THE BEST NONFICTION OF 2000

AFRICA IN MY BLOOD

An Autobiography in Letters

By Jane Goodall

Edited by Dale Peterson

Houghton Mifflin: 372 pp., $28

She was 23 when she finally got to Africa in 1957, but Jane Goodall had dreamed of going there for years. For her first birthday, her father, who would leave when she was only 5, gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee she named Jubilee. She studied to become a secretary, but fate wasn’t having any of it.

She did not become a secretary. She became instead the world’s preeminent field zoologist. Her letters, from the time she was 7 to 32, reveal her fondness for family and friends, her steadfastness, her humor and irony (through which she reveals her true feelings) and her exuberance. Many are written from the field, describing details so many of us know from all the articles and documentaries about her. They are written, now and again, “with banana sticky hands.”

AFRICANA

The Encyclopedia of the African

and African American Experience

Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah

and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Basic Books: 2,144 pp., $100

“Africana’s” 2,000-page, 2 million-word text focuses on social and political history, literature and the arts “to give a sense of the wide diversity of peoples, cultures, and traditions” as well as “a feel for the environment” in which the history of African peoples has been lived. Though one can use “Africana” as a reference work, given that most of us are ignorant of much of what it contains, it is the first reference work that is attractive enough and accessible enough to simply pick up, open to any page and start reading. “Africana” is a major achievement. If we truly believe that education and knowledge are the prerequisites for eradicating racism, then the publication of “Africana” gives us an important tool we have been lacking. Now, no one has an excuse for being ignorant about Africa and its descendants.

THE ALEX STUDIES

Cognitive and Communicative Abilities

of Grey Parrots

By Irene Maxine Pepperberg

Harvard University Press: 448 pp., $39.95

Media accounts of Irene Pepperberg’s 22-year-long study of an African Grey parrot named Alex are invariably packaged in the most painfully obvious type of humor, with headline references to birdbrains, Dr. Dolittle and the inevitable Polly. Of course, this may suggest that the media’s own “cognitive and communicative abilities” are sadly limited, but the knee-jerk jokes also speak to humanity’s collective sense of unease with the idea that intelligence and, by extension, language itself may not be our own private fiefdom. Indeed, the assumption that “talking” to animals must be a trick, a hoax or a delusion has shaped Pepperberg’s scrupulous, exacting work. She knows as well as anyone that the debate over language studies in nonhuman animals has been as viciously contentious as any in science and that the stakes--involving the survival of other species as well as our own self-definition--could not be higher.

Pepperberg is cautious about the implications of her data, saying, “Does Alex possess language? No. Is it a complicated two-way communication? Yes.” Nonetheless, she suggests that Alex, over a 20-year period, has even come up with an act of “intentional creativity,” coining a term of his own. Alex has insisted that “apple” should be called “banerry,” possibly a combination of two words in his vocabulary: “banana” and “cherry.” Creative or not, Alex’s abilities are extraordinary, and Pepperberg’s investigation of them makes “The Alex Studies” essential for anyone interested in the wider issues it raises--though it was written for a specialized audience and is packed with tables and references. As with other pioneering works from Darwin’s to E.O. Wilson’s, its influence will be felt throughout the field of animal ethology for years to come.

AMERICAN DREAMER

The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace

By John C. Culver and John Hyde

W.W. Norton: 608 pp., $35

Political leaders in our democracy come in many varieties, as the recent presidential campaign suggests and as history amply records. One of the more curious examples in the 20th-century was Henry Agard Wallace of Iowa, editor, geneticist, economist, businessman, the best secretary of agriculture the country has ever had, a vice president of the United States during World War II, a third- (or, as it turned out, fourth-) party candidate for president at the start of the Cold War and, at the same time, an incorrigibly naive politician and privately a mystic given to improbable spiritual quests. Now John Culver, a distinguished Iowa legislator who served five terms in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate, and John Hyde, a former Des Moines Register reporter, have teamed to write the life of the man they term their “state’s greatest son.” With unimpeded access to Wallace’s diaries, his family papers, the 5,000 pages of his oral history and his 1,000-page FBI file, supplemented by interviews with the vanishing group of people who actually knew Wallace, Culver and Hyde have produced in “American Dreamer” a careful, readable, sympathetic but commendably dispassionate biography.

AMERICAN FICTIONS

by Elizabeth Hardwick

The Modern Library: 356 pp., $14.95 paper

“American Fictions” is a regrouping of some of Elizabeth Hardwick’s strongest and most beautiful literary essays. Hardwick writes in the tradition, which is sadly fading out of our culture, of the general literary essayist. In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf was its most sparkling practitioner. Cynthia Ozick writes brilliantly in the genre. Among younger writers, James Wood has embraced the form. Hardwick is committed to thinking and sleuthing through what a writer does well, and how and why. Her essays succeed doubly: To those who are unfamiliar with a writer’s work, they serve as an elegant introduction to it; to those who have read the material, they serve as an invitation to join in a thoughtful dialogue. “Dialogue” is essential and, of course, an illusion: It is Hardwick’s gift to make the reader feel as though her essays are conversations, when they are the product of her perspicacious mind only. “American Fictions” is literature about literature, with intelligence that shines out on every page.

AMERICAN SEA WRITING

A Literary Anthology

Edited and with an introduction

by Peter Neill

The Library of America: 672 pp., $35

Anthologies too often read as shortcuts, snippets that invariably fall far short of the whole. This volume is a joyful exception. It gains power from the long sweep of time and builds its own narrative-like drive. It is not only a literary smorgasbord but also a coherent history. From slavery to war, from work to wanderlust, the American experience is told from a single perspective, the sea--but in the changing language and with the evolving sensibilities of nearly four centuries. “American Sea Writing” will fill your sails and carry you away. As far as you dare, and beyond. As Melville observed, “Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

THE ARCADES PROJECT

By Walter Benjamin

The Belknap Press / Harvard University Press: 1,074 pp., $39.95

Walter Benjamin’s effort to unlock the mystery of industrial culture became his central mission, which he pursued by combing the streets of the Paris he loved--or, more exactly, by combing old books about these streets. The materials he culled from these books and his commentary on them constitute “The Arcades Project,” his masterpiece, which he worked on for 13 years. For Benjamin, the Parisian arcade or covered street served as a prism of industrial capitalism. He cited an early 19th-century Parisian guide that identified the arcades as a “recent invention of industrial luxury ... glass-roofed, marbled-paneled corridors.... Lining both sides of the arcades, which gets its light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.” Benjamin deliberated on every facet of the arcades: the lighting, construction, foot traffic, advertising, stores, as well as its prostitutes, gamblers, bohemians and rag pickers. He ranged far and wide; he devoted several hundred pages to Baudelaire, whom he considered the poet of Parisian streets. He wrote about mirrors, dandies and photography. For students of urban life and industrial culture, “The Arcades Project” is a gold mine of insights and apercus.

THE BATTLE FOR GOD

By Karen Armstrong

Alfred A. Knopf: 446 pp., $27.50

The three great monotheistic traditions of the West--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--worship the same God but have competed over who has the purest link to the divine. These struggles, between these faiths and within them, is the subject of Karen Armstrong’s sometimes dense, always informative and illuminating new book, “The Battle for God.” Armstrong, a former nun and the author of several books on religion, traces the history of fundamentalist movements from the 15th century to the present. She sees the rise of the modern world as a dramatic transformation in human existence, and she believes the central issue has been the unresolved tension between mythos and logos. All of us, she asserts, need to confront the fears generated by the modern world, and if the dominant culture fails to do so, others, such as fundamentalists, will. That is a key message, one that is easily drowned out in contemporary society, with only occasional voices like Armstrong’s reminding us that we forget it at our peril.

BEHIND THE LABEL

Inequality in the Los Angeles

Apparel Industry

by Edna Bonacich

and Richard P. Appelbaum

University of California Press:

414 pp., $19.95 paper

In their penetrating examination of the Los Angeles apparel industry, Edna Bonacich and Richard P. Appelbaum reach a disturbing conclusion: Sweatshops are endemic to the business and just won’t go away. Los Angeles, they write, is the “sweatshop capital of the United States” with “more people ... employed in the apparel industry ... than anywhere else in the nation, more than in New York, and far more than any other center.” Indeed, the garment industry generates 10% of L.A.’s $282-billion economy.

Bonacich and Appelbaum have done an expert job of deciphering the social, political and economic lineaments of L.A.’s manufacturing underside, and they argue convincingly that sweatshops will not disappear through governmental intervention or unionization. To undo this gloomy reality, the authors offer a strategy calibrated to the nature of fashion. “An industry that lives by image is very vulnerable to an unfavorable image,” they suggest; awake the public conscience and the extractive apparatus will crumble. It is a Panglossian but forgivable conceit in a book of otherwise astute and hard-nosed observations.

BELIEF OR NONBELIEF?

A Confrontation

By Umberto Eco

and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini

Translated from the Italian by Minna Proctor

Arcade: 102 pp., $17.95

“Belief or Nonbelief?” is a short but challenging book, an exchange of letters between Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and scholar, and Carlo Maria Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan. A newspaper in Milan asked the two men to write to each other (and published the results) because they represent the believer and the nonbeliever, the Catholic and the secularist, the one who left the church and the one who stayed. The result, says Harvard theologian Harvey Cox in his introduction, is a “My Dinner With Andre” on paper, a conversation between two amazing minds on which we have the luck to eavesdrop.

The letters were written at the end of 1999, and the issues the men debate are those that worry and divide us on the cusp of the millennium: abortion, the apocalypse, women in the church, ethics without God, violence and intolerance.

They are relentless in a search for common ground but also more than willing to respectfully disagree. In the end, this is the gift of this slim book, that two people can disagree with each other, tolerate the other’s point of view (without watering down his own) and remain coherent. In an age of talk radio’s ugly rejoinders and the weak-kneed compromise we all tend toward in order to get along, this robust exchange is a joy to read.

A BLESSING OVER ASHES

The Remarkable Odyssey

of My Unlikely Brother

By Adam Fifield

William Morrow: 336 pp., $24

“A Blessing Over Ashes” is the true story of an American boy’s growing-up with his “unlikely” brother Soeuth and their struggle to overcome a yawning cultural chasm, the kind of gulf that experience tells us can be reached across but never fully closed. It is rare for a writer’s first book to be so successfully realized. “A Blessing” is written at once with stark emotional honesty and singular authenticity. Also with occasional humor, the kind birthed by the pain attached to self-discovery. “A Blessing Over Ashes” is a very American story: of two boys coming of age in the New England countryside, one of them a haunted refugee from an upheaval that started with an American war--the Vietnam War, which spilled into Cambodia with Richard Nixon’s “incursion” in 1970 and then enveloped the entire country.

There is much, much more to the story. Indeed, Soeuth’s discovery of his family’s existence is but the beginning of the second half of this striking book, whose gift lies in its fearless laying-open of the personal relationships of the true-life cast. Adam Fifield keeps digging to the marrow, not to wound or to shock but rather to try to learn the essence of Soeuth’s life--and of his own. He goes to Cambodia with Soeuth to dig there, too--into the soul of Soeuth’s family and, by extension, into the pain of that little country. Those who read this story will not so easily be able to think again in the abstract, or from a safe emotional distance, about this other world and our very real connection to it. This is a special book, maybe a great one. It deserves a wide audience.

BLOWBACK

The Costs and Consequences

of American Empire

By Chalmers Johnson

Metropolitan Books: 268 pp., $26

Chalmers Johnson, the brilliant and iconoclastic scholar of China, Japan and the rest of East Asia, has in “Blowback” written a brilliant and iconoclastic assault on American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

For five years, starting in 1967, Johnson was director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies and later produced the standard work on Japanese industrial policy, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle.” A professor emeritus at UC San Diego today, he finds examples of “blowback” in American policies and actions large and small. The central problem, he writes, is that the United States has extended the policies it undertook to counter the Soviet Union during the 50-year Cold War into the post-Cold War period, a time in which those policies are both inappropriate and self-damaging. The result, he argues, is an “impending crisis of empire” in which the United States and, indeed, the world may suffer devastating economic and international disruptions.

BODIES IN MOTION AND AT REST

On Metaphor and Mortality

By Thomas Lynch

W.W. Norton: 278 pp., $23.95

Thomas Lynch, one of our most elegant cogitators, claims he writes because he doesn’t golf. “You don’t need a caddy or a designated driver or a bag full of cameras. All you need is a little peace and quiet and the words will come to you--your own or the other’s. Your voice or the voice of God. Perspiration, inspiration. It feels like a gift.” Lynch is a funeral director in Milford, Mich., as was his father and his father’s father before that. It would be almost worth dying to have him preside at your funeral, not only because of his humor (like Garrison Keillor’s, but richer) but mainly because he is the living opposite, the embodiment of an antidote to our increasingly impersonal world. Lynch has his finger on the bloody pulse of creation, and what makes him such a fine essayist is that it’s just the business of everyday life and death to him. Death is so much a part of creation that it’s hardly even an ending, and Lynch writes most beautifully in these essays about passage and about echoes throughout generations.

BOWLING ALONE

The Collapse and Revival

of American Community

By Robert Putnam

Simon & Schuster: 544 pp., $26

In 1995, Robert Putnam, a respected Harvard political scientist, published a brief article in an obscure journal. The article, “Bowling Alone,” was copied and faxed by all manner of people. Its very title was intriguing, and it quickly became a phrase that condensed a good deal of contemporary social life. “Bowling Alone” referred to the fact that, over the last quarter of a century, the number of people who bowled as members of bowling leagues had sharply dropped (even though bowling alleys were still popular). This seemingly trivial fact, Putnam claimed, symbolized a wider trend: the general and rapid erosion of all kinds of community ties, social networks, political involvements, formal associations and informal bonds. These declines, according to Putnam, indicated that “social capital” in America was shrinking. He argued that the problem-solving capacities of society depend on the richness and scope of its social connections and on the store of trust and trustworthiness that such connections sustain.

Putnam has tried, since 1995, to buttress his evidence for declining social capital by amassing data that might fill in the gaps his critics had identified. If he could confirm the diagnosis, he hoped, people would start debating the cure. “Bowling Alone” reports the outcome of what became an ambitious research program. Putnam styles himself as a kind of sociological detective, and he unfolds his argument as a mystery story in which masses of survey data, analyzed over time, masterfully define the crime (“the loss of community”) and suggest what has caused it. The reader experiences the suspense that can happen in both detective fiction and science. It is a remarkable achievement in the writing of social science.

BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST

Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

By Joy S. Kasson

Hill and Wang: 320 pp., $27

He was Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. He was Michael Ovitz and Michael Eisner rolled into one; his own publicity machine; his own agency; his own star, his own studio on wheels. He created the first American multimedia spectacular, “a living diorama,” Joy S. Kasson calls it, a show that had its own special effects, including “a cyclone that whirled all the actors and props away.” William F. Cody spent almost half a century blurring the lines between reality and fantasy in his own life and his country’s--and that was an accomplishment. Wielding an out-sized version of the history he had been a part of, he pioneered the earliest reality programming, and that is the real subject of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a meditation on the roots of popular culture. A fine reporter of the past, Kasson has gathered fascinating material on the man who, in producing a pageant of American triumphalism, helped create the commercial world of entertainment that today we take for granted.

BURT LANCASTER

An American Life

By Kate Buford

Alfred A. Knopf: 448 pp., $27.50

Live long enough and people will forget who you are or, worse, who you were. Kate Buford has gathered the small bits and large pieces that constitute the life and work of one of the great post-World War II movie stars, and she has written a fine and intelligent book that is doubly good because it is realistic without being salacious. A model of what a celebrity’s biography should be, it will ensure that we don’t forget Burton Stephen Lancaster. Lancaster’s final film was “Field of Dreams” in 1989, in which he played Doc Graham, the old man who in his youth had briefly been a rookie on the 1919 Chicago White Sox. In Lancaster’s last scene in the movie, Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) calls to Graham, “Hey, rookie! You were good.” This definitive and entertaining book reminds us that Burt Lancaster was even better.

CANON AND CREATIVITY

By Robert Alter

Yale University Press: 192 pp., $18.50

Robert Alter is one of the living masters of biblical criticism and translation, a scholar whose writings have illuminated the Bible over a long and distinguished career. He describes himself as “a critic of modern literature who has devoted considerable attention to the biblical canon,” and “Canon and Creativity” is an elegant synthesis of these two enterprises. Alter invites us to ponder the precise point of intersection where the biblical canon and the secular canon strike each other and throw off sparks, a place where we will find both the Book of Samuel and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the Book of Genesis and Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” the Song of Songs and James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” With “Canon and Creativity,” Alter reminds us exactly why the Bible is as lively and meaningful today as it was when its earliest passages were first set down on parchment 3,000 years ago.

CAN’T YOU HEAR ME CALLIN’

The Life of Bill Monroe,

Father of Bluegrass

by Richard D. Smith

Little, Brown: 352 pp., $25.95

Attending a special arts and humanities luncheon hosted by President and Nancy Reagan in 1983, Bill Monroe encountered Frank Sinatra--another luncheon guest--in one of the White House waiting rooms. Sinatra immediately approached Monroe, telling him how much he admired his work, mentioning specifics, most pointedly Monroe’s early concerts at the Grand Ole Opry. Monroe’s response was typical for this enigmatic and sometimes shrewdly controlling man:

” . . . ‘Now what did you say your name was?’ Bill asked.

‘I’m Frank Sinatra.’

‘And what is it that you do?’

‘I’m a singer.’

‘I believe I’ve heard of you,’ said Bill, deadpan.

‘Well, I hope so,’ Sinatra replied with considerable grace.’ . . .”

Richard D. Smith’s spirited biography brims with many such anecdotes, engaging as they are instructive about this fiercely contradictory character lauded as the “Father of Bluegrass,” who would become, according to Smith, “the most broadly talented and broadly influential figure in the history of American popular music.” Smith’s nuanced account of Monroe’s artistic connection to countless recording artists--including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris and Jerry Garcia, to name a few--maps out the particulars of his far-reaching influence on contemporary popular music.

CASSIDY’S RUN

The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas

By David Wise

Random House: 256 pp., $25

The espionage specialist David Wise has, in “Cassidy’s Run,” written a fast-paced Cold War thriller with all the elements of a good spy story--mystery, suspense, tangled personal motives, moral ambiguity. And, unlike most thrillers, the book has the advantage of being all true. Wise spent nearly a decade prying this story from reluctant U.S. government officials, then added to what he learned from Russian sources. Told here for the first time, it is a story of counterespionage by the FBI, code-named Operation SHOCKER, against U.S.-based Russian spies. The moral ambiguity apparent in “Cassidy’s Run” lies in the chance, if not the probability, that during the long secret struggle in the Cold War, the Americans may have inadvertently given the Russians a leg up in the search for ever-deadlier nerve gas. The ambiguity exists too in questions that haunt cold and hot wars alike: When are actions ordinarily regarded as evil to be justified for the sake of a greater good? In “Cassidy’s Run,” Wise explores the questions with finesse and a strong sense of how to tell a good tale.

THE CHIEF

The Life of William Randolph Hearst

By David Nasaw

Houghton Mifflin: 688 pp., $35

It is difficult to like William Randolph Hearst. It is not difficult, however, to admire, indeed, thoroughly to enjoy this magisterial new biography of Hearst, the first in 40 years, based upon a wide array of new sources. This biography, years in the making, is based upon an entirely new array of primary sources, including a cache of letters discovered in a bunkhouse at San Simeon. David Nasaw, in fact, who writes with the verve of a first-rate reporter, achieves much of his narrative through quotations from previously inaccessible letters, especially from Hearst’s earlier years. Nasaw’s “The Chief” works on a large, even heroic, canvas and, thanks to his exhaustive research, moves on a level of detail that would satisfy even Theodore Dreiser. “The Chief,” in fact, is replete with extraordinary moments that are at once historical and suggestive of that Great American Novel that once haunted the imagination of our writers but which they have now put aside, temporarily, as unattainable.

CLAREMONT

A Pictorial History

By Judy Wright

Claremont Historic Resources: 544 pp., $35

L.A.’s unique amalgam of sales pitch and self-deception--our ability simultaneously to manufacture utopian snake oil and innocently buy it--generally preempts history, but not entirely. L.A.’s stories bleed through their packaging as if they knew how much we needed them. In Judy Wright’s history of the town of Claremont in the Pomona Valley (about 30 miles east of Los Angeles), the stories are often naive but as often well-informed (she was a planning commissioner and City Council member before becoming an amateur historian). Her stories are accompanied by page after page of photographs of heartbreakingly beautiful houses. Most are from the turn of the century, and most of them are still there, still the houses of Claremont’s fortunate residents who can be nostalgic about their paradise of the ordinary without irony because they manage to live in it too. They live in a town whose history is a fractal of L.A.’s, a fragment that faithfully reproduces our shared longing for a familiar place. Wright’s stories of Claremont, told without regret, tell us that the power of the past is not to make us more informed but more whole. Memory is an act of courage in our L.A., even if we do not fully understand the stories we tell. Memory is sabotage against the regime of speed.

CRUCIBLE OF WAR

The Seven Years’ War

and the Fate of Empire in

British North America, 1754-1766

By Fred Anderson

Alfred A. Knopf: 960 pp., $40

Fred Anderson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has given us a fresh, detailed and readable narrative of the war that Americans call the French and Indian War but was known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War. Anderson takes us with assurance through the swamps and snowstorms, from the rushing rivers of the Ohio Valley to the mob-filled streets of London in the reign of the German-speaking Hanoverian King George II. He writes vividly of Lt. Col. George Washington’s clash with Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville at Fort Necessity in 1754; of Braddock’s disaster on the Monongahela; of Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint Veran, and James Wolfe and their deaths in the Battle of Quebec, which lost France an empire; of the lives lived by the Six Nations of the Iroquois; and not least of Britain’s allies, the Mohawks. He knows when detail helps, and he is as well-informed on the House of Commons as he is on the Ohio River Valley.

DARKNESS IN EL DORADO

How Scientists and

Journalists Devastated the Amazon

By Patrick Tierney

W.W. Norton: 416 pp., 27.95

The systematic study of human beings, often from different cultures than the investigator’s, raises troubling questions about the relationship of science and humanity. “Why do they want to study us so much?” asks an acculturated Yanomami Indian named Pablo Mejilla in Patrick Tierney’s “Darkness in El Dorado.” “Nabah [foreigners] have a brain; Yanomami have a brain; Nabah have two eyes; Yanomami have two eyes. . . . Why are they so interested in studying us?”

Tierney’s “Darkness in El Dorado” is a tale of self-interested agendas carried to such extremes as to seem an anthropological “Heart of Darkness.” Tierney accuses some of the most eminent scientists who have worked with the Yanomami in the last four decades of having effects on them similar to the “Spanish conquistadors.”

DARWIN’S WORMS

On Life Stories and Death Stories

By Adam Phillips

Basic Books: 148 pp., $20

Darwin and Freud struggled to make sense of the past. They saw things in the past that many before them had overlooked, and they labored to bring that extraordinary plethora of phenomena into some coherent form. For Darwin, that form was the theory of evolution; for Freud, it was psychoanalysis. What did each see when looking back on how we came to be who we are? And how did each determine what really mattered? For Darwin, survival in a shifting environment demands the capacity for change rather than the ability to evaluate which changes we prefer. For Freud, our facility for happiness is directly related to our capacity for letting go of our attachments to the past in order to have a history with which we can live. Phillips writes not merely to praise these thinkers but to creatively bury them, so that their themes of loss and death reemerge with clarity and relevance. In this small gem of a book, he asks us “not to be unduly dismayed by our mortality,” so that we might be converted to the beauty of the ephemeral and truly inherit the Earth.

DOUBLE VICTORY

A Multicultural History of America

in World War II

By Ronald Takaki

Little, Brown: 288 pp., $29.95

The timing is right for a history like this. The World War II generation is dying out, and America has reacted with a wave of patriotic nostalgia. Books such as Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” and movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” are celebrating the “good war” against the Axis and the virtues that won it as they haven’t been celebrated in decades. This is natural, even laudable, but it runs the risk of re-sanctifying and re-whitewashing what, as UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Ronald Takaki reminds us, was a very complex experience. Takaki’s survey of the war explores its impact on Americans of African, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Jewish, Korean, Indian, German, Italian and Native origin. Some of Takaki’s conclusions will be disputed--particularly his assertion that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was unnecessary--but his portraits of Roosevelt, having to be prodded into doing the right but politically risky thing and then doing it halfheartedly, and of President Harry S Truman, his “buck-stops-here” facade hiding his genuine horror over the A-bombing, are convincingly nuanced.

DUST

A History of the Small & the Invisible

By Joseph A. Amato

University of California Press:

252 pp., $22.50

Certainly more inevitable than taxes, if not death, is the stuff we call dust. The Bible describes humankind as created out of dust, and the prayers at burial services remind us: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Joseph A. Amato’s elegant little book, “Dust: A History of the Small & the Invisible,” not only scrutinizes dust but reaches out to examine the history of the small and invisible, in general. Although at the outset he draws a neat distinction between dust and its “bigger and clumsier” cousin, dirt, (one being lighter and airborne, the other earthier and generally containing excrement), Amato’s history includes dirt as well. Indeed, his first few chapters take us back to the days when dust, dirt and darkness ruled. “Dust” is a diverting, thought-provoking amalgam of science, literature, intellectual and social history. Playful yet serious, Amato’s supple prose conveys the hidden poetry of his subject.

EDUCATION OF A FELON

A Memoir

By Edward Bunker

Introduction

by William Styron

St. Martin’s: 272 pp., $25.95

“Education of a Felon” is a masterful summation of the hard and brutal life of crime and prison from which Edward Bunker chiseled the vigorous prose that marks him as America’s foremost chronicler of prison life (which plays no minor role in American society). Bunker spent 18 years in prison in three separate stints for crimes involving robbery, stealing cars, running con jobs, forging checks. It was not until he turned 40 that he fully tasted the life of a free man, and he has not been back behind the walls since. In San Quentin, Bunker began to write. Through his defense lawyer, he had been befriended by Louise Wallis, the wife of Hal Wallis, the powerful and talented producer of such films as “Casablanca.” She tried to steer him straight, and when he was in San Quentin she sent him the Sunday New York Times. Its book review started him reading.

Bunker closes his powerful memoir with moving, defiant words addressed to his 5-year-old son: “Who knows what he will think of his father, but the cards we dealt him are infinitely better than what fate dealt me. I could have played them better, no doubt, and there are things for which I am ashamed, but when I look in the mirror, I am proud of what I am. The traits that made me fight the world are also those that made me prevail.”

THE ESSENTIAL LEWIS AND CLARK

Edited by Landon Y. Jones

The Ecco Press/HarperCollins:

204 pp., $24

Read “The Essential Lewis and Clark” and go wandering. Here are the most mercifully edited journal entries of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (the original journals were almost a million words) on their magnificent journey in search of a water route across the American continent. Clark was 29 when they began their journey in the fall of 1803, Lewis was 31. Clark is more colorful and specific; Lewis is poetic and better on the expedition’s inner life. Both exude leadership qualities that would make this an excellent book for management: optimism, inventiveness, prudence and restraint. Behind every rock, every chokecherry, every buffalo lie the good-naturedness, the wholesomeness, the excitement of discovery, the levity of heading out for the territory. Both Lewis and Clark write eloquently about the Indians, their dress and medicines and rituals. The journals lack the histrionics of modern-day travel adventure writing but none of the drama.

FAR FROM RUSSIA

A Memoir

By Olga Andreyev Carlisle

St. Martin’s: 192 pp., $22.95

Olga Carlisle, painter and writer, has the genteel memory of M.F.K. Fisher, though she rarely mentions food. Her writing is perfumed with nostalgia for her childhood in Paris; for family dinners and poems read out loud; for her poet father, Leonid Andreyev; and for the coast of France. This is the story, really, of how she fell in love with her husband, Henry Carlisle (writer and, later, Knopf editor), how she learned his America, the New England coast--Nantucket and New York--and how she traveled in 1959 to Russia and found hope there for the future. Her portraits of New York are from both the art world and the literary world: Acquaintances included Robert Motherwell (her teacher), Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollack, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. But the finest scenes take place--as they so often do--in the three-room garret on the Seine where she and Henry fell in love.

FEEDING THE EYE

by Anne Hollander

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

348 pp., $14.95 paper

In “Feeding the Eye,” her accomplished collection of essays, Anne Hollander focuses her astute, curious intelligence on a range of arts-related subjects that have come her way somewhat incidentally, by means of books assigned to her for review, and manages to turn them into a volume that sparkles with insight, learning and cohesiveness. This is no small achievement. Hollander has a gift for building a vivid essay around a book, even when she rather dislikes it, so that the potentially fleeting (a review) becomes instead an incisive biographical sketch, a critical dialogue or (frequently) a small, sly tract on a subject of abiding importance to her, the art of dress, and the way it has been sloppily or too casually handled by critics, historians, reviewers and writers of every kind. Interested in kimonos, androgyny, transvestism, the culture of flowers? Pick up “Feeding the Eye” and allow your own to be fed.

FIRST WORDS

A Childhood in Fascist Italy

By Rosetta Loy

Translated from the Italian

by Gregory Conti

Metropolitan Books: 186 pp., $22

“My days haven’t changed at all,” Rosetta Loy writes of 1939, when she was 7 in Rome, a young member of the Catholic intelligentsia, “the blue furniture in my room, the picture of children skating, the carousel-shaped wooden lamp....” Yet in the previous year, the laws on race were published: no textbooks in schools by Jewish authors, no Jews in vacation resorts, no Jews publishing books, no Jews listing their names in the phone book. And that was only the beginning for the 58,412 Jewish residents in Italy. Loy pairs childhood observations with month-by-month changes in Fascist Italy from 1936 to 1944. As always, the gulf between a child’s steady, daily understanding of the world and the reality, the terrible momentum of hatred, astonish on the page.

FORCED INTO GLORY

Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream

By Lerone Bennett Jr.

Johnson Publishing: 652 pp., $35

Each generation, it is said, reinvents history in its own image. This is certainly true in the case of Abraham Lincoln. Portraits of Lincoln have gone through innumerable permutations, depending on the era in which historians were writing. Lincoln has been depicted as a statesman who merged politics and moral purpose by liberating 4 million slaves and as a political pragmatist who opposed the radicals within his party almost as much as secessionist Southerners. Most recently, in David Donald’s masterful biography “Lincoln,” he emerged as an indecisive leader with few firm convictions, a man constantly buffeted by events, rather reminiscent of Bill Clinton. Rarely, however, has a scholar launched the full-scale assault on Lincoln’s reputation that Lerone Bennett Jr. offers in “Forced Into Glory.”

His book is not likely to convince many readers who do not already believe that Lincoln was an inveterate racist. But the book deserves attention, for it contains insights into Lincoln’s era and the ways historians have treated the 16th president. Bennett presents compelling evidence of how historians have consistently soft-pedaled Lincoln’s racial views. Previous scholars, he rightly points out, downplay or ignore Lincoln’s commitment to colonizing blacks outside the country.

THE FOUR WITNESSES

The Rebel, The Rabbi, The Chronicler,

and The Mystic

By Robin Griffith-Jones

HarperSanFrancisco: 406 pp., $25

“Who do you say I am?” asks Jesus in the New Testament--and the provocative question resonates throughout “The Four Witnesses,” a courageous exploration of the contrasting and sometimes contradictory ways in which Jesus of Nazareth is depicted in the Gospels. Robin Griffith-Jones, whose book serves as the companion volume for a PBS docudrama about the writing of the New Testament, encourages us to reread the Gospels in light of what scholarship and the biblical text itself reveal about the motives of the men who first composed them. At moments, Griffith-Jones strikes an intentionally eccentric stance, as if to shake us out of our own comfortable assumptions about the Bible. He uses the terms “Old Order” and “New Order” in place of “Old Testament” and “New Testament,” the Book of Exodus is called “Escape,” and the Book of Revelation is called “the Book of Unveiling.” But such conceits are not employed at the sacrifice of clarity, and “The Four Witnesses” remains lucid, urgent and persuasive even as its author blazes his own trail through the thickets of Bible scholarship.

FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE

500 Years of Cultural Life,

1500 to the Present

By Jacques Barzun

HarperCollins: 878 pp., $36

“The bulk of the book...is a delight because it presents a strong character full of surprises. He is learned but practical, unmistakably of his time . . . conservative but unconventional. His genius is in common sense ... unusual judgments made by clear-eyed observation and couched in lapidary words.” Jacques Barzun, distinguished historian, critic and academic administrator, uses these words to characterize Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” They also constitute an apt appraisal of Barzun’s own, and truly amazing, new book. Like Samuel Johnson, Barzun is impressively learned, conservative and unconventional in many of his judgments, writes with an acute sense of the fuzzy and changeable meanings of words and treats his reader to innumerable lapidary bon mots. On top of that, he offers an admirably coherent and comprehensive portrait of the cultural achievements--”art and thought, manners, morals and religion”--of what we once confidently called “Modern,” and more recently and accurately label “Western” civilization. The deposit of a lifetime, this book is sui generis: likely to become a classic.

FULL OF LIFE

A Biography of John Fante

By Stephen Cooper

North Point Press: 406 pp., $30

“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles, come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” So intones Arturo Bandini, the hero of John Fante’s “Ask the Dust.” Holed up in his cheap room, subsisting on oranges and stubborn determination, he is the quintessential starving artist, his base not a romantic garret in Paris, or even a drafty loft in Manhattan, but a rooming house on Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. He has come, like his creator, from a poor Italian family in Colorado, left his religion and his family to become that great thing, a writer. Arturo’s success seems both imminent and highly unlikely. But succeed he does. Fante’s fame, however, was transitory. Only a few years after publication, “Ask the Dust,” the book many call the Los Angeles novel, was out of print. It stayed out of print (except for a cheap paperback version issued in 1954) until Charles Bukowski alerted his publisher to the man he called “a lifetime influence.” Black Sparrow Press reprinted “Ask the Dust” in 1980, only three years before John Fante died of complications caused by diabetes. Fante continues to be appreciated as one of the most influential L.A. writers. Now, finally, the publication of a full-length biography is testimony to his renewed popularity. “Full of Life” offers a large share of fascinating material by and about Fante, and by bringing together his life and work for the first time with such clarity of purpose, Stephen Cooper presents a remarkable gift to innumerable fans of Fante’s work.

THE GENESIS OF JUSTICE

Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice That Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law

By Alan M. Dershowitz

Warner Books: 274 pp., $25.95

“Would you give a young person a book whose heroes cheat, lie, steal, murder--and get away with it?” asks Alan M. Dershowitz in his provocative book of modern biblical exegesis, “The Genesis of Justice.” “Chances are you have. The book, of course, is Genesis.” Ever the controversialist, Dershowitz dares to speak out loud about one of the uncomfortable truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition--unlike the New Testament or the Koran, where God is always great and his prophets are always perfect, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are crowded with men and women whose behavior is shocking and scandalous. What makes “The Genesis of Justice” so refreshing is Dershowitz’s insistence on looking beneath and beyond the passages of Holy Writ where biblical law is presented in all of its abundance, complexity and density. All of Leviticus, for example, and much of Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are law codes. Genesis, by contrast, is a storybook. And yet it is in the most compelling tales of the Bible that Dershowitz looks for and finds not only the roots of Western jurisprudence but the very spark that ignites the passion for justice that is the burning heart of the Bible.

GEORGIANA

Duchess of Devonshire

by Amanda Foreman

Random House: 464 pp., $29.95

Born in 1757, Lady Georgiana Spencer was a great-great-great-great aunt of the late Princess Diana. Like her collateral descendant, she made a very impressive match early on, marrying the duke of Devonshire when she was just 17. A tall, good-looking blond with a flair for fashion and publicity, Georgiana too had broad popular appeal in an era in which it was far more unusual for an aristocrat to have the common touch. Like Diana, she was an affectionate and devoted mother, an impulsive woman in many ways who was temperamentally unsuited to her phlegmatic husband. And Georgiana’s impulsive nature got her into serious trouble, as she became what we might now call “addicted” to gambling.

But there was a lot more to Georgiana’s character. The “amiable” duchess, as the newspapers were wont to call her, was an amateur musician, poet and scientist, and one of the most astute, dynamic and hard-working supporters of the Whig cause in politics. At a time when women could not vote, Georgiana campaigned for Whig candidates and worked behind the scenes to influence the men who sought and held power. Her willingness to hobnob with the common folk to win their support made her a target of the Tory press, which ran cartoons of the duchess kissing a butcher in exchange for his vote.

Amanda Foreman has done a tremendous amount of research among primary sources and weaves these reams of raw material into a compelling story. Even readers who know little about late 18th-century British history and politics will soon find themselves engrossed. Not only does Foreman have a knack for explaining things along the way, but she does it with clarity and brio. She is equally good at portraying Georgiana’s private life--which included a menage a trois with a woman who was the duke’s mistress and her own best friend. Unlike some biographers, who end up disillusioned with their subjects, Foreman seems never to lose her basic sympathy for Georgiana. The result is an exemplary work of biography as judicious as it is engaging.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF SAILING

Classic Yacht Photographs

By Benken of Cowes

Times Books: 172 pp., $25

Illusions of grandeur always include yachts. Looking at these luminous photographs of racing yachts, taken from 1885 to 1939, could make the most committed pauper dream of endless riches and a life of freedom on the high seas. “Benken of Cowes” refers to the firm that Alfred, then his son Frank, then his son Keith, owned--a firm that photographed yachts at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, then the center of world yachting and the home of the America’s Cup. Each decade boasts its revolution in design: from large yachts to smaller, more creative designs. Nineteen-thirty to ’39 saw the end of gentleman yachtsmanship, as well as gentleman farming. The photos are delicate and powerful. Nothing swells the heart as a full sail does. Gaff-rigged yawls, three-masted schooners, acres of sails, glistening decks, photos of wind.

GREENE ON CAPRI

A Memoir

By Shirley Hazzard

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 152 pp., $22

A convergence of cultural vectors has brought Graham Greene back to center stage. A film of “The End of the Affair,” starring Ralph Fiennes, was recently released, and the BBC broadcast a tie-in titled “The Beginning of the End of the Affair.” The third and final volume of Greene’s authorized biography by Norman Sherry is due soon. Amid howling winds of hype, Shirley Hazzard modestly hopes “there is room for the remembrances of someone who knew [Graham Greene]--not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well.” An esteemed novelist with a home on Capri, Hazzard and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, now deceased, were among the few inhabitants Greene socialized with during visits to his house on the island. Her memoir “Greene on Capri” is a pointillist masterpiece that manages to evoke a magical setting, remarkable people and vivid events, all in the space of 152 elegantly written pages.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK

OF STAGGERING GENIUS

Based on a True Story

By Dave Eggers

Simon & Schuster: 376 pp., $23

It’s James Joyce, back from the dead! The very fast mind, the pleading with humanity, the hate-filled humor, the love-filled humor, the chaotic honesty that you can’t trust (because Dave Eggers makes fun of every non-authentic thing down to the copyright page). But it doesn’t matter if you trust him or not, or does it? “Based on a True Story” says the fine print on the cover of this memoir. Did his parents really both die of cancer within five weeks of one another? (What a clerk-like bureaucratic form-filing little question!) Did he really, at 21, take his 8-year-old brother away from Chicago to live in San Francisco, to raise him himself with a vigor and empathy and flexibility that only a very young, very smart person could possibly have? And he’s got some Proust in him, the little 29-year-old jerk, he’s got the trammeling thoroughness of Proust’s observation, his honest observations of artifice. The book is fine and different for earnest reasons, too: It is refreshing, for instance, to watch someone in the terrifying, death-defying act of parenting who doesn’t have to pretend he knows every last yuppie thing about child-rearing or convince everyone what a good parent he is just by meeting deadlines and being on time. He starts a magazine; he keeps his friend John from killing himself; he just wants to be naked again with all his friends from high school. He worries that he never gave his parents a decent burial. He says everything he thinks about lying and death and love (he loves that little brother so much). How generous of him to write this for us, to reveal all this so fearlessly.

HIROHITO AND THE MAKING

OF MODERN JAPAN

By Herbert P. Bix

HarperCollins: 800 pp., $35

This is a biting biography that demolishes the stereotype of Japan’s wartime emperor as a mousy and passive figurehead who was merely the puppet of the militarist clique that drove the nation to war. “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,” a potentially politically charged tome by historian Herbert P. Bix, portrays the late emperor as smarter, shrewder, better informed and more energetic than people thought. Unapologetic to the last, Hirohito was an autocrat whose ultimate loyalty was not to his people but to his ancestors, the book asserts. He hid behind his passive image but was in fact at the very center of the Japanese political system--not only before but also after World War II. The book documents how Hirohito and his aides collaborated with U.S. occupation authorities to shield the emperor from any responsibility for the aggression committed in his name. Bix argues that this joint whitewash--which protected the political interests of each nation--fundamentally distorted the development of Japanese democracy. Bix draws on letters and diaries of Imperial Court and government officials and other documents, many of which have only begun to trickle out in the 11 years since Hirohito’s death. Among other bombshells, the book presents evidence that senior aides to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Japanese court officials schemed to fix testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials so as not to implicate Hirohito. Many sections of the book have deep relevance to Japanese politics today. The biography is revealing in pointing out the parts of the historical record that remain blank.

HO CHI MINH

By William J. Duiker

Hyperion: 700pp., $35

There is an epic sweep to the life of Ho Chi Minh, who was possessed of an idea for which the world refused to make room. This was not just the dream of an independent Vietnam, liberated from the bondage of empire, but Ho’s vision of the revolution that would bring it about. As it happened, it was a revolution that was sometimes insufficiently Leninist to suit his own Party chiefs, not to mention Stalin and later Mao, and was originally fired in no small way by the ideals of his enemies. Liberty, equality and fraternity--also the American Revolution’s celebration of righteous resistance and the pursuit of happiness--fairly crackled with purpose when they were attached to the 30-year struggle he led.

“No national leader has stood so stubbornly or so long before the enemy’s guns,” wrote Time magazine when Ho died in 1969. Similarly no nation’s leadership resisted taking the measure of its enemy longer than did Washington. This resistance deepened the ignominy of America’s defeat, but it was impermissible, at least on the battlefield, to see in the Vietnamese revolution anything other than a conspiratorial, technically adroit, terrorist uprising, which could (or couldn’t) be defeated in South Vietnam with superior technique, showy doctrines of reform and the relentless deployment of overwhelming military force. To view it otherwise--to see the guerrilla as someone with a commitment to justice who had the support of his or her people and was willing to make sacrifices for the sake of a cause or ideology--was to cede the moral ground that traditionally fueled America’s wars, something Ho well understood.

William Duiker’s book, the first full-scale biography outside Vietnam, is a welcome intrusion on the silence that has surrounded Ho Chi Minh, especially in the United States. Duiker, a retired professor of East Asian studies at Penn State and the author of several books on modern China and Vietnam, has written an impressive diplomatic history of Ho’s life.

I WILL BEAR WITNESS

A Diary of the Nazi Years,

1942-1945

By Victor Klemperer

Translated from the German

by Martin Chalmers

Random House: 558 pp., $29.95

As a young man, Victor Klemperer began to keep a record of his daily life and experiences, and this soon became so much of a habit that he would have been lost without it. He did not differ significantly from other dedicated diarists, whose labors bring personal satisfaction but rarely attract wider attention. What made Klemperer different was the fact that he was a German Jew who lived in Germany from the origins of the Hitler regime until its catastrophic end, and his diary, written in perilous circumstances and smuggled by Eva, his wife, in installments to a secure hiding place in a friend’s home, became not only a personal journal but, in his own words, “a record of the everyday life of tyranny.” Reading Klemperer’s diaries is a harrowing, but addictive, experience. The diaries’ authenticity is so obvious, their calm and often reflective tone so persuasive, that even their boring stretches--and these are inevitable in an account of a life as dull as it was dangerous--cannot cause the serious reader’s interest to flag. There is nothing quite like it in the historic literature on the Nazi period.

IMPERIAL SAN FRANCISCO

Urban Power, Earthly Ruin

By Gray Brechin

University of California Press:

414 pp., $29.95

For anyone who is sick and tired of the vast literature of L.A.-bashing, “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin” will come as a refreshing surprise. Here is a book that fairly sizzles with outrage over water-grabs and land-grabs, “environmental blunders” and “the dynastic, corporate and political alliances that enable some cities to claim and acquire empires as their rightful due”--and yet the target is quaint and charming San Francisco rather than the customary urban whipping boy, Los Angeles. Beneath the surface of San Francisco, almost literally, Gray Brechin perceives what he calls “the Pyramid of Mining,” the powerful but invisible mechanism of wealth and power that began in the mines during the California Gold Rush and reached its highest expression in the city of San Francisco. “Imperial San Francisco” is an intentionally provocative work, and Brechin may not convince every reader that a “dark irrationality” underlies the glorious achievements of the pioneers who built the city in the first place. But no one who reads his book will ever look at quaint old San Francisco in quite the same way again.

IN GLORY’S SHADOW

Shannon Faulkner,

the Citadel and a Changing America

By Catherine S. Manegold

Alfred A. Knopf: 336 pp., $26.95

“In Glory’s Shadow” is a powerful book that, like a hurricane, grows in force as it proceeds. It is ostensibly about Shannon Faulkner’s attempt to become the first female student at the all-male Citadel, the old military college in Charleston, S.C. But it soon turns out that Faulkner is almost incidental to the story that Catherine Manegold, who covered the story for The New York Times, develops in all its Southern gothic intensity.

“In Glory’s Shadow” is not so much the tale of one woman’s attempt to break an ancient barrier so much as it is a tale of why that barrier was first erected and then maintained, through enormous effort and money, against the modernizing influences of post-World War II America. This is the story of the death struggle of an especially pernicious form of provincialism, and Manegold tells the story superbly.

IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Better Living from Plato to Prozac

By Mark Kingwell

Crown: 392 pp., $25

With this trenchant yet good-natured book, Mark Kingwell places himself in an honorable tradition of thinkers with the audacity to think that thinking about the nature of happiness might not only be interesting but also contribute to happiness. Kingwell is a young Canadian philosopher with an eye for a felicitous phrase and a taste for the happy meander. His easygoing book is a loose-jointed succession of essays dotted with revelations of down-home perplexities, picaresque adventures and personal quandaries concerning religion, drugs, consumption, solitude, marriage, academia and other challenges. He is an intellectual who derives felicity from intellectual pursuit, but not in order to prove how smart he is. Rather, he aims sincerely and self-disclosingly to guide the lay perplexed toward an appreciation that happiness is not the hedonistic riot it’s cracked up to be; it’s more attainable, less utopian, probably less expensive and all-around better for you and for everyone around you. Perhaps without meaning to, he has written an amiable guide to the best thinking about happiness that doubles as a self-help book for those who wouldn’t be caught dead reading self-help books.

INFERNO

By James Nachtwey

Phaidon: 428 pp., $125

No one paging through the magnificent, searing collection of pictures that is “Inferno” should be under any illusion about the toll that these photographs must have taken on James Nachtwey. It is not only a question of physical courage, although that is required of war photographers. Moral courage is required as well; and, if demonstration were needed, “Inferno” shows just how morally brave Nachtwey has been. The book is not just a moral triumph but an aesthetic one. Most photographers, whatever their preferred genre or subject matter, would be proud to have done half the first-rate work contained in the book. The images are models of composition; the layouts form an object lesson in skillful picture editing. At their best, Nachtwey’s war pictures are as memorable as the best work of the great photographers of a previous generation--Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullum and George Rodger. Even when he is photographing subjects so beaten down by suffering that they seem almost catatonic, as he did in a series of images shot in the southern Somali city of Baidoa during the famine, or when he is portraying inanimate objects like a pile of machetes used by the murderers during the Rwandan genocide, to look at a Nachtwey photograph is not just to see an image of human suffering but practically to hear the screaming.

INHERITING THE REVOLUTION

The First Generation of Americans

By Joyce Appleby

The Belknap Press /

Harvard University Press: 322 pp., $26

In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published “Letters From an American Farmer,” in which he famously asked, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” Americans seeking to define their national character have wrestled with that question ever since, often with dubious results. At the least, they have tended to ransack the past for evidence of those characteristics that anticipate what they currently admire about themselves, thus underestimating the complexity and ambiguity of their ancestors’ identity and flattening their own understanding of American history. Knowing that the Civil War ended in the destruction of slavery, for example, latter-day Americans have often assumed that Yankee attributes of egalitarianism and industriousness defined the “true” character of the nation as a whole and have ignored the fact that prewar Northerners happily profited from the slave system and shared without any particular qualms the racist opinions of their Southern contemporaries.

To read the past in such an essentially teleological and self-serving way is bad enough, but it also tends to sustain the fallacy of “exceptionalism”--the notion that American history serves the United States’ special destiny as a beacon to lesser nations. Now Joyce Appleby, a professor of history at UCLA, has created a collective portrait of the generation of men and women born in the United States between 1776 and 1800, and on the basis of their lives and values ventures an answer to Crevecoeur’s query that is intriguing, sophisticated and anything but exceptionalist. Anyone curious about how Americans came to understand themselves as a people would do well to read this book.

INSIDE ‘VARIETY’

The Story of the Bible

of Show Business (1905-1987)

By Peter Besas

Ars Millenii: 566 pp., $39

Variety, the legendary show business trade paper, brought out the ardor in her employees. For those who worked there, it was never merely a job; it was a mission to which they devoted their lives. There was no need for time clocks or time sheets at the Variety office. Reporters were happily on call 24 hours a day, skulking about the nightspots and entertainment palaces of Broadway, trolling for news. Employees talked about little else than their paper. In later years, when it was being buffeted by financial pressures, they would ask one another tremulously, “Is there life after Variety?”

As a 30-year Variety veteran who ran the paper’s Madrid office before being unceremoniously dumped by new bloodless corporate ownership, Peter Besas remains so ardent that he has written an exhaustive, frequently fascinating and unflaggingly loving history of the paper and its plethora of colorful denizens. For him, Variety is a living, breathing organism rather than a metaphor. He says at the outset that he prefers anecdote to amplitude, description to diagnosis, and as “Inside Variety” “cruises through the near-century of the paper’s existence,” that is pretty much what you get ... until the homey little paper gets trampled under the jackboots of modern business and Besas begins to wax nostalgic for simpler, better times. In this he is a true son of Variety, which kept its eye fixed on the week’s box office receipts or the latest show business news. Yet for all its professions of unpretentiousness, Variety was not only a perfect chronicler of the ascendant entertainment culture but one of the enduring symbols of that culture, and the paper’s shifting ethos wound up uncannily reflecting the changing role of entertainment in 20th-century America.

INTO THE WEST

The Story of Its People

By Walter Nugent

Alfred A. Knopf: 500 pp., $35

nto the West” tells the grand story of the peopling of the great expanse of the continent that extends from the 98th meridian to the Pacific (including Alaska and Hawaii). Walter Nugent, professor of history at Notre Dame, has written a big, sprawling story about a big, sprawling place. He has an especially good eye for the exemplary anecdote. The personal detail breathes life into statistical material, the past tracings of birth, death, marriage and migration patterns. In notable ways, his account departs from earlier versions of “How the West Was Won.” The traditional triumphant narrative claimed the West as the premier site of white Anglo-Saxon accomplishment. But Nugent makes it clear that