FOR YOUR DESK

The Leaders We Need - And What Makes Us Follow By Michael Maccoby (Harvard Business School Press, $26.95)

"There is only one irrefutable definition of a leader," writes Maccoby, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist who's spent decades coaching execs, "and that is someone people follow." But what do those followers look for in leaders? Maccoby addresses that question through historical and cultural contexts, eviscerating classic models of paternalistic and autocratic bosses, promoting diverse rather than unilateral management, and citing examples showing how people who lead with their hearts as well as their heads are better able to enlist employees as willing collaborators.

FOR YOUR NIGHTSTAND

The Ghost

By Robert Harris (Simon & Schuster, $26)

After stepping down in disgrace for his support of an unpopular war on terror, charismatic British Prime Minister Adam Lang retreats to Martha's Vineyard to complete his "potentially explosive" memoir. But after his ghostwriter is found dead, he turns for help to a jaded, money-hungry author who raises uncomfortable doubts about his predecessor's demise and Lang himself. As he probes his subject's past, Harris' protagonist finds that the ex-PM's past is full of dark secrets capable of causing more deaths in the future. After five books firmly rooted in history (including last year's Imperium), Harris demonstrates equal acumen in penning a contemporary political thriller.

Signed, Mata Hari

By Yannick Murphy (Little, Brown, $23.99)

Ninety years after being convicted of spying for Germany during World War I and executed by a firing squad in Paris, Dutch-born Margaretha Zelle proves that she can be just as seductive in print as she apparently was in person. From the damp of her cell, this femme fatale recounts her desolate girlhood and bleak marriage, and her subsequent years spent re-creating herself as a model, an exotic dancer (she claimed to be an Indian princess and performed before crowned heads) and a courtesan to European grandees. By the close of Murphy's extraordinary yarn, Mata Hari can't escape the business end of a rifle, but neither can the reader escape doubts about her infamy.

America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation

By Jim Rasenberger (Scribner, $27)

We think of our own times as being the fastest-paced, most astonishing in U.S. history. But people living in 1908, the subject of Rasenberger's delightful new book, must have felt the same. Packed into that single year were Henry Ford's introduction of the Model T; a thrilling 20,000-mile car race from New York to Paris; the supposed deaths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bolivia; explorer Robert Peary's final assault on the North Pole; the Tunguska Event, a massive explosion - likely caused by a descending comet - that felled some 80 million trees; and the very first passenger death in an airplane, flown by Orville Wright. Rasenberger's many-layered narrative balances out the optimism of 1908 and the sense of a country taking center stage, against the adversities - lynchings in the South, terrorist explosions in Manhattan - that lurked just beneath America's idealized vision of itself.

The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved

By Judith Freeman (Pantheon, $25.95)

"For 30 years, 10 months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition." So said crime fictionist Raymond Chandler in 1954, after the death of his wife, Cissy, a twice-divorced woman, 18 years older than he (though she had lied to him about being younger), whom Chandler had married less than two weeks after his mother - a critic of their union - perished of cancer. Drawing on near-obsessive research into her subjects, novelist Freeman (Red Water) presents a frequently moving study of their symbiotic marriage; the author's unsteady evolution from oil company exec to distinguished genre stylist; Cissy's influence on her husband's fictional portrayal of women; and his rapid decline into drink, depression and attempted suicide after her passing at age 84. Suffused with quotes from Chandler's work, The Long Embrace is an extraordinary look at the relationship between love and literature.