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The United Nations was created from the strategic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who deemed it essential that the world have an effective international security organization. Even before the U.S. entered World War II, Roosevelt’s administration had begun planning for a postwar world. FDR died on April 12, 1945, just two weeks before the San Francisco conference on the U.N. was set to begin. New president Harry Truman was facing other major foreign policy questions, but his strong belief in the U.N. concept led him to proceed with the conference. The story of that crucial meeting, at which 46 nations gathered for two months to establish the organization, is told in Stephen Schlesinger’s compelling new book Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations.

At the heart of the narrative are two little-known but extraordinary men. One is Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, head of the U.S. delegation, who did an outstanding job of forging consensus. The other was Russian ŽmigrŽ Leo Pasvolsky, a State Department official who was most responsible for writing the U.N. charter. His analytical skills and willingness to work behind the scenes made him indispensable.

Of the many issues covered at the San Francisco conference, probably the most contentious was that regarding the veto power in the Security Council. The understanding agreed to at Yalta gave the five permanent Security Council members absolute veto over “substantive matters” vague wording that prompted smaller nations to question the scope of the veto, a crisis that threatened the success of the conference. Among the journalists covering the event was a 27-year-old former naval officer, John F. Kennedy. In summarizing the results of the meeting, he wrote that, overall, “What [the] Conference accomplished is that it made war more difficult.” For all its successes and failures, the U.N. has played an important role in world politics for over half a century. Schlesinger’s impressive account of its founding deserves a wide readership. Roger Bishop is a bookseller in Nashville.

In 1790, England had a new naval hero: a man who had saved the lives of more than a dozen sailors by navigating a 23-foot open boat over 4,000 miles a staggering feat of seamanship. William Bligh, late of the ship H.M.

S. Bounty, was the toast of the town. Captain Bligh? A hero? As everyone “knows” thanks to Nordhoff and Hall’s 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty and the various movies based on it, intrepid master’s mate Fletcher Christian launched a mutiny against the tyrannical Captain Bligh, whom he set adrift in a launch with a handful of loyalists. Christian then led his followers to an idyllic existence on a South Pacific island. But real life has an inconvenient way of diverging from legend. Readers will find the true story in Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty, a fascinating book based on court testimony, diaries and other primary sources that draws a picture very different from the popular version. Alexander, author of the equally excellent volume The Endurance, which told the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, produces a vivid narrative with psychological depth and a keen understanding of historical context. Not that Alexander’s Bligh is a saint. He was a perfectionist with an ugly temper. But his record was far better than that of many contemporary naval officers, and he didn’t treat anyone unfairly by the standards of the time. As presented here, the mutiny wasn’t a rebellion against oppression, but a personal clash between two men under pressure who misunderstood each other’s motives. Ironically, even in Alexander’s deft hands, Christian emerges as somewhat of a mystery, in part because he died under odd circumstances not long after he brought his crew to Pitcairn Island. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

Its owner was correct when he said the 10-story Asch Building in downtown Manhattan was fireproof. The problem was that its contents were not. Thus, the cloth and paper used on the top three floors by the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s garment workers fed the March 25, 1911, fire that resulted in the deaths of 146 people, the worst workplace disaster in New York City’s history before that Tuesday morning in September two years ago.

Other authors have told the story of the fire but probably never as completely and carefully as David Von Drehle in Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Von Drehle, a journalist who pored over more than 1,300 long-lost, crumbling pages of trial testimony, examines the tragedy in a wider context than ever before and produced what historians likely will regard as the first complete and most reliable list of the victims and the people who identified the remains on the pier that became a makeshift morgue.

After taking us to the congested Lower East Side, with its dingy workshops and teeming mass of new immigrants, the author brings alive rich society matrons joining poor sweatshop seamstresses to defy thugs, cops and judges intent on breaking up their strike for decent wages, tolerable hours and voting rights. Von Drehle gives us a minute-by-minute replay of the fire itself, with some victims being burned alive, others plunging fatally down an elevator shaft, and, by one reporter’s count, 54 people mostly young women leaping or falling from window ledges to their doom. Then we visit the courtroom, where the tight-fisted factory proprietors managed to beat the accusation that they knew the building’s exit doors were locked an illegal practice that allowed guards to search workers’ purses for pilfered goods. A powerful story about a pivotal event in the maturation of our nation, Triangle is a valuable addition to the literature of reform in America.