MY POETS, by Maureen N. McLane. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16. Part autobiography and part free-form criticism, this charismatically subversive book includes essays on poets canonical (Shelley, Dickinson) and contemporary (Fanny Howe, Louise Glück), as McLane tells how she learned to embrace the ambivalence of her own taste in poems and in people. Twelve, $15. Sun Tzu's classic, "The Art of War," is fervently quoted by strivers and schemers in Buckley's uproarious political farce, in which a Washington lobbyist inflames anti-Chinese sentiment to gain Congressional support for a weapons system. BISMARCK: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg. Oxford University, $21.95. Appointed minister­-president of Prussia in 1862, Otto von Bismarck carried out what Steinberg describes as "the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries": the unification of Germany and the reorganization of Central Europe. In the Book Review, Henry A. Kissinger called this incisive biography of a complex man "the best study of its subject in the English language." A well-heeled clan gathers for a wedding in Shipstead's smart, frothy first novel. On the fictional island of Waskeke, off New England, Winn Van Meter is marrying off his elder daughter over a precisely choreographed weekend, but beneath the surface lie animosities, sexual suspense and a clash between appearances and authenticity. Vintage, $18. This enlightening encyclopedic survey, by a literary critic and philosophy professor, both illustrates and argues for the liveliness of American intellectual life. Drawing on decades of cultural journalism and nearly 200 interviews conducted over the years, Romano reports on, among other things, political theorists, mathematicians, broadcasters, science writers and purveyors of self-help. Grand Central, $15. At more than 300 pounds, Edie Middlestein, the 60-ish heroine of Attenberg's caustic and entertaining novel, is killing herself through overeating. But this story's underlying subject is Edie's suburban Jewish family, and how it reacts to the disaster unfolding in its midst. Our reviewer, Julie Orringer, praised "the unfailing emotional accuracy and specificity with which Attenberg renders Edie's despair." THE HUNT FOR KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer. Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18. This in-depth account gives us the war on terror at its best and worst: the dogged agents who cultivated intelligence and ran down every semi-credible lead as they chased one of the world's most dangerous terrorists; and the bureaucratic infighting that may well have delayed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's capture. Seth G. Jones's HUNTING IN THE SHADOWS: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 (Norton, $16.95) takes a wider view. A rogues" gallery of terrorists and their pursuers, it presents the history of Al Qaeda's war against the West as a series of "waves," beginning with the embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998.