(FORTUNE Magazine) – Family dramas are often loaded with human elements that make for great business stories--pride, envy, the quest for redemption. Senior writer Devin Leonard has proved himself a master of this kind of yarn. He's probed the tensions between that odd couple, Viacom's Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin (tensions they only later publicly admitted existed); he's captured the Greek tragedy (literally) of the rise and fall of cable's Rigas family; and now he's delivered another epic, "The Bronfman Saga: From Rags to Riches to..." With candid comments from Edgars Sr. and Jr., it's the best story yet about a remarkable dynasty and a son's struggle to preserve--and now rebuild--the family fortune.

A great journalist like our Bill Powell prides himself on staying ahead of the pack. (He wrote in June about the coming Iraq war when it was off most folks' radar, and he's early again this issue with a brilliant analysis of how the fate of the post-Saddam Middle East will make--or break--the global economy in 2003. But when you're good, you don't always have to go after news; sometimes it walks in your door. That happened in 1998, when Bill was Newsweek's Moscow bureau chief. A former top Soviet spy came to him with a tangled tale that eventually helped lead to the capture of CIA double agent Robert Hanssen. With his usual flair, Bill has told this story in a gripping new book, Treason. Don't miss it.

And then there's editor-at-large Carol Loomis. After 48 years at FORTUNE, and having garnered just about every award out there (some of them twice), Carol is in a league of her own. Her look inside Sandy Weill's Citigroup--still an amazing money machine despite the blows it has taken this year--is full of insights you'll find nowhere else. It's classic Loomis.