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.

Stephen Ambrose: a guide for appreciating our history Stephen E. Ambrose’s histories are as vivid as screenplays. One moment you’re overlooking the distant battlefield, the next you’re huddled head-to-head with the generals in the command tent. That’s how it is with Ambrose’s latest DeMillean epic, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869. By every measure from the speed at which it was done to the exquisite coordination of effort it required the railroad was a stunning achievement.

First came the dreamers and surveyors, as Ambrose recounts, then the capitalists and their political allies, and finally the hordes of laborers essential to giving substance to the dream.

Even as the Confederate army strove to split the nation apart, south from north, equally determined forces converged to bind it together, east to west by the railroad. The Central Pacific inched eastward over the mountains from Sacramento, California, while the Union Pacific crawled west across the plains and deserts from Omaha, Nebraska. Along the way, the builders had to contend with gargantuan costs and shaky financing, impassible mountains, worker shortages, devastating weather, fragile supply lines, hostile Indians, and the incessant economic pressure to lay track faster. To fathom the enormity of the undertaking, Ambrose traveled much of the railroad’s original route, inspecting both the harsh terrain and the engineering marvels that tamed it. He populates his account with figures who, if not larger than life, are made more fully alive by their great ambition and determination. Chief among these are the Central Pacific’s “Big Four” Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins and the Union Pacific’s wily Thomas “Doc” Durant and his point man, General Grenville Dodge. For years, Ambrose had viewed these men as ruthless opportunists.

“I thought of them as robber barons,” says the eminent historian, speaking by phone from his home in Helena, Montana. “I thought they made ungodly profits and then used them in nefarious ways, especially Huntington and Stanford. But I had been taught by men who did their graduate work in the ’30s, and they just hated big business.” While conceding that the builders did reap huge fortunes, Ambrose now concludes they deserved to. “These guys went deeply in debt,” he explains. “They didn’t really risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, but they damn near did.” Ambrose is equally admiring of the laborers who would accomplish the seemingly impossible one day and better it the next. Chinese immigrant workers, he points out, were absolutely vital to the Central Pacific. They were called in, albeit reluctantly, after American workers kept leaving the job to search for riches in the gold and silver mines of California and Nevada. When James Strobridge, Central Pacific’s head of construction, balked at hiring the Chinese, asserting that they were too small to do such physically demanding work, Crocker reminded him that they had been strong enough to build the Great Wall of China. Before long, the company was sending recruiters to China.

Ambrose admits that most historians, like his old professors, write from a political agenda. But does he? “I used to,” he says. “It’s a different world we’re living in now. I mean, I used to care terribly about the Vietnam War. But I don’t have a political agenda anymore, other than I want young people in America, now and in the future, to understand that freedom doesn’t come free, that the blessings they’ve got by being Americans were paid for. And I want them to know who paid and how and what they did.” Warming to this subject, Ambrose continues, “For a quick example: I want them to know more about Thomas Jefferson than [his relationship with] Sally Hemmings. I want them to know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, and I want everyone else be they Muslim, Buddhist, Rainbow People, Protestant, Catholic, or whatever to know that their right to believe what they want to believe and worship as they choose to worship comes from Thomas Jefferson. I want them to know if they live in Wisconsin or Iowa or any of the other Louisiana Purchase states or any of the other states west of the Allegheny Mountains, the reason they get to vote for senators and congressmen and that their states are co-equal with the original 13 is because of the Northwest Ordinance. I want them to know that, and I want them to appreciate that.” A university history teacher until his retirement in 1995, Ambrose concedes that his views of history are now out of fashion on campus. “It’s not the way most academic historians teach history,” he says. “Most of them teach that Jefferson had a slave mistress and that George Washington was a slaveholder. I want them to know that George Washington led us in war and in peace. In war, he knew if he was captured, they were going to send him to London, they were going to put him on trial, they were going to find him guilty of treason and then they were going to draw and quarter him. I make sure those kids know what drawing and quartering means. Obviously, Washington’s being a slaveholder is an important part of his life and of history. But there’s a lot more.” For years, Ambrose wrote histories and biographies which were well received but which sold poorly. “I badly needed my income [from teaching],” he says. “I wrote books that got very nice reviews, but it used to be I’d be lucky if they sold 20,000 copies. I’d get a royalty check, and I could take the wife out to dinner or maybe pay for a summer off and do some research. But nothing to make me a rich man. And then Undaunted Courage is the one that just burst.” Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West was published in 1996. “At first, my editor, Alice Mayhew, didn’t want me to do the book,” Ambrose recalls. “She said, ÔNobody wants to read about dead white males.’ I said, ÔI do, Alice.’ . . . Now the book’s at two million hardback and two million paperback. So I became a rich man. But it happened to me late in life, or relatively late. I was 58 or 59 years old, and all of a sudden I had a lot of money.” He credits Mayhew for suggesting he write his current book. Indeed, he dedicates it to her. “This is the second time Alice has done this to me,” he says, with a good-natured laugh. “The first time, it cost me a decade of my life.” It was Mayhew, he explains, who talked him into doing what became a two-volume biography of Richard Nixon.

Good fortune has not appreciably altered the way Ambrose researches and writes. “I’m a Luddite, I’m afraid. I came to the computer fairly late in my career. I like to say now because it’s true that the ability to move paragraphs around and spell-check is so good that if I’d had the computer earlier, I’d have five more books. . . . My son, who now works with me, uses the computer for research. But I have no idea how to do it. I can’t even do e-mail.” (In spite of Ambrose’s own technophobia, his son has erected a fancy and useful website on his dad’s behalf at www.stephenambrose.com.) Next up for Ambrose is a history of the 15th Air Force and their B-24 Liberator bombers. “It came about because George McGovern asked me to write about his wartime career,” Ambrose says. “That was awfully tempting because here was the world’s most famous anti-bombing advocate who was a bomber pilot. Thirty-five missions. The Distinguished Flying Cross. That part of it fascinated me.” As for the Transcontinental Railroad, Ambrose says, our fascination focuses on the mammoth and awe-inspiring construction project, but it is best appreciated at a higher level: “It tied us together,” he asserts, “east and west.” Edward Morris writes on music, politics, and fiction from Nashville.

The legacy of the ancient Greeks is so overwhelming in so many areas democracy, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics, mythology, drama, art, the Olympic games it is easy to idealize them. As Charles Freeman writes, A popular image of Athens has survived in which the marble is always shining, the streets are clean, and there is a lot of time for passionate philosophical discussions about art, theater, and the meaning of life. But Freeman is keenly aware of the human reality behind the reputation and the paradoxes that accompanied the towering accomplishments. His magnificent The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World offers the general reader an excellent introduction to the subject. The author uses the best of recent scholarship and excerpts from the works of many classic sources such as Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, and Sappho, in a fast-paced narrative that covers almost 2,000 years of cultural, diplomatic, and military history.

Greek society had a rich spiritual tradition that involved a complex mythology. For example, It was typical for a new city to find a protecting god, Athena at Athens, Apollo in Corinth, for instance, and sacred areas, both inside and outside of the city were set aside for temples . . . in which to worship them. After her victory in the Persian wars, for 75 years Athens became the most important force in the Greek world. Democracy was sustained by empire; drama was an essential part of democratic participation, philosophy fostered by the experience of intense debate within a city setting. The city’s pride was enhanced by the magnificent building program on the Acropolis. But Freeman notes: Athens’ democracy depended on slavery and the fruits of empire. Democratic government did not necessarily mean benign government. The Athenian assembly could order the massacre of the entire male population of another Greek island and the enslavement of its women and children. Women were segregated and marginalized in almost every area.

Freeman explains that until recently we knew virtually nothing about the Greeks as farmers. But Ninety percent of Greeks made their living on the land and it was their surpluses which underpinned city life. He discusses the close relationship between town and country. There is no sense of an urban elite who use the countryside primarily as a leisure source and look down on the more ignorant country dweller. Such an idea comes only in Hellenistic times when poems about the countryside are written by urban poets who clearly see the countryside as something to enjoy or use as a backdrop to tales of love and seduction in shady groves. There is a fascinating discussion of the intense interest in the place of the hero that began in the eighth century. Who was the hero? How limited were his powers? Alongside heroic behavior comes the idealization of the heroic male body. The search for perfection in the human form was to prove one of the driving forces of Greek art. Homer’s epics are not concerned only with glorifying the hero. The greatness of the Iliad and Odyssey as literature lies arguably in the way they illustrate the difficulties inherent in the heroic role.

The greatest glory for the hero comes from activities which court death and yet death brings nothing but a shadowy existence in the underworld. Here is the ultimate and inexplicable human tragedy. This rich overview points out the flaw of the Greek political system was that it never developed a theory of human rights. Rights and duties were assigned not on a universal basis but on the grounds of status and sex. The author also notes that a major point to remember is the resilience of the Greek culture. As he surveys the Greeks from 1550 B.

C. to A.

D. 600, from Mycenae to the Byzantine Empire, their influence spreads to other lands, other cultures.

Recent accounts of human suffering in Kosovo serve as a sufficient primer for a book like Crimes of War. For this is a book that examines human atrocities and tries to deepen the reader’s understanding by providing historical perspective. Crimes of War is a collection of articles written by journalists, legal scholars, and military law experts. The book is edited by two such experts: Roy Gutman, a Newsday reporter and author who won the Pulitzer Prize for international journalism; and David Rieff, a magazine writer and author of a book on the Bosnian conflict.

The book is timely, not only because of events in Yugoslavia, but also because it arrives on the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, which established principles for ethical conduct in war. It is sad and sobering, for it chronicles the many crimes against humanity in the 20th century.

Three types of articles are featured: vivid descriptions of war crimes in places such as Bosnia, Chechnya, Liberia, and Rwanda; explanations of international law on issues like collateral damage and prisoners of war; and descriptions of key terms, such as limited war and victims’ rights. The topics are arranged in alphabetical order and cross-referenced to related subjects.

Highlights include broadcaster Christiane Amanpour’s article on paramilitaries in Bosnia, the horrors of civil war in Sri Lanka by John Burns of the New York Times, and mass genocide in Cambodia by Sydney H. Schanberg, whose book on the subject led to the movie The Killing Fields. Just as engaging, and perhaps more gut-wrenching, are the photographs that illustrate each article. The art, by such well-known photographers as Robert Capa and Annie Leibovitz, tells as much about the topics as does the writing. Crimes of War may be too much an instructional text for the casual reader, and too intense a subject for bedtime reading. And the book could be updated to include the latest machinations in Yugoslavia. (Unfortunately, mankind seems eager to write new chapters about war crimes at a faster rate than any book can keep pace.) But for the reader who wants to better understand the historical factors fomenting the violence we witness in the world today, it is an important work.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor and writer in Chicago.