What should you put under the Christmas tree this year? Derb has a few suggestions:

A fruitful gift book for anyone wondering whether we should be in Afghanistan: Taking “fruitful” to mean “a darn good read that left me much more knowledgeable about something,” I strongly recommend David Loyn’s In Afghanistan. Loyn, a BBC foreign correspondent for 30 years, really knows the territory. He is one of the very few people from Europe or North America to have seen Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader. In October 2006, he actually spent a few days as an imbed with the Taliban in northern Helmland, where they were fighting against the British. Some British press commentators have called for Loyn to be tried for treason on this account. A faction of the Taliban, on the other hand, wanted to kill him, but: “My security was the Pashtun honor code. . . . My host, Mullah Abdul Manan, the overall military commander of the Taliban, told them if they wanted to kill me they would have to kill him first.”
Loyn fills in all the history: it turns out to be even more repetitively blood-curdling than you thought, with a cast of exceptionally colorful characters, both Afghan and foreign. Charlie Wilson was by no means the first of his kind; nor is Mullah Omar the first of his. Warning: If you support our current mission in Afghanistan, your approval will likely not survive a reading of this book.
A classic worth giving new reading life to for any intelligent pre-teen: Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. When I was around ages eight to eleven, my favorite reading matter was the William books of Richmal Crompton. William Brown was a pre-teen middle-class English boy waging guerrilla war against the adult world of convention, respectability, organized activities, and clean fingernails — an English Tom Sawyer, in fact. His adventures eventually filled 38 books. When I told an American friend about this, she passed on Penrod to me, in the 2007 Penguin Classics edition (not listed on Amazon for some reason). Penrod Schofield is of the same kidney as William and Tom. Aged eleven-coming-on-twelve, he lives in the American Midwest around 1910, and conducts boyish assaults on the bourgeois order. He is a principal in, for example, the Great Tar Fight, “the origin of which proved . . . so difficult for parents to trace . . . The barber did not begin it; it was the fly on the barber’s nose that began it — though, of course, something else began the fly . . . ” A lost world, wonderfully brought to life by the author of The Magnificent Ambersons.
A Non-book item for anyone with a dozen or more website passwords scrawled in a notebook somewhere: RoboForm. Are you bedeviled, as I was, by the problem of generating and keeping track of passwords to a score or more of different websites? You think “steve092376” is any kind of a secure password? Mine now look like this: “m!k4Xn98Ag$mQqP%.” Now that’s a password. (“Bit strength 98” says the generator. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds real good, and I fall asleep easily at nights murmuring it to myself.) No need to remember the dang thing, either — RoboForm takes care of that. Which is just as well. E6j$P&q94Fy8elph . . . YsP$2pP6hNK%G7Bh . . . feJ#FvreVctz5YZx . . . Go on, hack me, you buggers!

Get more suggestions from NRO’s Christmas-shopping symposium here, here, and here.