of local officials. Buy the book

Ruben Dican adjusts the television, as everyone waits. A picture comes into focus. It's Bryant Gumbel. There's a shot of United Flight 175 ramming the south tower. Then it's run again. And again. It is Sept. 12, and 22 men, women and children sit, rapt, at the end of the earth. They've never actually seen a skyscraper. Or a Bryant Gumbel. Or a plane, other than the tiny ones that infrequently alight on a grassy strip near the volcano.

NEW YORK -- Because Kathy Morgan believes in the Christian doctrine of free will, she offers her students at All Hallows Catholic High School a choice about their future. "So, you want to get out of the South Bronx?" she asks 17-year-old Brian Seymour, who just slumped into a chair in her pin-neat office. No response. She waits. "Yo, Brian. It's a simple yes or no."