The United States, as part of the United Nations and NATO, has sought to bring peace, reconciliation, and order to Bosnia and Kosovo. This humanitarian intervention by the international community is a fresh approach whose long-term effectiveness is uncertain. But intervention by major world powers in the region is part of a continuing pattern that over the last 200 years has brought untold devastation, misery, and death to the inhabitants.

Ethnic and religious groups have clashed repeatedly in the Balkans, as a result of historic rivalries whose origins date back hundreds of years. But, as Misha Glenny demonstrates in this compelling and very readable comprehensive narrative history, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, intervention by foreign powers has often made difficult situations even worse. The best known of these is the start of the First World War, of which Glenny writes: The Balkans were not the powder keg, as is so often believed: The metaphor is inaccurate. They were merely the powder trail that the great powers themselves had laid. The powder keg was Europe. Glenny was for many years the Central European correspondent for the BBC’s World Service, based in Vienna. His earlier books were The Rebirth of History and The Fall of Yugoslavia, which won the 1992 Overseas Press Club Award for Best Book on Foreign Affairs.

The author believes that to understand Yugoslav history it is necessary to explore the history of the entire region. He traces the start of the Balkan tragedy to national movements early in the 19th century by Serbs and Greeks. The largely peasant societies were not able to develop as many had hoped, and located at the intersection of absolutist empires, they were exploited by the great powers.

Glenny vividly describes the many diplomatic meetings held outside the Balkans where decisions were made that adversely affected the people who lived there. These included the 1878 Congress of Berlin, presided over by Bismarck, which led to partition and, where necessary, population exchange.

The author explains how, in this century, the First and Second World Wars, and before them the First and Second Balkan Wars, helped shape the region. It is important to know that territorial and constitutional issues concerning the Balkans took more time and work at the World War I Peace Conference than any other issue. At the time of the armistice in November 1918, Yugoslavia did not exist as a country. Even when it was established as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes on December 1, it was without clear borders or a clear constitutional order. Glenny also deals with the question of why Hitler attacked the Balkans. Hitler had no need for war in the Balkans, yet he brought terrible death and destruction there. The World War II years of occupation, resistance, fracticide, genocide, and the oppressive Communist regimes in power until recently left a multitude of problems.

The author discusses the fragility of nationalism and national identity. His vivid depictions of individual leaders and events challenge our assumptions about past and present in the region. He argues convincingly that the three major interventions guaranteed the Balkans relative economic backwardness, compared to the rest of Europe. This rich and timely study is a sweeping mix of social, political, military, and diplomatic history. At the core, though, it is about human beings, often caught in situations over which they have little or no control.

Glenny’s book gives us essential historical background about a part of the world where the international community may be deeply involved for a long time. It deserves a wide readership.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Ask almost anyone to describe Custer’s Last Stand and you will most probably receive a response that paints a picture of a valiant leader and his troops, surrounded by fearsome Indians, bravely facing insurmountable odds. But if you ask Herman J. Viola, you’ll get a completely different story. That’s because Viola has spent the last several years interviewing Native American survivors and their descendants and collecting their stories of the events that day. These stories as well as a number of additional essays are all a part of Little Bighorn Remembered.

This book is unique in many ways. Unlike most historical accounts, Little Bighorn Remembered focuses mainly on primary sources. There are over 100 pages which contain the stories and recollections of members of the four tribes involved in that day’s battle, two of which fought Custer, and, to many people’s surprise, two of which were working with Custer. In addition to the stories, the book is illustrated with more than 200 maps, photographs, reproductions, and drawings of the battle. Many of these documents were created by those who survived and are appearing here for the first time in print. The book also includes a number of historical essays which help fill in the details of the battle and the time leading up to it. This book is not about Custer. It is about the Indians who fought on both sides and why they felt they had no other choice but to be there. Little Bighorn Remembered is fascinating reading. For history buffs and military enthusiasts, it provides a great deal of additional information from a point of view few books have ever taken. For those unfamiliar with this historical event, it could prove to be a difficult book to jump into, but persevere. The first-hand accounts offer a stunning look at how a historian pieces together multiple tellings of the same tale, and the additional essays are enlightening. ¦ Wes Breazeale is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

In his 21st and latest book, A Necessary Evil, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Garry Wills offers a thought-provoking framework for understanding Americans’ pervasive distrust of their government. Wills’s survey extends from the earliest debates surrounding adoption of the Constitution to the 1998 Birmingham, Alabama, clinic bombing. Reviews of the Constitution and Bill of Rights exhibit the tight reasoning of legal briefs. But Wills notes that the distinction between powers and rights is much more than semantic and attributes confusion about (or convenient misreading of) this central tenet to myths that have been accepted as truisms for two centuries. He contends that while governments can possess powers, only individuals have rights. According to Wills, a close reading of the articles as originally expressed by the framers suggests that the government’s three unequal branches were created for efficiency, not as checks on one another. Equally telling, gun rights were directed toward maintenance of state militias as part of the debate about a standing army. Wills also offers alternative interpretations of Madison’s intent to those taken by modern gun groups.

A Necessary Evil explores a spectrum of protests, from nation-rending acts of secession (the Civil War) to civil disobedience (Martin Luther King Jr.) Wills establishes the differences between insurrectionists (those who claim the government does too much) and vigilantes (those who say it does too little) as the extreme manifestations of distrust. He observes that, despite high visibility, such modest responses as nullification (Oliver North, Bernard Goetz) or withdrawal (Thoreau, Mencken) seek very different federal responses. Nullifiers want to send a message to the government regarding a larger issue; withdrawers seek only to remove themselves from the government’s objectionable laws. The history presented here reveals that violent and passive protests against government policies have been largely unsuccessful. Rather than considering government a necessary evil, Wills finds it to be, on balance, a necessary good. A Necessary Evil confirms that the system conceived by the government’s founders still offers avenues open to those seeking redress the cup is half full, not half empty as portrayed by those who would subvert it. ¦ John Messer once served in the Pentagon.

Welcome to hard times From a high school history class in the late 1950s, I remember a teacher, attempting to shake us children of relative privilege out of our apathy, telling a personal story to illustrate the awfulness of the Great Depression. Out of work himself in those years, he was walking along a city street one day when he saw a small crowd at a doorway, encircling what proved to be the dead body of a man. Only later, he said, did he learn that the man had died of starvation.

I don’t know about my fellow sloths, but obviously I was affected enough by the story to remember it. Not that I or they needed his anecdote. We could have had anecdotes aplenty if we’d wanted them, which we mostly didn’t from our mothers and fathers, our aunts and uncles people now part of what T.

H. Watkins calls in The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939 a generation of witnesses who are passing from the scene and to whom he intends his book to be a tribute.

If any subject comes close to rivaling the Civil War and World War II for being written about, it is the Depression. Indeed, Watkins himself has written an earlier book about the period and an award-winning biography of one of its leading figures, Harold Ickes. So why another tome on the pile? The author explains in his foreword that he wanted to write not so much about the New Deal and politics as about the people whose lives were changed by what the Great Depression brought, to take the story as far beyond Washington, D.

C., as I can get it, and wherever possible present the story from the ground up. In this he largely succeeds. He divides his book into three sections, the first a chronological overview, the other two examinations of the Depression’s grip on urban and rural America. These last two are, as he intends, considerably more descriptive and anecdotal than the first, but even here there is still plenty of detail about what might be called the story from the top down the lives and motivations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, other politicians, union leaders, businessmen, and so forth.

Except in incidental ways Watkins is not interested in what movies people watched, books they read, or songs they sang and danced to. The Hungry Years is almost exclusively a political, social, and economic as distinct from cultural history. He devotes his book to Americans’ struggle with hard times and to an examination of Roosevelt’s attempts to get the nation out of the economic morass that he believes FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, did little to keep it from sinking into.

In this interpretation he is hardly alone, of course. Hoover’s fiddling while America burned has pretty much become the revealed truth of 20th-century American history. Watkins admires the New Deal’s nobility of purpose that few governments have ever entertained, but calls it, when all is said and done, a magnificent failure whose reach far exceeded its grasp. Watkins deftly rounds up all the usual suspects and grills them hard. One of his best examinations is of the nation’s exclusive dependence on volunteerism, local aid, self-reliance, and private charity that, to give Hoover his due, made a good and capable man a prisoner of ideology and kept him from doing more than he did.

FDR was not about to be any such prisoner. Immediately upon achieving office he began serving up the famous alphabet soup of public works and relief: the soil soldiers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, for example; and the Public Works Administration, which eventually would put at least one construction project in all but three of the country’s 3,073 counties; and the most ubiquitous program of all, the oddly named Works Progress Administration, which included the federal writers, music, and theater projects. One of the New Dealers’ signal failures, he writes, is in the decade’s labor unrest and rising unionism, because of their lack of understanding of and sympathy for the working class. He maintains that they were more comfortable giving workers government jobs than helping them fight for their own.

All too soon our own children will no longer have a generation of witnesses to these hard times. Luckily, they or at least the few who show more interest than my generation did will have The Hungry Years to tell them what they were fortunate to have missed. ¦ Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

Between 1929 and 1945 the American people and their political leadership met and emerged victorious over two daunting challenges. Had events gone in other directions, our century could have been quite different. In a brilliant narrative history of broad scope and complexity, Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy recreates that crucial period in Freedom from Fear. The latest volume in the publisher’s award-winning Oxford History of the American People, it encompasses political, economic, diplomatic, social, and military history.

Kennedy examines in detail the root causes that contributed to the crises, placing them in context with events elsewhere in the world. Chief among these is the terms of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which imposed harsh reparations on Germany, brought serious economic problems to that country, and eventually raised Hitler to power. The author shows that in the United States, the economic prosperity of the 1920s did not reach all citizens, with farmers and minority groups especially left out. What did FDR hope to accomplish with his New Deal? We are going to make a country, he told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, in which no one is left out. The pattern of institutional arrangements that came out of that period, according to Kennedy, can be summarized in one word: security security for vulnerable individuals, to be sure . . . but security for capitalists and consumers, for workers and employers, for corporations and farms and homeowners and bankers as well. The historian also notes: . . . legend to the contrary, much of the security that the New Deal threaded into the fabric of American society was often stitched with a remarkably delicate hand, not simply imposed by the fist of the imperious state. Kennedy devotes considerable attention to American involvement in World War II, focusing not only on military personnel and major battles but also on those who served on the home front. In these chapters, as throughout the entire volume, there is concern for the effect of events on individuals. The tremendous popularity of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation has shown the widespread interest in and appreciation of what Americans did in that period. There could not be a better companion volume than this one.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Among the unlikely results of a shipwreck 86 years ago is Leonardo DiCaprio’s current starring role in the daydreams of teenage females from Boise to Baghdad. DiCaprio was lucky to be aboard James Cameron’s film Titanic. By now, as everyone knows, the film can be described only in superlatives. It is the most expensive movie ever made, the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, the first film ever to gross $1 billion worldwide. Its soundtrack is surprise the best-selling ever. And it won more Oscars (11) than any film since, God help us, Ben Hur. The ship itself may have sunk for good, but its story has been resurrected, with a mixture of horror and glee, in books, documentaries, exhibitions, movies, and even a Broadway musical. And still they come. Herewith, marking the September release of Titanic on home video, a harvest of new books and booklike things. We might as well begin with another superlative the two biggest, most impressive, and most expensive books on our list. Even if you barely know the Titanic from the good ship Lollipop, you will enjoy Titanic: An Illustrated History (Hyperion, $39.95, 078686401X), by Don Lynch. Throughout, the lively text is illuminated by photos, drawings, maps, and the beautiful photorealistic paintings of Ken Marschall, who has emerged as the disaster’s visual historian. Marschall gets his own book, with text by Rick Archbold, in a fascinating survey of his three decades of work, Art of Titanic (Hyperion, $40, 0786864559). Sketches, photos, and 80-plus gorgeous paintings illuminate the complicated process of historical illustration. No photograph can match Marschall’s poignant visions of either the gaiety aboard ship or the gloomy depths of the wreckage.

Simon and Schuster is publishing Titanic: Fortune and Fate ($30, 0684857103), the companion volume to the Mariner’s Museum exhibition of the same name. Artifacts include personal mementos, letters, and other moving records of the lives lost that night in 1912, with a text emphasizing less the well-known play-by-play and more the personalities involved. There are all sorts of stories of the shipwreck, but naturally eyewitness accounts are the most impressive. One such survivor, an observant young woman named Violet Jessup, wrote her memoirs in 1934. They are published for the first time in Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessup, Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters (Sheridan House, $23.95, 1574090356). She was a steward aboard the Titanic and a wartime nurse aboard the Britannic, and her story is as compelling as any in the disaster’s lore. Surprisingly, it’s also funny.

If you worry you missed the boat and want to catch up, you might try The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Titanic (Alpha Books, $18.95, 0028627121), by Jay Stevenson and Sharon Rutman. Like others in this series (which add up to a veritable idiot’s encyclopedia), this book manages to cram an astonishing amount of information into an irresistible browser format. Robert D. Ballard, co-leader of the 1985 expedition that found the sunken ship, first published his story in 1987. Now there is a newly updated trade paperback edition, The Discovery of the Titanic: Exploring the Greatest of All Lost Ships (Warner, $13.99, 0446671746), by Robert D. Ballard. Its many illustrations include paintings and touching sea-bottom photos.

If you really want to get behind the scenes, you should turn to a paperback entitled The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, edited by Tom Kuntz. Following its 500 or so pages of compelling (okay, somewhat compelling) transcripts you’ll find an index of witnesses and a digest of their testimony. The most original new contributions to Titaniana are not even books at all. The Titanic Collection: Mementos of the Maiden Voyage (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811820521) is a handsomely packaged collection of facsimile documents. They come in a booklike box designed to resemble a steamer trunk, complete with hinges. A tray sets inside the trunk, and both spaces are filled with extraordinary facsimiles. Items include copies of a first class passenger ticket, the menu for the fateful night, the music repertoire, telegraph flimsies, luggage labels (yes, they’re adhesive), smudged and scribbled postcards, and many other documents. The packaging on Titanic: The Official Story (Random House, $25, 0375501150) is not quite so impressive, but the facsimiles are great fun. These documents are larger, and include stateroom charts, a newspaper page, the ship’s register form, telegrams. Far more evocative than mere photos of artifacts.

As you leave the bookstore with this armload, on your way to buy the video of Cameron’s *Titanic*, rest easy in the knowledge that at least a sequel seems unlikely. Michael Sims is a frequent contributor to BookPage and the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Among the unlikely results of a shipwreck 86 years ago is Leonardo DiCaprio’s current starring role in the daydreams of teenage females from Boise to Baghdad. DiCaprio was lucky to be aboard James Cameron’s film Titanic. By now, as everyone knows, the film can be described only in superlatives. It is the most expensive movie ever made, the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, the first film ever to gross $1 billion worldwide. Its soundtrack is surprise the best-selling ever. And it won more Oscars (11) than any film since, God help us, Ben Hur. The ship itself may have sunk for good, but its story has been resurrected, with a mixture of horror and glee, in books, documentaries, exhibitions, movies, and even a Broadway musical. And still they come. Herewith, marking the September release of Titanic on home video, a harvest of new books and booklike things. We might as well begin with another superlative the two biggest, most impressive, and most expensive books on our list. Even if you barely know the Titanic from the good ship Lollipop, you will enjoy Titanic: An Illustrated History (Hyperion, $39.95, 078686401X), by Don Lynch. Throughout, the lively text is illuminated by photos, drawings, maps, and the beautiful photorealistic paintings of Ken Marschall, who has emerged as the disaster’s visual historian. Marschall gets his own book, with text by Rick Archbold, in a fascinating survey of his three decades of work, Art of Titanic (Hyperion, $40, 0786864559). Sketches, photos, and 80-plus gorgeous paintings illuminate the complicated process of historical illustration. No photograph can match Marschall’s poignant visions of either the gaiety aboard ship or the gloomy depths of the wreckage.

Simon and Schuster is publishing Titanic: Fortune and Fate, the companion volume to the Mariner’s Museum exhibition of the same name. Artifacts include personal mementos, letters, and other moving records of the lives lost that night in 1912, with a text emphasizing less the well-known play-by-play and more the personalities involved. There are all sorts of stories of the shipwreck, but naturally eyewitness accounts are the most impressive. One such survivor, an observant young woman named Violet Jessup, wrote her memoirs in 1934. They are published for the first time in Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessup, Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters (Sheridan House, $23.95, 1574090356). She was a steward aboard the Titanic and a wartime nurse aboard the Britannic, and her story is as compelling as any in the disaster’s lore. Surprisingly, it’s also funny.

If you worry you missed the boat and want to catch up, you might try The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Titanic (Alpha Books, $18.95, 0028627121), by Jay Stevenson and Sharon Rutman. Like others in this series (which add up to a veritable idiot’s encyclopedia), this book manages to cram an astonishing amount of information into an irresistible browser format. Robert D. Ballard, co-leader of the 1985 expedition that found the sunken ship, first published his story in 1987. Now there is a newly updated trade paperback edition, The Discovery of the Titanic: Exploring the Greatest of All Lost Ships (Warner, $13.99, 0446671746), by Robert D. Ballard. Its many illustrations include paintings and touching sea-bottom photos.

If you really want to get behind the scenes, you should turn to a paperback entitled The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation (Pocket, $7.99, 0671025538), edited by Tom Kuntz. Following its 500 or so pages of compelling (okay, somewhat compelling) transcripts you’ll find an index of witnesses and a digest of their testimony. The most original new contributions to Titaniana are not even books at all. The Titanic Collection: Mementos of the Maiden Voyage (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811820521) is a handsomely packaged collection of facsimile documents. They come in a booklike box designed to resemble a steamer trunk, complete with hinges. A tray sets inside the trunk, and both spaces are filled with extraordinary facsimiles. Items include copies of a first class passenger ticket, the menu for the fateful night, the music repertoire, telegraph flimsies, luggage labels (yes, they’re adhesive), smudged and scribbled postcards, and many other documents. The packaging on Titanic: The Official Story (Random House, $25, 0375501150) is not quite so impressive, but the facsimiles are great fun. These documents are larger, and include stateroom charts, a newspaper page, the ship’s register form, telegrams. Far more evocative than mere photos of artifacts.

As you leave the bookstore with this armload, on your way to buy the video of Cameron’s *Titanic*, rest easy in the knowledge that at least a sequel seems unlikely. Michael Sims is a frequent contributor to BookPage and the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

If April showers bring May flowers, get a headstart with The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad. Author Anna Pavord spent six years sifting through library books, paintings, illustrations, tulip gardens (cultivated, wild, and sometimes dangerous), and talking to scores of tulipomaniacs to develop a thorough account of the flower’s very checkered past. Beginning with its Turkish roots (one sultan’s reign was completely dominated by his passion for the tulip), Pavrod reveals incidents where entire businesses were traded for one single bulb; the tulip’s migration from one continent to another; the great mystery behind breaking, where a plain tulip changes into a multi-colored bloom (once thought to be a grower-controlled process, it’s actually caused by a virus). Rich endpapers contain Pavord’s detailed text, and The Tulip is complete with color plates and hundreds of species’ descriptions. Ideal for gardeners and social historians.