It's exciting to discover a book (a) by an expert (b) with a definite thesis. There are lots of books with theses by random nuts, and lots of boring surveys by experts, but surprisingly few books with theses by experts.
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How much of this is the convention of not framing books around a thesis? Take _Abe_, the recent Lincoln biography. It argues that the real Lincoln is much forgotten / misunderstood because we've forgotten a lot about the culture c. 1850. But it's not presented as an argument.
I just went through my Kindle history; surprisingly many of the books by experts really are organized around theses (or so they seem), but they are usually not presented that way.
