Painstaking scholarship produced Georgiana, Amanda Foreman’s biography of an 18th-century duchess, but the book transcends the academic, depicting a complex woman thoroughly and with style. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. The story of her life provides a fitting prologue to that of her famous descendant, but more importantly stands on its own as a portrait of a politically and socially active woman who, as Foreman writes, possessed a single-minded determination to be the heroine of her own story.

Georgiana was a duchess and a mother, author and trendsetter, political authority and leader. She was involved in contemporary politics at their highest levels, and Foreman writes of her contributions that It was these innovations her own cult of celebrity and her democratic approach which differentiated Georgiana then and later as a female pioneer in electoral politics. In her personal life, Georgiana dealt with difficult situations including gambling debts, trouble bearing children, gossip, an unfaithful husband, and the gnarled male-female relationships of her class and station. The accounts of her struggles simultaneously demonstrate the paradoxical depths of both dependence and independence attained by the 18th-century noblewoman.

The immediacy of Foreman’s book comes from her liberal use of Georgiana’s own words and those of her friends and family. Since the figures often speak for themselves, the language and concerns of the period stand out. Georgiana writes her dear friend Bess a poem letter which concludes, "Thy watchful affection I wait,/And hang with Delight on Thy voice;/And Dependance is softened by fate,/Since Dependance on Thee is my choice."  The elegant form and deep feeling this poem evinces illustrate Georgiana’s affection for her friend and the importance of even quotidian writing in her world.

These moments of authentic expression elevate Georgiana to more than a historical account. Instead, it is a thoroughly contextualized portrait of a fascinating woman. As Foreman writes of her own interest in her subject, I was struck by her voice, it was so strong, so clear, honest, and open, that she made everything I subsequently read seem dull by comparison.

Eliza R. L. McGraw teaches English at Vanderbilt University.

NYPD: The Inside Story of New York’s Legendary Police Department Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of civilization is man’s delegation of authority to enforce laws, in effect to say, “We make the rules and you make sure we obey them.” As James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto make abundantly clear in NYPD: The Inside Story of New York’s Legendary Police Department, this bargain is a double-edged sword; not only are we expected to live by our rules, so are those who enforce them and that doesn’t always happen.

The world’s greatest city is a natural place to study the workings of a police department. All city police department’s have their share of both scandal and sainthood, but few have the ethnic mix, history, and sheer size of New York City. It seems the NYPD is always in the news, from a controversial death to a staggering bust, and as Lardner and Reppetto show us, it’s always been that way.

NYPD makes clear that the criminals of the 18th and 19th centuries were not like those of today, and neither was the city; living conditions in the poorer sections of New York make today’s ghettos seem like paradise. Back then, the force of moral suasion was a bigger factor than it is today. A confession for murder could be extracted by appealing to God and mother despite the near certitude of execution.

Lardner and Reppetto have written a history, of course, but it is a biography, too. The NYPD is a reflection of the people who run it, and the cast of characters is long and colorful, from the formidable high constable Jacob Hays, friend of Aaron Burr, who enforced the law in the early 1800s attired in a black suit and top hat, to the embittered Frank Serpico, an undercover cop in the 1970s who tried to blow the whistle on police graft, but instead ended up in self-imposed exile in Europe.

Corruption is a constant theme in NYPD, as the authors detail a seemingly endless cycle of graft, public awareness, investigations, public apathy, and graft again. Yet throughout, police work gets done.

Realize too, that the majority of this story is pre-Miranda, and if the methods used to bust the bad guys seem extreme, they were everyday practice, both in New York and elsewhere.

Well researched and full of detail, NYPD is a fascinating book, yet it leaves untold the thousands of stories about officers who just did their jobs and didn’t get their name in the paper or in this book.

Jim Webb writes from Nashville.

A Modern Library chronicles the past The title of this review sounds like a manifesto for a good library. For that reason, it is apt in several ways, because it also announces a noble publishing venture: Modern Library, the estimable publisher of everyone from Proust to Tolstoy, has just launched a new series, Modern Library Chronicles.

The goal is to chronicle the eras and themes of past centuries the ideas and changes that laid the groundwork for our own world in less than 200 pages per outing. And no, these are not McBooks. Think of them as long essays, labors of love by people who know their subjects and care about language and style.

Like the excellent and popular Penguin Lives series of short biographies, the Chronicles emphasize accessible brevity and good writing.

The first two volumes, just released, hint at the series’ projected breadth by addressing an era and a religion. Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times and A History of the Jews and several other volumes, has written an elegant little book to sit beside his elegant big books The Renaissance: A Short History ($19.95, ISBN 067964086X). Karen Armstrong, who has written everything from an account of her years as a nun to the recent bestseller The Battle for God, explores the history of one of the most influential beliefs in history, Islam: A Short History ($19.95, ISBN 0679640401). Two other volumes coming in November are Mark Mazower on the Balkans and Michael Sturmer on the German Empire.

These new books aren’t written by academic borer beetles who haven’t looked up from their tunnels since they got tenure. They’re written by writers writers whose mastery of their topic never overshadows their sense of language and style. The result, so far, is extremely satisfying and, looking at the list of upcoming authors, it is safe to assume that the list will quickly develop a good momentum. Paul Johnson’s Renaissance may be dwarfed by its predecessors’ bulk, but it can hold up its head for quality. Throughout, it is intelligent, straightforward, and clear-headed. His very first sentences pull you in with their common-sense simplicity, but they also seem to state the very theme of the Modern Library series: “The past is infinitely complicated, composed as it is of events, big and small, beyond computation. To make sense of it, the historian must select and simplify and shape. One way he shapes the past is to divide it into periods. Each period is made more memorable and easy to grasp if it can be labeled by a word that epitomizes its spirit. That is how such terms as Ôthe Renaissance’ came into being.” Johnson moves briskly along through the highly competitive world of Florentine artists and the roles of such art-supporting popes as Leo X. He demonstrates how the Renaissance art historian Vasari began shaping the immediate past by categorizing it with a particular artist embodying what he saw as the crucial themes of the period a practice than continues today, of course. Johnson’s book becomes a fine little survey course of the arts. The Renaissance was a period of cultural revitalization growing from a rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Johnson points out something we tend to forget: “Cultural rebirths, major and minor, are a common occurrence in history. Most generations, of all human societies, have a propensity to look back on golden ages and seek to restore them.” Karen Armstrong is equally adept at weaving together the diverse strands of her topic, even though her theme is a belief system (and its consequent actions) that cover hundreds of years and, by now, the entire world. She smoothly unifies such differing elements of Islam as the struggle for power among the immediate successors to the Prophet, the unifying of spirituality and theology in Islamic discourse, and the rise of modern fundamentalist terrorism. For example, she clearly explains why Western notions of democracy must be hybridized before they can take root in Eastern soil: “The reformers who wanted to graft modernity onto an Islamic substructure pointed out that in itself the ideal of democracy was not inimical to Islam. . . . Part of the difficulty lay in the way that the West formulated democracy as Ôgovernment of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ In Islam, it is God and not the people who gives a government legitimacy.” Such an elevation of humanity could seem like idolatry.

If these first two books are any indication, the rest of the Modern Library Chronicles will be enlightening, digestible, and entertaining.

Why does the Civil War still enthrall Americans and generate such keen interest? Why is it that people just won’t let it go, insisting on reenacting battles and clinging to any bit of personal history that connects them with the war? Perhaps because oral history is such an important part of American culture, and this terrible war was so close to home. A new book gives voice to America’s past in a unique way.

The Civil War: Unstilled Voices, by Chuck Lawliss, is a special collection of replicas of letters, memoirs, and newspaper articles that describes the war in different voices, from different perspectives. The war’s varied participants tell their stories the soldiers, spies, nurses, writers, and prisoners, to name a few, both famous and unknown. These items can be removed from their envelopes as if readers have discovered them after many years. What an ingenious way to encourage interest in American history!

For your heroine Recently, much attention has been paid to the mythical heroes of the ancient world. Their representations have been primarily masculine, and if you read the ancient literature, it’s easy to see why. The timeless tales of heroes were created by men for the enjoyment of men. Women, for the most part, played minor roles.

With Women of Mythology by Kay Retzlaff, we see, at last, ancient myth from a feminine perspective women as doers. From the no-nonsense ferocity of the Amazon queen, Myrine, who captured Atlantis, to the exploits of Chinese General Mulan, women arise from myth in much the same way as their male counterparts.

Illustrated with exquisite full-color reproductions of famous depictions of art, Women of Mythology takes readers, young and old alike, on an inspiring journey of women as seen through the eye of the ages.