Americans have always been dreamers, beginning with the Founders, who aspired to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness for all. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was alone in its power; of all the Allied and Axis countries, it was the only one stronger when the war was over than when it began. A chief lesson we learned from the war, according to noted historian H.W. Brands, was “that the U.S. could accomplish almost anything it put its mind to, within the limits of human nature.” What we dreamed, the many challenges we faced and how we have used our power in the post-war era are the subjects of Brands’ rich and incisive survey, American Dreams.

The author casts a wide net. While he tells of spectacular achievements in technology and space exploration, he also shows how crucial the strength of the economy was to Baby Boomers and their families, and how, with McDonalds, “no one contributed more to the creation of a single popular culture than Ray Kroc.” Brands notes that “the most contentious issues in American life continued to center on race,” and he writes of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement as well as the wars in Korea, Vietnam and our current involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brands, best known for his biographies of American figures like Benjamin Franklin and Franklin Roosevelt (both Pulitzer Prize finalists), makes political, social and cultural history come alive by focusing on seminal events and key personalities. He effectively inserts pithy excerpts from such sources as civil rights speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson, President Reagan’s inaugural address, which sought to restore the nation’s self-confidence, Betty Friedan’s writing on “the feminine mystique,” and President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. He also gives attention to key persons and events or policies not often remembered today, such as Senator Robert Taft, who led opposition to big government and interventionism in foreign policy, and President Nixon’s support for affirmative action, environmental and workplace safety legislation.

The sweeping narrative covers more than six decades in reader-friendly prose. In an overview of this scope, it is certainly possible to quibble with the author’s analysis of certain events, but Brands conveys a lot of information and lets the facts speak for themselves. American Dreams is an outstanding title for anyone who wants a solid introduction to the period.

Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor at Newsweek, appears regularly on “Meet the Press,” “Larry King Live” and “Today,” and that background is apparent in his new book, The War Lovers. Readers who enjoy made-for-television history are most likely to appreciate this rehash of the events that led to the Spanish-American War and what the jacket copy calls our nation’s “ferocious drive toward empire.” The explosion of the Battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, was almost certainly an accident, but newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst charged that Spanish saboteurs had planted explosives on the craft. Hearst’s headlines in his New York Journal pressured Congress to declare war, a step favored by powerful Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The third “war lover,” Theodore Roosevelt, actually fought in the war, and his charge up San Juan Heights under enemy fire made him a national hero—and ultimately President of the United States. Yet Thomas accuses the trio of fabricating evidence to support the theory of an act of terrorism.

Thomas’ own heroes are two doves: Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed and William James, psychologist, philosopher, religious thinker and Harvard professor. Although Lodge and Roosevelt had once planned how to win the presidency for Reed, the speaker broke with his former friends over the war, and James pronounced the United States “now as dangerous to the world as anything since Bonaparte’s time.” He understood that Spain had oppressed the Cuban people, he said—but he could not excuse President McKinley’s demand for the Philippines in the name of freedom and uplift.

Thomas clearly means the reader to see parallels between U.S. foreign policy of the late 19th century and the early 21st century. In both eras, did America invent enemies and rush to war?

A cropped portrait of Theodore Roosevelt serves as the cover illustration for The War Lovers. Thomas notes that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby hung Roosevelt’s likeness over his desk, “drawing inspiration from it” as he toiled for his boss, Vice President Richard Cheney. That’s just the sort of anecdote that Larry King fans will love to hear Thomas tell.

James Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

I’m a Chicago guy. Been one all my life. So I thought I knew everything there is to know about the “Chicago Way.” You know, using hustle and muscle to get power and money. But along comes this other Chicago guy, Jonathan Eig, to teach me some new things. His book, Get Capone, is about the guy who made the “Chicago Way” famous. Al “Scarface” Capone, that is—the most notorious Chicago gangster of all time.

Most people know Capone from the blockbuster movie The Untouchables. I love that movie. But it only paints a broad picture of Capone, and the guy credited for jailing him: Eliot Ness. It turns out that the government’s plot to get Capone ran much deeper than Ness and his small band of agents. Everyone from President Herbert Hoover to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover conspired to get Capone for years. They finally got him for income tax evasion. But it took a lot more work than Ness simply stumbling upon the mobster’s accounting ledgers, as portrayed in the movie.

That’s what I like about Eig’s book. There’s a lot of detail. Which impressed me, as a Chicago guy who thought he knew everything. Like when I walk by Holy Name Cathedral in the city’s Gold Coast. I always knew the bullet holes in the façade were from a gangland shooting. But now I know from Get Capone that the shots were fired by some of Capone’s hit men from a building across the street, killing several rival mobsters. I also learned that Scarface spent as much time in Cicero, Illinois, and Miami, Florida, as he did in Chicago. Meanwhile, he had a wife and kid who lived quietly in a bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. See, Capone got around. Which explains how he caught a social disease that eventually killed him. I learned all this from the book.

Get Capone is great because it adds to the legend while dispelling some of the myths. From one Chicago guy to another: Good job, Jonathan Eig.

The defeat of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry near the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876, has been so painstakingly chronicled and relentlessly mythologized that it’s hard to imagine anyone could find much new to say about it. And apart from providing a few fresh minor details, Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand doesn’t change the overall picture of the battle that has come down to us. Nor does he find Custer less arrogant and impulsive than a succession of other historians claimed him to be. Instead, Philbrick’s great service is to sift through the bounty of original sources from both sides of the fray, factor in recent forensic discoveries from the battlefield and emerge with a documentary-like narrative that has all the aspects of a Greek tragedy.

Essentially a washout at West Point but a valiant fighter for the Union in the Civil War, Ohio-born George Armstrong Custer soon enough found himself on the sword’s edge of Indian removal in the rapidly developing West, a task he relished. He was supported in his ambitions (which extended to the political and journalistic) by his doting wife, Elizabeth, who followed him to virtually every wilderness outpost.

Philbrick immerses the reader in the dull minutiae and stark terror of the battle at Little Bighorn, using the same close-up, minute-by-minute perspective he demonstrated in Mayflower and In the Heart of the Sea. He not only delves into the characters of Custer and his subordinate officers but also identifies by name and actions dozens of Lakota, Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho people who witnessed or fought alongside Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the epic battle. Philbrick’s scholarship is equally epic; his appendices, notes and bibliography take up 135 pages, and he includes 18 maps. Like that of all historians, Philbrick’s account of Custer’s final hours rests on speculation. But it is well-informed and reasonable speculation—and immensely vivid.

We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains. For that, we can thank (or blame) a workaholic cockney immigrant named Fred Harvey.

Yes, Fred Harvey, not Howard Johnson. Johnson had his own genius, but Harvey was his forebear. Starting in 1876, Harvey created a chain of restaurants, hotels and stores at Santa Fe Railroad stations from Chicago to California that were not only ubiquitous, but really good. At a time when the gunslingers were still shooting it out at the O.K. Corral, Harvey brought high standards, interesting recipes, white tablecloths and well-trained “Harvey Girl” waitresses to what was then the back of beyond.

In Appetite for America, Harvey’s story is both a comprehensive cultural history and a fascinating family saga. Author Stephen Fried takes us from Harvey’s arrival in the U.S. in 1853 to his descendents’ sale of the by-then declining company to a conglomerate in 1968. He even includes an appendix of Harvey House recipes (of which “Bull Frogs Sauté Provencal” is perhaps the most intriguing).

Plagued with terrible health in his later years, Fred Harvey was lucky in his heir. His son, Ford Harvey, not only greatly expanded the empire, he had a lasting impact on the U.S. as an impresario for Southwestern tourism, the development of the Native American curio industry and the invention of the Santa Fe design style. (If you own turquoise earrings from Taos, you’re in Ford’s debt.) But, as is so often true, everything fell apart in the third generation; the talented heirs weren’t much interested in the business, and the untalented ones left to mind the store didn’t have the imagination to face up to interstates and airports.

Happily, not all was lost. Several of the high-end hotels developed under Ford Harvey still exist, like the always-booked El Tovar at the Grand Canyon. And for more proof of Harvey’s legacy, be sure to track down MGM’s The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland, and join in the chorus of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

In The Long Way Home, journalist David Laskin sets out to tell the stories of 12 immigrant men who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. Like half a million other non-native combatants fighting for Uncle Sam in “the war to end all wars,” Laskin’s dozen—three Jews, four Italians, two Poles, an Irishman, a Norwegian and a Slovak—were relatively new to America, having endured  Ellis Island during the great wave of U.S. immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Still struggling to establish themselves in an alien land where they spoke little English, where low-level employment was the norm and where they were looked on with some suspicion, these plucky fellows embraced the U.S. mission in Europe and distinguished themselves with honor. Three died in France, two won the Congressional Medal of Honor and all fought in major engagements, including the breaking of the Hindenburg Line and the taking of the Argonne Forest. Laskin’s thorough research into these lives encompassed digging into letters, diaries, battlefield reports and the National Archives and, whenever possible, conducting interviews with family members, including a face-to-face sit-down in 2006 with one of his subjects, Tony Pierro, who lived to be 111.

A marvelous craftsman, Laskin interweaves the soldiers’ personal profiles into a greater context, which positions his work equally as a history that deftly covers the background of the war and all its contemporary political ramifications, and also as a keen piece of social reflection on the role of the immigrant in shaping the fabric of American society. Laskin’s work also proves invaluable for readers interested in World War I military operations, as he follows the 12 men into battle, offering detailed accounts of their experiences and bravery on the front lines. A concluding chapter summarizes the postwar lives of those who survived, all of whom returned to America to live relatively quiet and productive lives, fully committed to the new homeland for which they fought.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

Fans of television’s “CSI” and its myriad spin-offs will no doubt find much of morbid interest in Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, a lushly detailed account of how the discipline and profession of forensic science emerged from the “poison playground” of 1920s New York to become an indispensable argumentative tool in the modern-day crime-fighter’s arsenal. In particular, Blum focuses on the turbulent lives and trailblazing careers of the city’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and his trusty toxicologist, Alexander Gettler. Through their diligence, persistence and selfless devotion to the cause, Norris and Gettler laid the intellectual groundwork for a new—and potentially invaluable—field of study in the span of a few short decades. All the while, the pair waged an uphill battle against popular (and political) scientific ignorance and faced resistance, often fierce, from clueless city-hall bureaucrats and budget-cutters.

Known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work as a journalist and science writer, Blum displays a remarkable gift for narrative storytelling in The Poisoner’s Handbook, weaving together, from seemingly disparate elements, an old-fashioned tale of suspense that is as readable as it is densely informative. Each chapter of the book takes its title from a particular periodic element or compound, introducing the reader to these lethal substances in the kind of vivid language novelists often utilize to introduce their main characters. While the pages are populated with plenty of human villains, these killer compounds are the book’s real antagonists. Whether used as a murder weapon or ingested accidentally, each poses a unique and complex puzzle for Norris and Gettler, prompting the pair to devise ever more cunning procedures for the detection, in human tissue, of lethal quantities and trace amounts alike. They work tirelessly, selflessly, even courageously at fine-tuning and perfecting their craft, using their own meager salaries to cover laboratory expenses and generally learning as they go—at times from their own deadly mistakes.

The Poisoner’s Handbook is that rare nonfiction book that has something for everyone, whether you are a true-crime aficionado, a political-history buff, a science geek or simply a fan of well-written narrative suspense.

Brian Corrigan lives and writes in Florence, Alabama.

The story of Polly Bemis—the subject of Christopher Corbett’s The Poker Bride—has been told before. A biographical novel, Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn, was made into a film in 1991, and she has appeared in juvenile biographies and history books. Factor in the many other journalistic accounts since her death in 1933, and Bemis emerges as an outright legend.

Sold into indentured servitude in China by her parents and brought to San Francisco by her Chinese owner, she later made her way into the post-Gold Rush mining areas of 1870s Idaho, where—like most other immigrant Chinese women of that era—she presumably was a concubine or a prostitute. What still remains somewhat unclear is how Polly ended up as the the long-lived wife of Charlie Bemis, a gambler and saloon owner. The more romanticized version avoids the possibility that Charlie actually won her in a game of poker. Corbett seems comfortable enough with that scenario, however, and it’s in line with the broader history he gives us of the harsh realities of Chinese immigration in the late-19th-century American West.

In fact, the main strength of Corbett’s book is his detailed description of life in wide-open California and the Pacific Northwest, places where gold fever induced thousands of Chinese men to enter the country in search of new opportunities and financial fortune. The darkest side of things happened in San Francisco, where imported Chinese women and girls stocked a burgeoning skin trade that helped define Chinatown’s more lurid character.

Fortunately for Polly Bemis, her story was totally atypical. She somehow managed to avoid the worst fate of a young Chinese woman—abuse, disease, early death—and lived out her long days as a highly respected lady on a picturesque ranch on the Salmon River. Her story is remarkable, and Corbett’s research is certainly thorough. The Poker Bride adds immeasurably to the Asian-American nonfiction catalog. 

“For want of a nail,” begins the old fable about small actions with disastrous consequences. How much worse are the results when the actions are not small to begin with? The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers, brings that very question to American history, particularly the last great push of American imperialism at the start of the twentieth century. Bradley presents a tale of a United States steeped in an expansionist myth that Anglo-Saxon “civilization” was destined to dominate all lesser cultures and races, and that the white American race was called “to follow the Sun” to bring that same civilization across the Pacific to Asia, just as their British ancestors brought it across the Atlantic. That other races and cultures might already consider themselves civilized, or might not want the “benefits” of Anglo-Saxon culture, was unconsidered, even unfathomable to the American leaders of the day. At the top of that list of leaders, Bradley asserts, was Theodore Roosevelt.

The titular cruise was a “grand tour” of Pacific Asia undertaken by Alice Roosevelt, Teddy’s popular eldest daughter, under the chaperonage of then-Secretary of War William Taft. Seen mostly as a publicity stunt and a celebration of America’s supposedly benevolent conquest of the Philippines, Bradley reveals how the cruise served as a cover for secret, possibly unconstitutional diplomatic meetings with Imperial Japan on the part of Taft. Unfortunately, as Bradley reveals, it should have also served as a warning on how misguided that diplomacy was—indeed, how poorly the Americans understood the cultures and governments they were dealing with, and how little thought Roosevelt and Taft gave to the possible results of their efforts.

With each port of call, Bradley examines the history and policy that made each significant, both to America at large and to Roosevelt himself. From the greedy takeover of Hawaii to the brutal subjugation of the Philippines to diplomatic blunders in China and Korea, Bradley uses each stop to expose how readily American ideals fell away under the twin impulses of imperialism and racism. Along the way, Bradley examines Roosevelt’s personal character, the beliefs that motivated him and the ways in which he acted to control the public’s perception of him and exaggerate his personal and public exploits. What results is a far cry from the glorious, fun-loving, can-do leader carved into Mount Rushmore. Bradley’s Teddy is more of an egomaniac and short-sighted bully than visionary leader, and his racial politics are particularly repulsive to modern eyes.

This is not an easy book to read; the list of abuses fostered by American policy and militarism at the time range from racial massacres to officially sanctioned rape. Most would be treated today as war crimes of the worst sort. For readers used to glorious depictions of American progress, this book will be uncomfortable, to say the least.

And it is not without flaws: Bradley’s eagerness to expose and denounce Roosevelt’s character and American excesses becomes quickly pronounced. In asserting that Theodore Roosevelt’s policies and secret diplomacy were directly responsible for Japanese imperialism in Asia, Bradley goes so far as to lay the blame for World War II solely at Teddy’s feet. Indeed, Bradley writes as if the Japanese government had no culpability for any of its choices during the war, and only took action because of someone who’d been dead for over thirty years—an eyebrow-raising conclusion indeed.

Still, Bradley does an effective and important job of skewering the myth of Teddy, exposing the racism and classism which guided the president’s philosophy, politics and policies. Likewise, the American atrocities in the Philippines under McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft deserve to be exposed, as does Roosevelt’s poor faith with regards to Korea, his blinders towards Japanese ambitions and his failure to see past his own racism to recognize the value (and even superiority) in the cultures and peoples he sought to “civilize.” In these respects, The Imperial Cruise is an important contribution to a realistic understanding of America’s history, good and bad, and the views that other cultures, particularly in Asia, hold toward the United States. It also serves as a powerful reminder that the course we choose today is influenced by choices made long before, and will have its own influence, for good and ill, on the world that comes after us. We ignore such lessons at our own peril.

Howard Shirley is a writer from Franklin, Tennessee.

Near the historic seaside community of Gloucester, Massachusetts, lies a 3,600-acre woodland known as Dogtown. Once a colonial village, it was abandoned nearly 200 years ago—although “abandoned” might not be the appropriate term. Its history of pirates, witches, ghosts and unearthly forces has been a magnet ever since to those seeking a closer commune with all of nature’s forces. One such person is Elyssa East. Her book Dogtown is at once a memoir, a narrative of the region’s history and the story of the violent crime that occurred there in 1984.

Growing up in Georgia, East was fed on tales of“Revolutionary and Civil War heroes, and of plantation noblesse oblige.” As a child, she wanted to be like these people, but felt she never could. She believed, though, that there must be a region and a history to which she could belong. Dogtown, she thought, might be that place.

East learned of Dogtown (named for the 18th-century widows who kept dogs for protection) through the paintings of Marsden Hartley, an American artist who painted the giant boulders (many 20 feet tall) deposited there during the Ice Age. Suffering from his own personal demons, Hartley went to Dogtown in the summer of 1931. He fell under the region’s mystical spell and again found his muse. One particular painting, “Mountains in Stone, Dogtown,” captured East’s imagination. As she writes, “I began to wonder what kind of story a place named Dogtown would tell. I imagined that one day I would find this unusual landscape and the source of Hartley’s inspiration, as if doing so would complete some undone part of me.”

In Dogtown, East uses alternating chapters to chronicle her personal experiences, the town’s history and the grisly murder of schoolteacher Anne Netti in 1984. This brutal slaying put a curse on the region that, until recently, kept most people away. Only now, she believes, is Dogtown becoming cherished again.

East’s research is meticulous. If, at times, there is more historical information than necessary, it can be forgiven. She may not have found exactly what she was looking for in Dogtown, but she did find an abundance of material for a worthy first book.

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer in Nashville.

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Anita Diamant’s novel, The Last Days of Dogtown.

Once, back when conservation was taught in schools, every youngster heard the teacher say, “To see what man has wrought, go to Europe. But to see what God has wrought, come to America.” While the Old World has its palaces and cathedrals, Americans have Yosemite, Yellowstone and the nearly 60 other national parks that comprise our “empire of grandeur.” A sumptuous new book, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, recounts the history and preservation of these treasured places.

The book is a visual adventure, like its companion, the recently aired PBS production of the same name. Ken Burns and crew shot 150 hours of film and collected 12,000 archival photographs, distilling their work here. Of course they include such iconic places as the sun-splashed Grand Tetons of Wyoming and the valley of the Colorado River. Less well known but equally breathtaking are Oregon’s Crater Lake in winter and the Dakota badlands. Some of the historic pictures—chiaroscuro studies—feel nearly three-dimensional. Others touch the heart, including one of John Muir as an old man, broken by the loss of his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley, flooded for a reservoir.

Filmmaker Burns’ works are abundant with characters. This story of “America’s best idea” is likewise a story of people: those who first saw these spirit-lifting landscapes, reported on them to the world and fought for their protection—or tried to destroy them for profit. Theodore Roosevelt inevitably bestrides these pages. Muir, a close friend, called him “the most vital man on the continent,” and with good reason: during his presidency (1901-09), more than 280,000 square miles—a total area larger than Texas—were placed under protection of some kind.

Less famous heroes also gave their working lives to the conservation cause, writing articles, making speeches and lobbying politicians to save places with canyons, glaciers and giant trees. After an early life of dissolution, Horace Kephart took refuge in the mountain fastness of eastern Tennessee in 1904, where he witnessed logging companies laying waste to vast tracts of ancient timber. Owing his life to the wilderness, he joined the movement to save what was left. He was rewarded in 1934, when another President Roosevelt signed the law creating the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

When the authors refer to “the scripture of nature,” it becomes clear that their journey to make this stunning book was very much like a pilgrimage—and we are the richer for it. 

Jim Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

In General Sherman’s Christmas, award-winning author and historian Stanley Weintraub has provided an engrossing, up-close-and-personal narrative describing Union General William T. Sherman’s famous month-long “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, just before Christmas in 1864. Weintraub has built a name for himself by shedding light on some of history’s most memorable holidays, and this latest addition is another success.

In his daring 300-mile foray across the state, Sherman’s plan was not to enjoin his troops in battle, but to cut an intimidating swath with his army of 62,000 men through the civilian heart of Georgia, destroy Confederate supplies, and strike a psychological blow to civilian morale, convincing the populace of the futility of the Rebel effort.

A risky venture indeed, and to ensure its success, Sherman had to cut himself off from all avenues of supply and communication with the rest of the Union army. His troops had to forage for the 300 tons of food they needed to consume each day throughout the march. No humvees here, these soldiers marched with packs and muskets through the desolate and tarnished Georgia landscape, completing anywhere from 10 to 15 miles a day and confiscating everything edible in their path. While leaving the populace and most homes relatively untouched, they burned cotton gins, granaries, supply depots and armories, and destroyed rail lines and bridges as they went, in what later historians would call an early example of “total war” strategy.

A hero to Northerners, who welcomed news of the Union’s advance through the deep South, and a blackguard and villain to the civilian population through whose fields and forests he tramped, Sherman’s daring strategy paid off, and he was able to telegraph his now-famous message to President Lincoln on December 22: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Sherman’s march had effectively ended all chances for the survival of the Confederacy.

Weintraub has filled his book with the reminiscences of actual participants in the momentous events, from an officer’s poignant description of soldiers’ songs echoing from campfire to campfire in the dusk, to the diary entries and letters of terrified Southern women desperate to find food after their carefully filled larders have been looted by passing troops, to the false optimism in the headlines of Confederate newspapers. These contributions form the real tapestry of the narrative, and furnish a dramatic backdrop to the march that changed the face of the war. By April of 1865, the Southern cause was dead.

The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters. In comparison, the 1910 Northern Rockies forest fire remembered in The Big Burn covered nearly 3.2 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. At least 85 people were killed, most of them members of ill-trained firefighting crews.

That blowout, the biggest wildfire in American history, devastated the economy of a booming timber and mining region. It traumatized the survivors—and as New York Times columnist Timothy Egan shows in The Big Burn, it set the course for U.S. forest conservation for the next hundred years, for good and ill.

The national forests that burned were brand new, the product of President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade. Spurred on by fellow aristocrat Gifford Pinchot, the founding head of the National Forest Service, Roosevelt had worked at breakneck pace to protect millions of acres from logging, railroad and mine companies. But when Roosevelt left office, the land barons’ allies in his own party starved the Forest Service of resources, and forced out Pinchot.

The scope of the disaster and the heroism of so many forest rangers turned public opinion in favor of conservation at a crucial moment. National forests were subsequently created throughout the country, and the Forest Service became a thriving agency.

For his National Book Award-winning account of the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, Egan was able to interview survivors. For The Big Burn, he had to comb through Forest Service reports, memoirs and old newspapers. But he’s equally effective here in telling the story through individuals—the homesteaders, the fire crews of immigrants and drifters, the idealistic Ivy League grads who followed Pinchot’s siren call to the Forest Service.

Egan is a gorgeous writer. His chapters on the “blowup,” when thousands fled burning towns and desperate fire crews burrowed in mine shafts or submerged in streams to escape the inferno, should become a classic account of an American Pompeii.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.