What's new in paperback

"Fair Game: How a Top Spy Was Betrayed by Her Own Government," by Valerie Plame Wilson. (Simon & Schuster, $15.) The columnist Robert Novak ended Valerie Plame Wilson's career when he identified her as a CIA officer in 2003, and she wrote this book both to settle scores and to support her family. After reviewing the manuscript, the CIA demanded many deletions; the book includes the censor's marks as well as an afterword by a reporter who uses the public record to fill in gaps. "Fair Game," Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, shows Wilson as "an ambitious, gung-ho professional." Norman Pearlstine was the editor-in-chief of Time Inc. when Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak of Wilson's identity, subpoenaed the notes of the Time reporter Matt Cooper, and he was widely criticized when he decided to turn them over. In "Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War Over Anonymous Sources" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15), Pearlstine questions whether the news media have a right to keep their sources secret. READ MORE...