SOME OF the best narratives about America are the saddest, and most shocking. You might begin - because it is the tale of America's beginnings - with Brian Schofield's Selling your Father's Bones (HarperCollins, £17.99/offer £16.19). It tells the story of the Nez Percé native tribe, in the summer of 1877, who were forced from their lands by settlement, and set out on a 1,700-mile trek through what is now Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Some of it is a familiar story, in the chronicle of betrayal - the surrender of land for promises of security and payment that never appeared. But his research, although sometimes expressed with cliché, has a modern, passionate eye for personal stories and for the destruction of the environment and wildlife.

You might jump from that to Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris (Picador £16.99/£15.29). The account by a New Yorker journalist and a film-maker, based on interviews that made up a film of the same name, describes the US treatment of Iraqi prisoners that led to the photographs of torture and humiliation at the Abu Ghraib prison. The book, oddly, does not include the photographs that became iconic. Nor does it examine the legal dance the Bush Administration conducted to justify its treatment. It does give an account, from ordinary soldiers, of the confusion of the early months of the war, and how easily that led to procedures clearly against the Geneva Conventions to become part of normal operations.

But this year has also brought a more cheerful flow of books reasserting a belief in American optimism and democratic values. In Justin Webb's likeable pitch Have a Nice Day: Behind the clichés - giving America another chance (ShortBooks £14.99/£13.49), he quotes a familiar question: “If Middle America is so stupid, vulgar, self-absorbed and materialistic, which it often is, then how can America be so great?” And answers it with pleasure: “The answer to this reasonable question is that... [it] is all a by-product of something vital and strong and lean and nimble and clever at the heart of the project: it's the American talent for striving.” His BBC colleague Matt Frei, in a more conceptual take on some of the same themes, Only in America: Inside the mind and under the skin of the nation everyone loves to hate (HarperCollins, £16.99/£15.29), is particularly good on immigration, and on the nation's capital, “a one-industry town, and that industry is the pursuit and exercise of superpower”.

Simon Schama took a gamble in The American Future (The Bodley Head, £20/£18). It is unusual for an historian to pin his argument on the future, but Schama, who brought out this book before the election, is blunt in resting his hopes on Barack Obama's victory. The weakest of the four sections is the final one on American Plenty, not helped by the blow to the US's global economic standing since it was written. The best is the opening section on “American War”, packed with insights. His account of Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on setting up West Point military academy - to make the US thoughtful about the forceful exercise of its power - is particularly resonant.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

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The prize for optimism must go to Barack Obama's books. The Audacity of Hope (Canongate, £8.99/£8.54) is a standard political text in its setting out of his beliefs, although unusually well-written and personal in style. But the one to read if you want to understand more about the President-elect is Dreams From My Father (Canongate £8.99/£8.54), written when he was younger, of his life before politics, and including many anecdotes that someone who really thought he might be president surely would not have put in. It is an astonishing memoir.

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