In his prime, Roy Blount Jr. declares, Robert E. Lee “may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursor-cross between England’s Cary Grant and Virginia’s Randolph Scott.” Why, then, do most Americans today think of Lee if they do at all as a solemn, unsmiling figure in gray? Such an image comes to us, of course, largely from myriad photographs taken during the Civil War. Leave it to Blount, the renowned humorist, to show us not only the iconic Lee dubbed “The Marble Model” by his fellow cadets because he never received a demerit at West Point but also the flirtatious ladies’ man who never outgrew his fondness for dancing, gossip and parties.

Those readers who seek information on Lee as a career Army officer and military tactician will not be disappointed here; one finds extended discussion of Lee’s service in the Mexican War, as superintendent of West Point, and later as Confederate general. What distinguishes Blount’s treatment, however, is the author’s analysis of Lee and the race issue. The Virginian owned a handful of slaves and wrote that he considered “the blacks” to be “immeasurably better off” in the United States than in Africa. “God’s will,” he maintained, dictated that they be enslaved for their “instruction.” As Blount points out, Lee’s views on African Americans differed little from those of his contemporaries, North or South. For example, his battlefield nemesis, Ulysses S. Grant, wrote in his post-presidential memoirs that in order to bolster the Republican Party “it became necessary to enfranchise the negro, in all his ignorance.” This outstanding volume is the latest entry in the Penguin Life series, which allows distinguished authors to select a person about whom they are curious and then write a short, synthetic account that will inform the general reader and the specialist alike. Blount’s graceful narrative reflects the author’s wide reading of and mature reflection on the standard biographies of Lee. The result is a miniature masterpiece. Dr. Thomas Appleton is professor of history and associate director of the Center for Kentucky History and Politics at Eastern Kentucky University.

With the recent loss of the space shuttle Columbia, the world was once again reminded of the hazards and risks no matter how advanced the technology that are always present when man endeavors to fly. Coincidentally, 2003 marks the 100th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s astounding achievements in the tiny North Carolina coastal town of Kitty Hawk, where the Dayton, Ohio, proprietors of a bicycle shop repeatedly launched their homemade glider and eventually completed the first successful experiments in sustained flight. In To Conquer the Air, award-winning journalist James Tobin approaches this subject with dramatic flair, as he tells the story not only of the gifted, determined and humble team of brothers, but also of the other starry-eyed dreamers at the turn of the 20th century who bravely ventured into the previously little-explored field of aerodynamics. Chief among the latter was Samuel Langley, a highly respected astronomer, inventor and Smithsonian Institution executive, who, with the aid of government grants and important friends such as Alexander Graham Bell, spent years searching for the proper engine design for his own craft, which he called an aerodrome. But while Langley invested thousands of dollars and man-hours in continuously flawed mechanical plans and modifications, it was the Wrights working almost completely on their own, and at their own modest expense who methodically came to grips with essential yet elusive flight principles such as lift and drag, tirelessly hauling their wooden glider-prototype up and down the desolate sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, making one trial run after another. For the Wrights, flying began as simply a hobby inspired by routine observation of birds on the wing. Yet it grew into an all-consuming passion fueled by the quietly brilliant Wilbur (the clean-shaven one), who never went to college but combined voracious reading habits with high intelligence and an incredibly keen sense of scientific inquiry. It wasn’t until the Wrights had a good grasp of unpowered flight that they tapped machinist Charley Taylor, yet another hometown Dayton boy, to provide them with a modest yet efficient engine that would turn the glider into a true flying machine. December 17, 1903, was the day that marked the first incident of officially legitimate motor-propelled flight, but in some ways that was only the beginning of the story. Unlike their more vocal and somewhat grandstanding competitors, the Wrights worked in isolation. Flying was one thing; proving to a skeptical world that they’d really done so was quite another. Friends and associates were both admiring and jealous; newspapermen weren’t ready to believe; even whole nations, such as France, the birthplace of early balloon flight, remained caustically cynical. In the few years that followed, the Wrights eventually triumphed, as both Wilbur and Orville (the mustachioed one) built new machines and demonstrated them to an astounded even delirious public both abroad and in the U.S. Tobin’s thoroughly focused text often reads like the treatment for what would certainly be a fascinating film, featuring colorful characters, contentious relationships, and dramatic events of discovery and disappointment. Tobin also provides readers with a warm and highly interesting profile of the staunchly Protestant Wright family, including schoolteacher sister Kate, who played a key role for her brothers as devoted helpmeet, as grounded in sensible everyday advice as her brothers were aloft in the sky. This is a magnificent book about magnificent men. Martin Brady is a freelance writer and theater critic in Nashville.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time." That novel was part of a unique literary career that began with poetry, included such acclaimed novels as Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza, and Island and explored various scientific and literary subjects, mysticism and mind-altering drugs among other topics, in elegant essays. In addition to authoring more than 50 books, he also wrote for the stage and screen.

Biographer Nicholas Murray traces Huxley’s life and the development of this thought and work in Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Huxley’s personal motto was aun aprendo or "I am always learning," appropriate for the grandson of Victorian scientist Thomas Huxley, a prominent supporter of Charles Darwin. Among his many interests were the environmental movement, nuclear weapons, militarism and ruinous nationalism. When he was 16 years old, Aldous suffered a serious eye infection that rendered him unable to do any reading for almost two years and left him with partial sight for the rest of his life. Murray notes that for Huxley, "It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the single most important determining event in his early life." One of the first wave of those to study the then new discipline of English literature at Oxford, Huxley was drawn to a literary career. He did not consider himself a born novelist. "By profession I am an essayist who sometimes writes novels and biographies, an unsystematic cogitator whose books represent a series of attempts to discover and develop artistic methods for expressing the general in the particular." In the 1930s, he began to be much more concerned with politics, society and the problems of the world.

Murray deftly conveys both Huxley’s outer and inner lives. Early in his career, his friendships included literary figures Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Later on, his friends were often scientists, physicians and academic specialists in various disciplines. The astronomer Edwin Hubble and his wife Grace were close friends of the Huxleys.

Personally, Huxley was not much interested in practical matters and enjoyed solitude. He was very close to his first wife, Maria, and dependent on her for many things she read books to him and served as his driver. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to mysticism, but it was not insulated from the real world. He understood mysticism as data, real elements in life, not abstractions.

Murray’s carefully researched biography, including interviews with Huxley’s second wife Laura and son Matthew, gives us a vivid portrait of a complex figure. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

CBS News’ Bob Schieffer relives his life on deadline From James Meredith’s fiery admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962 to the recent take-down of Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, Bob Schieffer has worked at the wellsprings of America’s political history. It’s often been history made in a hurry. The veteran CBS News correspondent had the unenviable job of deciphering the voluminous Starr Report while he was on camera live. Later, he did the same with the convoluted Supreme Court opinion that gave George W. Bush the presidency. His new book This Just In is a breezy, story-a-page account of what it’s like to become famous while covering the famous. It is also a keen appraisal of the changing nature of news and reporting.

“There’s just so much news now,” says the affable Texas native, speaking by phone from Washington. “All of us are just pounded from all sides [with] this 24-hour news cycle. It’s difficult to break through this great maw of facts and figures and get people’s attention with something that’s really important.” Schieffer believes the assassination of President Kennedy marked the dividing line between old and new journalism. “That was the first time for many people to see reporters working,” he points out. “You saw those live television pictures of reporters jostling around in the Dallas police headquarters, pushing and shoving. You saw that a lot of times gathering the news is not an orderly process. It gave people real questions about our methods, and I think it raised questions about our credibility.” (Schieffer was a police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when Kennedy was shot and had the strange experience of giving Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother a ride into Dallas to see her imprisoned son.) Nowadays, Schieffer observes, reporters are accustomed to doing a lot of their work in public, frequently with warranted trepidation. He says he had to do his summarizings of the Starr and Supreme Court documents the moment he got them because “people will turn on CBS to see if we know anything about this story. If we’re not on the air talking about it, people will turn away from us and go to somebody who is. And once they turn away from you, they never come back.” One of Schieffer’s complaints about modern TV journalism is that it places no premium on good writing. “So much of television reporting these days,” he says, “is what I call behind-me television’ that is, the anchor switches to a reporter who’s on the scene and the reporter says, Dan, in that building behind me . . .’ or Dan, the flames behind me. . . .,’ and that’s the start of it. Then he interviews three or four people who’ve wandered by or maybe some spokesman from the police department, and then he throws it back to the anchor.” This Just In has a wealth of gossipy, good-humored tales about such eminent talking heads as Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr and Roger Mudd. Schorr, now a commentator for National Public Radio, was such a relentless news hound that Mudd once dreamed he boarded a plane and found Schorr sitting in every seat. Of Cronkite, Schieffer says, “Of course, Walter is my hero. But he could just drive you nuts calling you up at 6:15 and asking you how much oil there was in the world. I mean, who the hell knows? My favorite was not a question asked of me but to Hugh Heckman, who worked on the evening news. One day [Cronkite] turned to him and said, Hugh, how long is Greenland?'” It troubles Schieffer that government officials in all branches and at all levels have learned how to divert and manipulate the press. “Government is so much more sophisticated in its press relations than it was 40 or even 20 years ago. Everybody has learned how you have talking points,’ how you try to have a couple of things you want to say. Everybody has a public relations strategy. This is all relatively new.” None of these roadblocks, however, appear to have blunted Schieffer’s journalistic enthusiasm. He still talks with the eagerness of a cub reporter and notes at one point that it was he who broke the news that Lott would be stepping down as majority leader. “If there’s a lesson in this book for young journalists,” he tells BookPage, “it’s that one reason you might want to be a reporter is that it’s so much fun.”

Famous for her personal indulgences, as well as her vanity, France’s controversial queen gets a break in Fraser’s best-selling biography. Clearing up some misconceptions about a woman who was, in reality, surprisingly compassionate, Fraser paints a compelling portrait of an unwilling monarch trapped in a loveless marriage and ill-prepared to handle matters of state. Married at the age of 14 to Louis XVI an act of diplomacy between Austria and France rather than a matter of the heart Marie Antoinette entered into a life at court marked by scandal, tragedy and violence, as political upheaval swept through France. With unforgettable incidents, some of which have become the stuff of myth, this is the surprising story of a queen capable of pity and remorse, whose heart went out to her suffering subjects. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.anchorbooks.com.

Miles Davis was a modern jazz master and in some ways the Picasso of his musical milieu a difficult, cantankerous, peculiar, tortured man who was, of course, a genius. Although he grew up comfortably in Southern Illinois as the son of a prominent dentist, he had an angry, rebellious black man’s attitude. Born in 1926, he showed his musical talent early on, trekking to New York City to study at Juilliard, where he proved to be a good student, but where he also made important contacts in the world of contemporary jazz. Unfortunately, he also made connections with drug dealers, an affiliation that led to Davis’ many struggles through the years with heroin and cocaine abuse.

In So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Yale University Professor John Szwed presents a rich portrait of the trumpeter’s brilliance while examining his equally stellar contemporaries Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Max Roach and Art Blakey.

While he went on to become a contributor to the historical 1940s bebop movement, it was in the 1950s and ’60s that Davis carved out his singular niche as legendary trumpet player, innovative composer, free-thinking bandleader and titular spokesperson for progressive jazz. Davis never ceased to change and grow in his art, and with the exception of a self-imposed hiatus in the late 1970s continued to perform and make records, though by the time he passed away in 1991, he was revered more as an inscrutable icon than as an acclaimed innovator. So What combines an in-depth look at the inner workings of the jazz industry with a remarkable profile of Davis and his dark personality. He cultivated a Darth Vader-ish myth, was extraordinarily self-centered and seemingly ambivalent toward his family. But, as Szwed shows, the trumpeter probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. Martin Brady is a freelance writer in Nashville.

Let’s face it: nothing spoils the holiday season quite like shopping can. Getting the goods requires a tactical plan that would make MacArthur proud. Luckily, the intrepid editors of BookPage have run reconnaissance for readers, scouting out the hottest titles for the holidays. Armed with these great gift ideas the best in music, photography and dance you can cut those shopping skirmishes short and keep your inner Scrooge at bay.

Was ever a man more comely to look upon than Mikhail Baryshnikov? This specimen of physical perfection first entranced the world in 1974 with his thrilling defection from the Soviet Union while on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Canada. Impish, tousled and utterly endearing, he quickly became the darling of the dance world, working with the West’s top choreographers and companies. Baryshnikov in Black and White (Bloomsbury, $60, 321 pages, ISBN 1582341869), a stunning collection of 175 performance and rehearsal photographs, follows the course of the star’s career outside the Soviet block, spanning nearly three decades and showcasing the dancer’s many abilities and moods from mischievous boy, to seductive satyr, to tortured madman.

Cataloguing Misha’s greatest moments on the stage and in the theatre, the book features photos from ballet classics like The Nutcracker, as well as shots of modern works by Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Mark Morris. The dancer’s pure lines and remarkable versatility are dramatically documented here, as are his partnerships with primas like Natalia Makarova. The hooded eyes, the mighty thighs, the aura of melancholy all are unmistakably Misha. With an introduction by ballet critic Joan Acocella, this volume is a wonderful tribute to the greatest male dancer of our time.

Satisfaction for Stones fans Raunchy, rowdy and simmering with sexuality, The Rolling Stones stumbled onto the London pop scene in 1962, beginning a tumultuous 40-year career marked early on by the inimitable swagger of Mick Jagger, the cheekiness of Keith Richards, the dignified reserve of Charlie Watts and for a time the beatific beauty of Brian Jones. Also along for one of the wildest rides in rock n’ roll history was Stones bassist Bill Wyman, a bluesman turned author and documentarian, whose terrific new book Rolling with the Stones combines more than 2,000 photographs with classic visuals and band artifacts, as well as behind-the-scenes stories about Mick and the boys. This mod, mad volume traces the arc of the group’s career, capturing the trippy ’60s and excessive ’70s, dishing on chick sidekicks Marianne Faithfull and Bianca Jagger, and providing background info on classic blues-inflected albums like Sticky Fingers. Wyman also includes band bios, covering temporary Stone Mick Taylor along with Ron Wood, as well as input from the band about their musical influences, public and private lives, and the longevity of their legend. The ultimate Stones scrapbook, this vivid volume is the perfect gift for fans of the band Bill Graham once called "the biggest draw in the history of mankind." Wounds of war It was a war from which we’ve never recovered, fought in an era when pop culture collided with politics. Vietnam was nearly the unmaking of our nation, and now a stirring new volume collects classic images of the conflict snapped by Larry Burrows, one of the century’s greatest photojournalists. With 150 color and black-and-white photographs, Larry Burrows Vietnam (Knopf, $50, 243 pages, ISBN 037541102X) delivers the drama of combat with remarkable sensitivity and detail. The intrepid Englishman who strapped himself to the open door of a plane in order to shoot some of the pictures featured in the book covered the conflict from 1962 until his death in 1971, when the helicopter he flew in was shot down near the Vietnam-Laos border. Published in Life magazine (for which Burrows went to work at the age of 16), each of the volume’s 11 pictorial essays distills the nightmare reality of battle: wounded children, trussed prisoners, Asian women wracked by grief, soldiers stealing sleep amidst the litter of American luxuries chocolate and matches, cigarettes and soap, the bright wrappers emphatic on green grass. With an introduction by David Halberstam, Larry Burrows Vietnam is a profoundly moving visual reminiscence of war.