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.

Chronicling the gruesome toll of the fighting at Cold Harbor Ulysses S. Grant’s offensive against Robert E. Lee’s entrenched Army of Northern Virginia at Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864, summons powerful images. Northern assaults that day stand alongside Ambrose E. Burnside’s attacks at Fredericksburg and John Bell Hood’s at Franklin as examples of seemingly pointless slaughter of brave but doomed soldiers. Even casual students of the Civil War know that Grant admitted as much in his memoirs when he confessed that he “always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made.” Despite the well-known drama and gruesome butcher’s bill on June 3, historians have devoted relatively little attention to Cold Harbor. It served as the last major battle of the Overland campaign, greatly influenced morale behind the lines in the North, and set the stage for Grant’s brilliant crossing of the James River- all attributes that invite scrutiny. But historians have focused on the opening rather than the closing battles of the Overland campaign, writing several detailed studies of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Perhaps the apparent simplicity of the action at Cold Harbor on June 3, with unimaginative and costly frontal attacks that ended in predictable failure, has discouraged potential investigators. Ernest B. Furgurson’s Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 offers the first full-scale treatment of the subject. Furgurson brings to his task skills that produced successful earlier books on the Chancellorsville campaign and Richmond’s wartime experience -careful research in an array of published sources and unpublished manuscripts, an engaging and sometimes eloquent writing style, awareness of the many ties between the battlefield and the home front, and a deft touch with brief biographical sketches.

The book emphasizes that the celebrated fighting on June 3 represented just one element of a much larger set of maneuvers and clashes near Cold Harbor between May 28 and June 11 that produced more than 15,000 Union and between 3,000 and 5,000 Confederate casualties. A pair of chapters set the stage with an overview of events from the battle of the Wilderness on May 5-6 through action along the North Anna River three weeks later. Subsequent chapters highlight the cavalry engagements at Haw’s Shop on May 28 and at Matadequin Creek on May 30, the armies’ jockeying for position and skirmishing along Totopotomoy Creek on May 28-31, fighting at Bethesda Church on May 30, and aggressive Confederate movements and Union responses at Cold Harbor on June 1-2. Furgurson allocates less than 10 percent of his narrative to the combat on June 3, moving on to a consideration of the battle’s aftermath, its impact on northern politics and Union and Confederate civilian morale, and the reshuffling of units that preceded Grant’s march to the James River. Furgurson introduces a good deal of analysis into his chronological narrative. Much of it centers on Grant, George G. Meade, and the Union high command. He argues that Grant’s decision to accompany the Army of the Potomac while leaving Meade as its titular head fueled tensions and prevented efficient application of superior northern manpower and resources. “Grant did not know the Army of the Potomac intimately enough to give detailed orders as if he were the only general in charge,” observes Furgurson, while “Meade did not feel deep personal responsibility for managing operations that Grant had broadly planned.” Dangerous misconceptions about both the rebel army and his own force contributed to Grant’s decision to launch the attacks on June 3. He believed the Confederates suffered from low morale after being hammered at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania but thought Union soldiers retained high spirits despite heavy casualties in attacks against entrenchments during the first three weeks of May. On June 3, he hoped his men would win a decisive success against a weakened foe. But “Grant badly misunderstood the enemy, from Robert E. Lee down to the leanest Alabama rifleman,” argues Furgurson. “He also misunderstood his own army, from George G. Meade down to the weariest Massachusetts private. That helps explain why the assault failed so miserably.” Furgurson further criticizes Grant for failing to admit defeat after June 3. The Federal commander allowed wounded Federals to lie helpless between the lines rather than raise the white flag in order to have them removed. Sending a formal request to Lee under a white flag of truce, Furgurson notes, for Grant would have “meant conceding what every soldier in both armies could see but had not yet been absorbed in Washington and beyond: that he had been decisively beaten in the climactic battle of the bloody spring offensive, his first campaign as general-in-chief.” Although indicating that Lee bore part of the blame for unnecessary delay in getting relief to the wounded Federals, Furgurson judges Grant much more harshly.

Grant insisted that Cold Harbor gave Confederates only a momentary lift and had no long-term negative effect on Union soldiers. Furgurson notes persuasively that nearly the reverse was true. The bungled Union attacks against Petersburg in mid-June underscored the pernicious influence of a “Cold Harbor syndrome” that rendered northern troops less effective than in previous battles. Cold Harbor also sent tremors through the North, contributing to a period of growing doubt about the outcome of the War. As for Grant, he admitted failure in his effort to defeat Lee’s army north of Richmond but blamed that failure “not on his own strategy, but on the Confederates’ unwillingness to abandon their trenches and fight on his terms.” Although generally well written and soundly argued, Furgurson’s narrative sometimes claims too much or relies on questionable evidence. For example, Furgurson asserts that Cold Harbor marked a tactical “turning point of the Civil War,” after which “the war of maneuver became a war of siege; stand-up attack and defense gave way to digging and trench warfare.” Yet as the opening section of Not War But Murder makes clear, digging and trench warfare had become standard features of the confrontation between Grant and Lee before Cold Harbor. Earlier campaigns of maneuver also had given way to sieges at Vicksburg and elsewhere. Similarly, Furgurson’s statement that no other major battle of the War was “so shamefully one-sided as that in the first week of June 1864, at the country crossroads of Cold Harbor, Virginia” certainly would provoke lively disagreement.

In terms of evidence, Furgurson falls into the trap of using postwar testimony to describe wartime events and attitudes. He suggests that on the evening of June 2 “every man in both armies knew the grand assault was next,” supporting this highly questionable assertion with an 1880s quotation from Confederate general Evander M. Law. Law claimed in retrospect, with the advantage of knowing what had transpired on June 3, that he was “as well satisfied that [the attack] would come at dawn the next morning as if I had seen General Meade’s order directing it.” Furgurson also accepts Joshua L. Chamberlain’s postwar avowal that for a time after Cold Harbor the Union army ceased to compile routine morning reports of unit strengths because “the country would not stand it, if they knew” about the heavy casualties. Elsewhere, Furgurson employs dramatic but questionable quotations, most notably the purported Union diary entry that read: “June 3, Cold Harbor. I was killed.” These weaknesses do little to diminish Furgurson’s accomplishment in writing a balanced, compelling study of an important part of the Overland campaign. After more than a century and a third, Cold Harbor finally has emerged from the shadows of Civil War literature.

Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. His books include The Confederate War (1997) and Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (1998).

Why did Germany defeat France so easily in 1940? Conventional thinking has focused on three reasons. The first of these reasons that Germany had superior troop strength and more sophisticated weaponry has been shown to be false. The second, that the French troops were badly led, has also been discredited. Third, the charge that there was a “moral laxness” among the French soldiers does not hold up either. During the six weeks of fighting, France lost approximately 124,000 men with another 200,000 wounded, and reports indicate that most French units displayed gallantry.

What did or did not happen? Harvard historian Ernest May surveys a broad range of factors on both sides that led to the outcome in his absorbing diplomatic, political, and military history Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France. The author emphasizes the high level of confidence that prevailed in France before the German invasion in May and continued in certain places even after the Germans were on French soil. The arrogance of the French leaders they knew they had superiority in crucial areas and that Germany was aware of it was a crucial factor in their defeat. A second reason, to minimize the loss of life, was certainly understandable after such great losses in World War I. The Maginot Line was, the author says, “indicative neither of despair about defeating Germany nor of thought mired in the past. It was instead evidence of faith that technology could substitute for manpower.” The third factor he focuses on is the cumbersomeness of French, as well as British and Belgian, military bureaucracies. In a nutshell, “Germany’s strange victory occurred because the French and British failed to take advantage of their superiority.” May explores the interplay of domestic politics and foreign policy decisions over the years leading up to the German invasion. By the mid-1920s Hitler had become a masterful demagogue and laid out some of his basic beliefs in Mein Kampf. In 1937, he talked to his army generals and foreign minister about the need to use force to expand the nation to gain new resources and territory. May notes that Hitler did not trust official memoranda or other documents from diplomats. Instead he “assiduously read German translations of foreign newspapers and magazines . . . Hitler insisted on extracts, no summaries. He particularly demanded material on foreign leaders.” These sources helped Hitler predict how certain personalities would react to specific challenges. The author introduces the primary political figures in France, in particular Edouard Daladier, who was prime minister of France from April 1938 until the spring of 1940. Perhaps as important, he served as war minister and defense minister when he was named prime minister and continued in those positions as well. Although he insisted on significantly increasing France’s ground and air forces throughout the mid-’30s his grim experiences in the Great War made him very reluctant to send troops into battle.

May probes the importance of military intelligence for both the Allies and Germany. Though the Allies couldn’t possibly have predicted all that Germany planned to do, there were signals that should have alerted them to the danger. The author says their failure to recognize the extent of the German threat is attributable largely to “characteristics of their systems of collecting and analyzing intelligence and to their lack of system in relating this intelligence to their own decision-making.” May notes that most writings about the 1940 surprise have missed this point “in large part because their authors have been taken in by veterans of the French intelligence services who claimed to have perceived what the Germans were going to do, sounded loud warnings, and been ignored by dull-witted generals and politicians. But little or no evidence dating from the period itself supports this claim.” The author has written the only account that deals in depth with both Germany and France. Also, it is the only one that focuses on intelligence analysis as a key element. May sees contemporary relevance for what happened then. “The Western democracies today,” he notes, “exhibit many of the same characteristics that France and Britain did in 1938-40 arrogance, a strong disinclination to risk life in battle, heavy reliance on technology as a substitute, and governmental procedures poorly designed for anticipating or coping with ingenious challenges from the comparatively weak.” This dramatic story could have turned out differently. May enlightens and stimulates our thinking about decision making in times of crisis.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

What’s black and white and red all over? America 1950 What often comes back to me from the early 1950s is the word communist. I vividly recall, growing up on the gritty sidewalks of the north side of Binghamton, New York, one of my playmates becoming angry when his mother wouldn’t give him money so he could join me in going to the movies. He ranted and stormed and raved and, at the height of his frustration, he reached for the most wounding insult he could think of. You . . . you . . . COMMUNIST! he spat at her, and stormed out the door.

I do not know now if we ever got to the movies, or if my friend was punished for his audacious outburst. I do know that neither he nor I nor his mother could tell a communist from a coloratura, but we all knew communist was not a nice thing to be called.

Communism is one of two chief topics of Lisle A. Rose’s The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950. Rose is not concerned with the social and cultural aspects of an age in which eight- and nine-year-old boys could walk unescorted to and from the movies in perfect safety. His canvas is national and global in extent and portrays an impulsive, often absurd obsession with communism so pervasive that it provided a ready epithet for a witless boy in upstate New York.

1950 is critical, Rose says, because it is when our postwar mood turned sour and uncertain. In 1949, we still exuded a breezy, can-do confidence. One year later, he writes, the United States had become another country. His subtitle could as accurately be America Leading up to 1950, because he roams back in time at some length to explain how the United States got to this pass. Basically, Rose finds a crisis in the old order, the Main Street-Wall Street nexus of Republicans that had ruled the country for decades under the comfortable myth of the moral superiority of commerce.

An entire way of life seemed to be slipping away from Main Street, Rose writes, and the fact that he seems to argue from an old-fashioned liberal point of view in no way diminishes the force of his argument. Anti-communism held an appeal for these foes of the liberal establishment who saw what they believed to be a golden age disappearing.

The apex of anti-communism was, of course, McCarthyism, which to Rose was not merely a partisan attack on the Democratic administration but the first and most piercing middle American protest against all the real and apparent soullessness and incompetence of a large, distant, often unresponsive and, above all, liberal government. As a political and diplomatic history, The Cold War Comes to Main Street is briskly told and formidably documented, though the author is harder on Whittaker Chambers than the facts warrant. He makes him out to be a kind of up-market McCarthy, which is certainly not true, as Sam Tanenhaus showed in his recent biography of Chambers.

Rose’s other chief topic is a related one: the Korean War, which was the Cold War against communism grown hot. In four chapters, he captures its salient political and combat elements. There are, however, a couple of highly disputable assertions.

For instance, he says of the North Korean People’s Army invasion of the south in June 1950, the criminal slowness of the NKPA in advancing into South Korea would cost it the war. For one thing, many Korea historians would disagree with this assessment. For another, why criminal ? Would he prefer that the invaders had succeeded? On the other hand, he is quite right to condemn MacArthur’s vainglorious hot pursuit of the North Koreans right up to the Yalu River. If anything was criminal, it was that. It led to, among other things, the bitter campaign of November-December 1950 when U.

N. forces were overwhelmed by the Chinese and the cold. Through mining newspapers and other contemporary periodicals, Rose gives us a sense of how awful the campaign was for the combatants.

Finally, one of the malicious pleasures of reading a history such as this lies in discovering how wrong newspaper and other pundits of the day got things. For example, in 1950 Hans J. Morgenthau, a leading political scientist, intoned about the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, In comparison with it, all the great issues of the postwar period fade into insignificance. Well, actually, no. Remember that the next time Rush or Maureen tells you something of national or global importance.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

Soldiers’ stories In the years since the Second World War, historians have described and analyzed many of its battles, campaigns, and theaters. The Greatest War: Americans in Combat 1941-1945 offers a graphic timeline of the war from the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the bombing of Nagasaki 45 months later. Historian Gerald Astor draws on the experiences and observations of more than 1,000 Americans who fought in the Pacific, Asia, and Europe in trenches, bombers, and landing craft. It is the story of many small and large unit actions some heroic victories, others sorry defeats. For the millions of Americans who fought overseas in World War II, the events recounted here defined the rest of their lives. The Greatest War is oral history at its very best and a reminder of the thin line that separates selfless heroism from senseless barbarism.

How did humanity develop? Why have some societies thrived for long periods and others disappeared quickly? What decisions or unexpected turns of events made the difference between survival or extinction? Is past experience a reliable guide to the future? Boston University historian David Fromkin explores the above and many other questions in The Way of the World, his superbly crafted historical analysis of the story of humanity and civilization. Fromkin focuses on change, from the beginning of the universe, as scientists presently understand it, to a look at how it could affect our future. He concentrates primarily on the way human beings have organized and governed themselves and dealt with the crucial issues of war, peace, and survival. But he also acknowledges the central influence of religion and art. The influence on history by the founders of the major religions, he notes, endured over the ages and eventually far exceeded that of even the most successful generals and politicians . . . 4 billion of the 5.5 billion people alive today remain adherents of one or another of the religions they founded. Art is viewed by Fromkin as a magical gift. We have a tendency to regard the arts as products of civilization rather than an innate impulse. The evidence instead seems to show that they are basic to our nature, for they flourished prior to civilization. They are among the first unique manifestations of humanity. In graceful prose Fromkin traces events from the development of the first city-state in Sumer to today’s world which, while it is the world America wanted, it is not a world that America made. He examines the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, the latter’s history of what we call the Peloponnesian Wars, the first book to provide moral criticism of history and politics. He discusses the rise and fall of Rome, particularly as interpreted by Edward Gibbon. Taking a long view, Fromkin writes: The wonder of ancient history was not that one civilization, that of Rome and the classical Mediterranean, failed, but that so many others succeeded, many of them brilliantly. Fromkin does not agree with those who say that Europe’s takeover of the rest of the world was deliberate or intended. Only afterwards could it be seen that Europe had conquered the world; and even then we might disagree as to why it happened. Fromkin has the rare ability to convey a lot of information, often on difficult or sophisticated subjects, with a few beautifully constructed sentences. He also helps us to understand some things differently. Fromkin asserts that the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation are all misleading designations. He suggests that the Goths were looking for pastureland in Roman territory where they could settle, safe from the Huns. ( So far as historians can judge, it was not their original intention to put the empire or its cities to the torch. ) Fromkin also posits that the similar experimental approaches of Prince Henry the Navigator and Thomas Edison, in quite different areas, centuries apart, exemplified the rationalist frame of mind that took Europe out of medieval religion and into modern times. Fromkin demonstrates that irony is a major theme in history. He writes, Many if not most of the major happenings of the twentieth century took the world by surprise. Today, Science is said to be the faith of the modern world, it is the basis of our hopes for the future . . . As for the future, however, Fromkin is not optimistic about predictions, . . . yet many of us probably most of us either do not understand [science] or do not accept as true that which it tells us. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.