Name recognition just wasn't an issue when Winston S. Churchill began a 27-year career in Parliament in 1970. But being the grandson and namesake of the great World War II-era British leader hasn't opened every door. When the young Winston identified himself to two burly, disbelieving Chicago police officers amidst the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, he got a swift nightstick on the noggin for his trouble. A New York cabby once told him,  "If you're Winston Churchill, then I'm Marilyn Monroe."  And then there are always the daunting comparisons.

"My grandfather's life is a constant reproach to me and to everybody,"  Churchill says during a call to Belgium, where he is on summer holiday.  "How little one is able to achieve by comparison! Not only did he produce some 50 volumes of history, biography, and speeches, but nearly 500 canvases as an artist, some of them of remarkable quality. And in his spare time he managed to beat the daylights out of Adolf Hitler as well."

Four of the volumes Sir Winston produced make up his massive A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he received glowing reviews and the 1953 Nobel Prize for literature. Buried within these volumes is a fresh and vigorous account of the development of the United States, which Winston S. Churchill has seamlessly edited into the very enjoyable and very readable The Great Republic: A History of America.

"I had long known of my grandfather's writings about America and his love of America,"  Churchill explains,  "and it just struck me as amazing that the history of America which he had written had never been published in this format. To this day mainstream American readers are probably oblivious to the fact that Winston Churchill wrote a rather good history of their country."

Rather good indeed. Sir Winston writes with wit and verve and a capacious understanding of politics and governance. As his grandson says,  "It certainly isn't the work of an academic historian who has scribbled in his ivory tower. This is somebody who knows the world." The American world Sir Winston presents to the reader is just unfamiliar enough to be exceptionally interesting. Although the son of an American mother and proud of his American blood, Sir Winston escaped the hypnotic pull of our founding mythologies. So, for example, while acknowledging the contribution of George Washington and his heroic struggle to keep a revolutionary army in the field, he attributes British losses not to Washington's generalship but to larger strategic matters, such as Britain's inability to bring overwhelming force against the colonial armies because the French dominated the sea and bottled up the British navy in port. What we get is certainly a recognizable version of our history, just not the one we're likely to hear from other historians. That The Great Republic is so cleverly written is simply an added pleasure.

Sir Winston's writing is probably best when describing the battles of the Civil War. Such gruesome and heroic struggles clearly energized him. According to his grandson, he tramped many of the battlefields on foot during a 1929 visit to the United States. He impressed into service somebody who as a small boy had witnessed some of the heaviest fighting. He brings to his descriptions all of his knowledge as a soldier who had fought in many battles on four continents, as well as his power as a strategist, politician, and historian.

Churchill's history of the United States ends about 1900. His grandson fills the void by presenting a fine selection from Churchill's articles and speeches about 20th-century America. Some of these are the expected ones the famous Iron Curtain speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri, and his speeches before Joint Sessions of the U.S. Congress. But there are surprises here, too—a review of Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, in which Churchill displays an unexpectedly intense social conscience, and a very funny 1933 article on American food called  "Land of Corn and Lobsters."

The Great Republic concisely demonstrates what an exceptional writer Winston Churchill was, something that may surprise Americans who think of him primarily as a politician. According to his grandson, Sir Winston derived virtually all of his income from his pen, which is why by the end of the war six years when he had been unable to earn anything he was effectively bankrupt. When Churchill announced that he had to sell his beloved home, Chartwell, wealthy friends and well-wishers purchased the place for posterity. Churchill lived there until he died in 1965 at the age of 90.

Winston S. Churchill has vivid memories of his grandfather standing at his upright desk at Chartwell correcting page proofs. "It was a literary factory there. When he was at home he had a large team two or three researchers, mostly Oxford historians who would be preparing material, looking up facts and figures, and a relay of two or three secretaries that he kept busy until the early hours. He really drove himself."  Sir Winston had no speechwriters, and according to his grandson, put "approximately one hour of preparation into each minute of delivery. And that's why the speeches are so damn good!"

Like his grandfather and father, the mercurial Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill has had a dual career as a politician and a journalist. In the 1960s he spent a number of years working as a war correspondent and notes that the only time he sustained any injuries was "in a place called Chicago in 1968." He and his father co-authored a book on the Six Day War which remains the standard work on that war. Since retiring from politics, he has written a well-regarded biography of his father and continues to contribute articles to the Wall Street Journal and various European newspapers and magazines.

Winston S. Churchill remembers his grandfather not as the awesome personage of history, but as wonderfully warm and approachable, intensely human, with a lively sense of humor. He adds,  "I learned quite a bit as a journalist from my grandfather and various things as a politician from him. But above all, I learned about independence of mind to stand up for what you believe, come what may."  

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California, and a regular contributor to BookPage.

Theodore Roosevelt’s passion for the rugged outdoor life is widely known. But it remained for historian Douglas Brinkley to document—virtually on a week-by-week basis—the extent to which TR transformed his enthusiasm for nature into America’s gain and glory. The results of Brinkley’s exhaustive research reverberate through The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, a whopping (almost 1,000-page) examination of Roosevelt’s fight to save America’s unique natural spaces.

Elevated to the presidency in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, Roosevelt used the power of his office not simply to advocate the conservation of natural resources but also to impose sweeping environmental measures by fiat. “In seven years and sixty-nine days [as president],” Brinkley writes, “Roosevelt . . . saved more than 240 million acres of American wilderness.”

In one sense, Brinkley has been preparing to write this book for most of his life. “My mother and father were high school teachers” in Perrysburg, Ohio, he tells BookPage from his office in Houston, where he is professor of history at Rice University. “We had a 24-foot Coachman trailer, and we would visit presidential sites and national parks. I had been to Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home, when I was a boy, and I was enamored by the study and the library and the big-game trophies. Then we would visit a lot of these parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, the Petrified Forest and other places—I write about [here].

“But what really galvanized this book for me was in 1992 I brought a lot of students [from Hofstra University] on a program I called The Majic Bus. They earned college credits living on the road, visiting presidential sites and national parks like my family vacation. I came upon the town of Medora, North Dakota, where TR spent his Badlands days, and I was transfixed by this quaint, cowboy-like hamlet. I started at that point micro-looking at TR and conservation as a topic.”
Brinkley says he thinks the subject of land use—the question of what to do with the West—was the “big issue” between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. He plans to follow The Wilderness Warrior with two more related volumes that will chronicle the American environmental movement through the administration of President Clinton.

“We’ve created this extraordinary system of wildlife refuges, parks and forests,” says Brinkley, “and we’ve pioneered in saving endangered species and rehabilitating lakes and rivers. We’ve done a lot of things right. In many ways, the conservation story is a triumphal American story, but it’s also filled with warnings about the things we’re not doing properly now.”

Roosevelt left a literary trail Brinkley found easy to follow. In addition to his 30 or so books, most of which dealt with nature, TR wrote an estimated 150,000 letters that capsulated his thoughts and travels. His journeys and utterances were also “good copy” at the time for America’s increasingly influential daily newspapers.

“Roosevelt’s great talent was not manipulating Congress, which he looked on with a fair amount of disdain,” Brinkley says. “He was a genius at manipulating the media. He loved reporters. He was a writer himself and a voracious reader. So any new book by a journalist that came out, he read it. He also read all the newspapers and periodicals of his day and knew the reporters by name. He won over a number of [news] people to the conservation movement.”

Politically, Roosevelt was hard to pin down. He was a rabid America-firster, a believer in westward expansion and in the “civilizing” or displacement of Indians. Yet he steadfastly thwarted the capitalists who sought to exploit the nation’s resources for private advantage. He gleefully slaughtered game animals, even as he fought to protect them and their habitats for posterity.

“The truth is that hunters and fishermen were the first environmentalists in the United States,” Brinkley asserts, noting that Roosevelt shipped many of his kills to scientists to study and to taxidermists to mount. “Before DNA testing or banding of animals,” Brinkley continues, “taxidermy was the way we learned about the natural world.”

As Brinkley sees it, Roosevelt “sold environmentalism by being a cowboy/hunter. That was his great contribution. Without the persona of, ‘Look, I’m a cowboy, I ride on a horse, and I’ve hunted grizzly bear and black bear and elk and buffalo’ then he wouldn’t have had the credibility to say, ‘You know what? We should create a buffalo commons to save the buffalo.’ He was able to sell enough people on that because he wasn’t seen as an effete intellectual talking about biology. . . . He was one part Darwin and one part James Fenimore Cooper.”

In the course of his environmental campaigns, Roosevelt crossed paths—and sometimes swords—with such luminaries as novelist Owen Wister (who dedicated The Virginian to him), painter Frederic Remington (then a relative unknown whom TR would tap to illustrate some of his magazine articles), Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington (with whom Roosevelt dined at the White House, much to the chagrin of many prominent Southerners), Mark Twain (who opposed Roosevelt on the Spanish-American War and later derided him in print for his impulsiveness and bloodlust) Jack London (whose fiction Roosevelt attacked for biological inaccuracy) and folklorist John Lomax (for whom Roosevelt personally secured a grant to enable him to continue his seminal study of American cowboy songs).

Apart from its impressive scholarship, The Wilderness Warrior also has an appealing turn-of-the-20th century design. The illustrations are integrated into the text rather than displayed on separate pages, and each chapter is prefaced by a list of phrases that outline the topics covered within.

Brinkley applauds Roosevelt for his “bold, hubristic moves” to preserve the nation’s most arresting landscapes. “He was the only politician we had in the White House in that period who had a biological sense of the world, who understood the need for species survival and did something about it. . . . When you open up a Rand McNally map and look at all the green on the United States, you’re looking at TR’s America.”

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a prison escapee named James Earl Ray.

Sides remembers that his father, who worked at the Memphis law firm that represented King during his marches on behalf of the city’s striking garbage workers, came home that evening, poured himself a stiff drink and braced his family for the worst.

“He was extremely worried that the city was going to rip apart and there was going to be a race riot,” Sides recalls. “Black and white, no one knew what was going to happen next. It was fairly terrifying.” Memphis would be one of the few major American cities spared widespread rioting in the wake of the assassination, but its scars of rage and guilt have been slow to heal.

Sides brings it all back home in Hellhound on His Trail, a narrative history with the pace of a thriller and the bite of a Howlin’ Wolf blues song.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, Sides employs an alternating narrative to build profiles of King and Ray in the months leading up to their fatal collision. King, who fears that his nonviolent movement is losing relevance, convinces his inner circle to decamp to Memphis and march in support of the largely black garbage workers. In the meantime, Ray, a small-time thief and Missouri prison fugitive with delusions of grandeur fueled by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign, drifts back to the U.S. after hiding in Mexico, assumes the alias of Eric Galt, rents an apartment in King’s hometown of Atlanta, buys a high-caliber rifle and follows King to Memphis with intent to kill.

Employing the same storytelling prowess he displayed in Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers, Sides ratchets up the tension by tracking Ray under his assumed name, a technique that enables us to suspend our feelings toward the historical figure and gain fresh insight into the mind of Eric Galt, assassin.

“I decided it was important to let Ray be whoever he is saying he is at any given point in the story,” Sides explains. “The ease with which he moved about the country and assumed these various identities is a big part of who he is, and the mystery is enhanced by that. Who is this guy with all these names? So I decided that the reader should find out it’s James Earl Ray at the point in the story where the FBI found out it was James Earl Ray. That ends up being like on page 300.”

Sides’ brick-by-brick portrait of Ray shows what madness can result from a birthright of racism, poverty and ignorance. A loner by temperament, Ray was a desultory dabbler, unwilling or unable to commit to anything—except murder.

“He was kind of an empty vessel of the culture, all these fads and trends, from bartending school to hypnosis to weird self-help books like Psycho-Cybernetics to locksmith school to dance lessons,” Sides says.

As if two larger-than-life figures were not enough, Sides also juggles a third: J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic G-man who supervised the largest manhunt in American history—a two-month, four-country search that ultimately involved 3,500 FBI agents and cost $2 million. Hoover not only loathed King, he also disdained Attorney General Ramsay Clark, his boss under President Lyndon Johnson.

“What Ramsay Clark said to me was, nothing was more important to Hoover than the reputation of the FBI, and he felt that it was at stake here because people were going to find out how much he’d been bugging and eavesdropping and smearing King,” Sides relates. “So in a paradoxical way, Hoover’s hatred of King intensified the manhunt and made it more desperate.”

The manhunt, which consumes the second half of the book, reads like a crime novel worthy of Joseph Wambaugh or Michael Connelly.

Sides studied under John Hershey (Hiroshima) at Yale and developed his love for narrative history out of the New Journalism movement of the ’60s. Would he ever consider flipping the coin and trying his hand at historical fiction?

“Honestly, whenever I read historical fiction, I have a problem,” he admits. “It’s sort of like, will the real fact please stand up? Even really good literary historical fiction like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, I’m thinking, what about the real Houdini? How much of this is real and how much of this is in [the author’s] own mind? I just think that the real story is always more interesting.”

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