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Michelangelo in Ravensbruck: One Woman’s War Against the Nazis is a detailed record of Hitler’s command, written between 1945 and 1946 by Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, a Polish-Catholic aristocrat with an indomitable will and a formidable intellect. In a memoir written in no-nonsense, reportorial style, this art professor tells of her activities and imprisonment for what the Nazis called her troublesome interference with the Reich’s rule of terror.

With her wealth and connections, the countess could have escaped to Switzerland at the occupation’s outset. But, an ardent patriot and dedicated teacher, she vowed to remain and continue her everyday life as well as to join the underground, all the while working to provide food and support to those in Nazi jails and prisons. Her head-on dealings with the SS and Gestapo, especially a perilous exchange with Nazi henchman Hans Kruger (in which he reveals a mass murder of Polish professors), land her in the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp. There, she bolsters the women inmates (especially the rabbits, women subjected to medical experimentation) with nursing care and her extra rations of food. She also offers them sustenance for the spirit lectures on art and history that lift their vision beyond the high prison walls.

Lanckoronska spent five years in captivity before her release, brought about by the intervention of Carl Burckhardt, head of the International Red Cross. She lived out her days in exile in Rome, working to tell the truths of war and celebrate Polish culture. Her almost dispassionate telling of the suffering she witnessed makes for heartbreaking, often horrifying reading, but this is reading we must do, especially in our own troubling times.

Poor Millard Fillmore. He’s been a running gag for years. Among the crop of generally undistinguished mid-19th-century presidents who served between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, Fillmore is often considered, if not the worst, then certainly the most colorless, of all chief executives. George Pendle’s new book, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President, only adds to Fillmore’s perceptual woes. In this lampoon of formal presidential biographies, Pendle claims to have been spurred on by the discovery in Africa of never-before-seen Fillmore journals, including letters and napkin doodles. (Did paper napkins exist in 1850? Did doodling?) Pendle hits all the general chronological marks of Fillmore’s life, but he fabricates the particulars in wildly imaginative fashion, complete with copious, addlepated footnotes that affirm the book’s comic intent.

Good ol’ Millard: He puts in an appearance at the Alamo (but dressed in drag, thus avoiding all those murderous Mexicans); he duels with Old Hickory (it never really happened); he proves to be an unheralded inventor (no way); and he also attends Ford’s Theatre with Honest Abe as a bonneted stand-in for the First Lady (and picks up John Wilkes Booth’s derringer and hands it back to the assassin).

To the very end, Pendle’s Fillmore is a figure of whimsy, on the day of his death having great difficulty doing his favorite animal impersonations, being forced to confine himself to cows and sheep. The Remarkable Millard Fillmore is esoteric stuff, but recommended highly for history buffs or those steeped in Fillmoriana (an ever-growing precious few).

Henry Hungerford died in 1834, unmarried, without children and without notable accomplishment. But his death was extraordinary good luck for the United States, because it led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. Hungerford was the nephew and heir of an odd rich man who lived more than half his life under the name James Macie, but changed it at age 35 to James Smithson. Smithson, who died in 1829, left his fortune to Hungerford, but made the U.S. his secondary legatee if Hungerford died without issue. The U.S., the will said, was to use the money to create a Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men. Smithson, an Englishman who never visited this country, has always seemed a shadowy figure, in large part because most of his papers were destroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian in 1865. But author Heather Ewing, an architectural historian who has worked for the Smithsonian, has risen to the biographical challenge in The Lost World of James Smithson. She has exhumed letters, diaries, bank records and government documents throughout Europe and the U.S. that add up to a clear picture of our cultural benefactor.

Smithson, it turns out, was a fascinating person, albeit quirky and frustrated. He was a politically progressive amateur chemist and geologist, who traveled widely, amassed a significant geological collection and befriended the scientific pioneers of his age. Although well-regarded in scientific circles, Smithson was insecure because of his background as the illegitimate son of a well-born widow and the illustrious Duke of Northumberland. The name James Macie was his mother’s pretense that he was the son of her late husband; he changed it to Smithson, the duke’s surname, immediately after his mother’s death.

Childless and aware that his scientific work was of only middling importance, Smithson wanted to be remembered as something more than his parents’ mistake. Hence the Smithsonian will. Of course, his name is now world-famous. Ewing’s psychologically sensitive book gives us the man behind the name. Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.