15 Stars is more than just a clever book title. It represents the collective careers of three five-star generals: Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. These three military giants led the United States to victory in World War II and helped shape the world following the war. Not since the immense fame of Grant, Sherman and Lee at the close of the Civil War have three generals become such household names, writes Stanley Weintraub, an accomplished author of more than 50 histories and biographies, many with military themes.

But while these generals were contemporaries, they were a study in contrasts. MacArthur was urbane and egotistical. Marshall exuded quiet confidence. Eisenhower was modest and unassuming. And their relationships to each other were complex. Colleagues, and on occasion competitors, they leapfrogged each other, sometimes stonewalled each other, even supported and protected each other, throughout their celebrated careers, Weintraub writes.

And each accomplished great things: MacArthur conquered the Pacific Theater; Marshall brought order to postwar Europe; Eisenhower was the architect of D-Day. But only one, Eisenhower, would achieve the greatest prize: the presidency. In the public mind they appeared, in turn, as glamour, integrity, and competence, Weintraub writes. But for the twists of circumstance, all three rather than one might have occupied the White House. 15 Stars chronicles those circumstances, from the start of World War II to the height of the Cold War. It is a well-researched book that thoroughly examines the lives of three American military icons. The material is complicated, but Weintraub’s easy writing makes it understandable and engaging. The book reads like a literary narrative, beginning with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and ending in the twilight of each man’s life. It is a worthy choice for the bookshelf of any reader who loves military history or historical nonfiction. John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

<b>Rampersad’s detailed look at the once-invisible man</b> Ralph Ellison’s incomparable 1952 novel <i>Invisible Man</i> was a 20th-century masterpiece that personalized racism’s moral, political and social impact in such remarkable fashion it simultaneously enhanced and restricted the rest of his life. Acclaimed author Arnold Rampersad’s (<i>The Life of Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson</i>) extensive new volume <b>Ralph Ellison</b> details Ellison’s embrace of and problems with celebrity status, his philosophical shift from radical communism to democratic universalism and his ongoing battle to craft a suitable follow-up to <i>Invisible Man</i>. Rampersad’s biography not only documents Ellison’s background, influences and evolutionary development, but offers a comprehensive look into his motivation and psyche. Readers encounter a complex individual who championed America’s ideals and celebrated its potential when others around him, even close friends and colleagues, focused on the nation’s ugly failures and mistreatment of its citizens. Rampersad’s findings and analysis prove informative, fascinating, sometimes disturbing and consistently compelling.

He cites isolation and poverty as driving factors in Ellison’s makeup. Growing up in Oklahoma and losing his father at a young age led Ellison to seek solace and advice from sometimes dubious authority figures, while being poor and frequently abandoned generated a continual desire to be part of some entity or structure. The often bizarre incidents he experienced at the Tuskegee Institute and during his early years in the New York of the ’30s were dramatized in <i>Invisible Man</i>. We also see his experience with class conflicts, the lure of (and later his disappointment in) the Communist Party and most importantly the realization that many white Americans he encountered not only didn’t view him as an equal, but even failed to acknowledge his existence. Still, Ellison’s brilliance as a writer and striking, charismatic personality, coupled with <i>Invisible Man</i>’s stunning success, soon changed things. Suddenly he was socializing with Robert Penn Warren and Saul Bellow, equated with Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and sought out by academics and writers everywhere.

Yet none of these situations made Ellison completely comfortable, nor enabled him to overcome the periodic writers’ block that plagued him in his later years. Rampersad chronicles the increasing alienation Ellison felt regarding the rise of nationalist and militant sentiments within both the black arts world and community, particularly the notions that America was fundamentally flawed and African-American culture stood separate and apart from everything else in the country. There were some painful incidents during the ’60s and ’70s, among them ugly denunciations of Ellison’s work and comments from students and writers angered by what they deemed his detachment from the Civil Rights movement. But none of that dimmed Ellison’s love of writing and literature, or his passion for music and other arts, and it didn’t alter his faith in the goodness he felt was inherent in America as a whole.

Aided by full access to Ellison’s papers, Arnold Rampersad has penned a definitive work that not only illuminates important questions about race, class and values, but also shows how Ellison’s approach to them profoundly influenced everything else in his life.

<i>Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville</i> City Paper <i>and other publications.</i>

<b>Restoring Burr’s tarnished image</b> What the generally educated know about Aaron Burr: He fatally wounded Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in a duel. After that, Burr (1756-1836) is usually dismissed as one of the darker characters in the early years of the republic. In <b>Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr</b>, historian Nancy Isenberg attempts to clarify the man and his life, to provide perspective on oft-published prejudices, and to examine Burr’s reputation in the important contextual light of politics. In rectifying prior shoddy research and addressing the infelicities of popular biography, Isenberg gives us a fuller-bodied Burr. The controversies remain to some degree, but their root causes are more clearly defined, and iBurr emerges as a fairly typical man of his time.

The New Jersey-born Burr was of notable stock: He was the grandson of the famous theologian Jonathan Edwards, and he graduated from Princeton, where his father had been president. Burr served as a colonel in the Continental Army, made a name for himself in New York politics, and in 1800 was elected vice president under Thomas Jefferson. What happened with Hamilton in 1804 was the culmination of years of professional and personal sniping, and by any objective assessment, was as much Hamilton’s fault as Burr’s.

Burr left office a tarnished man, embarked on various bank deals and real estate speculations, explored the West, was later tried for treason (and acquitted) under bogus circumstances, traveled to Europe and eventually returned to America, where he spent his later years doing legal work for women and children. (Burr was perhaps America’s first family lawyer.) Financial problems and exaggerations about his womanizing contributed over time to increased negative perceptions of Burr and, when combined with the Hamilton affair, sealed his fate as a blackguard in the American consciousness. Isenberg effectively broadens our view of history, providing some keen insights into the highly contentious post-revolutionary period and establishing Burr’s legitimate role within it, as patriot and statesman.

British author Sara Wheeler sets a daunting task for herself in her latest book, Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton to wrest her subject from the enduring portrait created by his longtime lover Karen Blixen in Out of Africa (not to mention Robert Redford’s cinematic portrayal). Wheeler succeeds, at least to some extent, presenting an in-depth profile of the legendary denizen of British East Africa (now Kenya) while also capturing the essence of life in the colony during the first quarter of the 20th century, contrasting and reflecting the world as depicted by Blixen.

Intriguingly aloof, devastatingly charming, equally comfortable facing down charging game, discussing literature or enjoying fine wine (which he always seemed to have on hand), Denys Finch Hatton seems the perfect embodiment of the age of gentleman explorers. Nineteenth-century explorers had brought Africa into the drawing room, Wheeler writes, and after their Eton and Oxford educations, scions of wealthy families traipsed out to the latest colonial hotspot seeking adventure or as social and tax changes left the aristocracy short on capital renewed fortunes. Finch Hatton followed family protocol in doing both, falling in love with Africa on his first visit in 1910, at the age of 23. Before finding his life’s work as a hunter and pilot, he tried his hand at dairy farming and became a decorated officer during the African campaign in the First World War.

Though we think of Finch Hatton as the consummate expatriate, he in fact returned to England often and always managed to be in the middle of things. He attended the coronation of King George V during one visit and went to parties with the Prince of Wales (the future Duke of Windsor), who he would later lead on safari, during another. He saw performances by Josephine Baker in Paris and Nijinsky in London. He befriended Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy’s son) en route to Mesopotamia.

Naturally, many Finch Hatton associates familiar to readers of Blixen’s works also figure in Too Close to the Sun: Berkeley Cole, Lord Delamere and Bror Blixen (Karen’s husband). Aviatrix Beryl Markham is also in the book. For most of us, however, the most fascinating member of Finch Hatton’s circle is Karen Blixen herself. Tania [Blixen] was part of Denys’s deepening contact with Kenya, and her lyrical response to the landscape and the people attracted him, Wheeler writes of their intense, yet fragile relationship.

In her introduction, Wheeler says she started out disliking Blixen, but made peace with her over the course of her research and travels. It is a result of those travels that Wheeler is able to set scenes so wonderfully a talent she shares with Blixen whether she’s describing the atmosphere of Finch Hatton’s favorite childhood home, a war-weary London or striking Kenyan sunsets. Putting her subject into context is an important aspect of Too Close to the Sun, because though he always lived life on his own terms, part of the allure of Finch Hatton will always be the intersection of time and place.

MiChelle Jones made a pilgrimage to Rung-stedlund, Karen Blixen’s family home near Copenhagen, in 2001.

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.

The notebooks and artwork of Holocaust victim Petr Ginz lay undiscovered in an old house in Prague for 60 years. In 2003, after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, it came to light that Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had carried with him a drawing ( Moon Landscape ) by young Petr an act intended to commemorate the Holocaust victims. Not long after a man came forward wishing to sell some old writings and drawings all by Petr Ginz.

Edited by Ginz’s sister, Chava Pressburger, The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941-1942 is the record of a Jewish schoolboy’s daily life in Prague while it is under Nazi control. Fourteen-year-old Petr, an irrepressible prodigy who excelled in painting, drawing and writing, kept a straightforward, calm record of his days, including his schooling, family life, and the personal indignities and work (cleaning typewriters) forced upon him and his family by Hitler’s edicts. Embellished with his wry poetry and his stark, intense linocuts and drawings, the diary entries are short, many no more than a few sentences, but they reveal volumes about the Nazis’ draconian methods: Tuesday, March 3, 1942: In the afternoon in town. There are ordinances everywhere saying that it is not allowed to wash Jewish laundry. As the strictures placed upon the Jews became tighter, there was an escalation of transports, moving the Jewish populace to the ghetto of Thereisienstadt before transfer to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. Petr’s diary ends in August 1942, two months before he was separated forever from his family and sent to Thereisienstadt, where he would live (and start a secret rebel newspaper), work and tirelessly study for two years. At the end of that time 16-year-old Petr was taken to Auschwitz and exterminated one of many lives prematurely ended, but a voice not fully stilled. Of Petr’s determination to bear witness, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer writes in the book’s introduction, Surrounded by death, and facing his own, Petr put words on paper. Given his unprecedented situation, his words were unprecedented. He was creating new language. He was creating life.

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).

Edith Wharton is perhaps best known for translating social history into fiction as she did in two of her most widely read novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first woman to do so. Her most popular book, Ethan Frome, a departure for her, was published in 1911. Growing up in New York in a well-to-do family during the Gilded Age, Wharton was an avid reader of important nonfiction works and a close observer of the elegant life and dramatic social change of that era. Despite an unhappy marriage and a difficult relationship with her mother and brothers, Wharton created a distinctive and sometimes extravagant life for herself, mostly abroad.

That story unfolds in Hermione Lee’s magnificent new biography Edith Wharton. Lee, Oxford’s first female Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature and author of a highly acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf, says Wharton was passionately interested in France, England, and Italy, but could never be done with the subject of America and Americans. In her richly detailed study, Lee shows how Wharton developed into an extremely ambitious author, publishing at least one book every year between 1897 and her death in 1937. Apart from her writing, Wharton was interested in fine homes and gardens, travel and friendships. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James, art critic Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark and Theodore Roosevelt.

Lee discusses what she calls the two essential underpinnings of [Wharton’s] life, money and servants. Of particular interest is Wharton’s work in establishing and supporting charities to assist in the war effort in France during World War I. Lee’s portrait also reveals some of Wharton’s less attractive characteristics, such as snobbery, racism, anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, which she says were commonplace among upper-class Anglo-Americans of the era.

This authoritative book, sensitive and thorough, is surely the definitive biography of Edith Wharton. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

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.

There are a handful of names associated with the abolitionist movement that most everyone knows Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. But history seems to have nearly forgotten one name William Wilberforce. Author Eric Metaxas chronicles the intriguing life and towering accomplishments of Wilberforce in his biography Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery.

Despite his slight physical stature, Wilberforce made a Herculean contribution to society, as he nearly single-handedly ended the British Empire’s slave trade in 1807, thereby paving the way for emancipation in 1833. Living in an era when slavery was ensconced as a social norm, Wilberforce found himself in the midst of a spiritual awakening a personal transformation that he referred to as his Great Change. Though he was one of the most talented and well connected men of his time, Wilberforce’s success is most firmly connected to his deep-seated belief in the equality of all men in the eyes of God. The Cambridge-educated Wilberforce secured a position in the House of Commons by the age of 21, and soon heard God’s calling for his life and became the foremost political leader and public figure of the abolitionist movement in England. He persistently led the fight for 20 long years, despite violent opposition from pro-slavery groups who felt that the slave trade was an integral part of Britain’s economy. Never yielding to the hostility he faced, as his adversaries targeted him with public ridicule, personal attacks and even a challenge to a duel, Wilberforce forged ahead, becoming the moral conscience of his country. This year marks the bicentennial of Wilberforce’s accomplishment, and Amazing Grace serves as the companion book to a recently released feature film by the same name. Metaxas tells Wilberforce’s story with a charm and energy reminiscent of a favorite history professor, painting a captivating picture of this era of social reform that revolutionized the world.

We know Washington Irving best for his folk tales The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Born in the year the American Revolution ended, Irving died not long before the start of the Civil War. During his lifetime, his versatility as an author who could successfully write satire, history and biography helped to establish him as the country’s first professional man of letters. How this lifelong bachelor and citizen of the world put Manhattan on the literary map is the subject of Andrew Burstein’s discerning biography The Original Knickerbocker.

From early on, Irving was part of a mutually supportive New York literary community that included three of his brothers, who were well-connected and politically engaged. His first book, 1809’s A History of New York, allegedly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a mock history, a widely read satiric masterpiece. In 1815, Irving sailed to Europe in search of new directions for his writing. When he returned home 17 years later, he was an international celebrity.

Burstein guides us carefully through Irving’s works, explaining both how each was received in its time and how later readers viewed them. [Irving] gave his country the epic historical romances they craved, he writes, He celebrated an at once vigorous, amusing, and opportunistic people. Although Irving the historian appreciated primary sources and archives, Burstein says he had a jaunty, sometimes starry-eyed way of telling history. He could not help but re-create it imaginatively. Irving was congenial and witty, had a naturally tolerant personality, was good company for the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Martin Van Buren, and was generous in trying to help other authors, even James Fenimore Cooper, who did not care for him. Burstein, who is best known for his books on Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, demonstrates here that he is also skilled in bringing readers the life and times of an important literary figure.

Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary journey from modest beginnings as the son of a builder to the pinnacle of British literary society was the result of his exceptional talent and fierce ambition. His road to critical acclaim and commercial success was fraught with numerous challenges as he steered his way between two worlds in a class-conscious society. Claire Tomalin, the author of distinguished biographies of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys the last receiving the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award gives us an elegant and incisive account of Hardy’s life in Thomas Hardy.

Her careful narrative vividly evokes his development from a bright young man, unable to go to university, who works as an architect’s clerk while becoming an aspiring author. He found his true voice with Far from the Madding Crowd, where he established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist’s eye and he portrays country people as they cope with custom and change. Tomalin notes that while in all of his works Hardy wasted no scrap of experience, some readers may have misunderstood him. Although he has been read as a realist, she notes, he was not producing documentaries but writing fiction. In addition to his work, at the center of his life for many years was his first wife, Emma Gifford. She was the inspiration for some of his best work, both before and, with regard to his poetry, after her death in 1912. He was in love with her, there was no doubt of that, Tomalin writes, but she was also a precious commodity a mine,’ as he so frankly told her. . . . She gave him material for his writing. Years later, Emma felt that her husband cared more for his fictional women than he did the real ones he encountered. Tomalin writes perceptively about Hardy’s relationships with other women, including his mother and his second wife, Florence.

Throughout Thomas Hardy Tomalin takes us behind the scenes of late 19th- and early 20th-century literary life in England and shows that Hardy was a shrewd businessman as well as a major author. She explains that early in his career he did whatever was necessary to have his work serialized in publications and for circulating libraries, as well as being deemed appropriate for family reading. Nevertheless, she writes, [h]e did want to become a serious novelist, and his best novels are great works of imagination each with its own seam of poetry sewn into the narrative. Tomalin gives us skillful and helpful readings of Hardy’s fiction and poetry and considers the poems an essential part of the narrative of his life. Although his works sometimes aroused controversy because of his views on religion and marriage, Tomalin says that he remained conventional and conservative in his personal life. He chose not to get involved with causes, for example, because he believed a writer was more effective if he appeared open-minded on strictly political questions. Tomalin’s beautifully crafted biography helps us to better understand the man and his work.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.