Tom Brokaw tapped an enormous reservoir of dormant sentiment in 1998 with the publication of The Greatest Generation, available this month for the first time in paperback. After more than 40 printings, there are almost 4 million hardcover copies in print, making it one of the best-selling nonfiction titles of the past decade.

Brokaw's thesis is simple: The generation of Americans that came of age during World War II was "the greatest generation any society has ever produced." He made his point by telling the stories of nearly 50 survivors of that era, most of whom are now in their late 70s to mid-80s. But this great generation is losing the battle against time, and the busy NBC anchorman wanted to capture their stories before they disappeared.

The book became a phenomenon, not just because of the surviving generation, but because of the succeeding generation, the baby boomers who grew up in families and communities affected by the sacrifices and heroism of their fathers' and mothers' generation.

Now comes a follow-up, An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation which is essentially a collection of letters Brokaw received in reaction to the first book. Brokaw writes in the foreword: "It was a common trait of the Greatest Generation not to discuss the difficult times and how they shaped their lives, but now, in their twilight years, more and more members of that remarkable group of men and women are determined to share their experiences." Whether the stories are about a 17-year-old enlistee who participated in the Bataan Death March, or about eyewitness accounts of the D-Day Invasion or the Battle of the Bulge, they are riveting in their detail and inspirational in their selfless passion.

As a baby boomer, I could not help but be affected by these books. My Uncle Calvin lost an arm at the age of 18 aboard a ship in the South Pacific. After more than 55 years of living without that arm, he is still with us, thankfully, a role model for me and others of my generation.

Whatever the final assessment of American culture, certainly one of the highest points will be the generation that marched off to war to save the world and did! James L. Dickerson is the author of numerous books, including Colonel Tom Parker, reviewed in this issue.

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams declared, "From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future." This was not mere political rhetoric. Our sixth president was, of course, the son of a key Founding Father who had served as the young republic's second president. But the son was an accomplished public figure in his own right, with a keen sense of history. As the country grew, he wanted it to reaffirm a connection with the generation of 1776 and the political ideals of its founders.

During that crucial formative period in the early 19th century, as settlers moved West and a series of canals helped to strengthen the country economically, "All Americans," according to historian Andrew Burstein, "agreed upon one thing, and it seemed, one thing only: that homage should be paid to their Revolutionary origins. It was that universal devotion which promised to preserve a language of unity and harmony and pure motives in an era of widely divergent tastes and purposes. Behind them lay glory days, ahead lay civil war. For them, as for us, the past was a comfort." In his rich new study, America's Jubilee, Burstein attempts "to uncover the soul of the (Revolution's) successor generation." To do this he introduces us to a wide range of personalities, some largely forgotten today, using a variety of sources private letters and diaries, public addresses, newspaper accounts to give us a vivid account of individual experiences, attitudes and thinking as the country prepared to celebrate its 50th birthday in 1826.

Burstein writes that a prominent figure in 1826, William Wirt, author of both fiction and nonfiction and U.S. attorney general for 12 successive years, "arguably did more than anyone else of his generation to link the Romantic movement in America with the Revolutionary spirit." Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, published in 1817, was not an objective biography, for the author wished "to restore the Revolution to living memory for his generation, even if his book had to take on a quasi-mythical character." It was Wirt who was selected to give a "masterful oration" in the U.S. Capitol on the nation's 50th anniversary.

Burstein explores his theme through the writings and public careers of such figures as Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, Marquis de Lafayette and John Randolph. He writes in some detail about the remarkable coincidence of the almost simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, a symbolic passing of the torch to a new generation. He discusses the differing accounts of the last words of the two founders, who heard those words, and how they have been remembered by later generations. Among many public events associated with the deaths, a particularly moving one was Daniel Webster's address in Boston. Burstein describes it as a "message of national religious significance.

Some of the most enlightening chapters of the book concern writings by people who were not public figures. Ruth Henshaw Bascom of Massachusetts began keeping a daily journal when she was 17 years old and continued to maintain it for 57 years. Her father had helped to organize the Massachusetts militia and had fought with George Washington at the nearly disastrous Battle of Long Island. "The most perceptible emotion one recognizes in reading Ruth's adult years' writing is her devout acceptance of the fragility of life," Burstein notes.

Burstein convincingly makes the case that contrary to popular myth Jacksonian democracy did not arise and flourish only with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. It was already established before that. "In mid-1826 the now 'knightly' Hero of New Orleans loomed as the embodiment of the democratizing conscience. There is a better way to put it: the democratic conscience prevailed in America already, and only lacked a president who would resurrect Jefferson's convincing call for the restriction of privilege."

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

In the days after his death in 1827, many of Beethoven's friends and admirers snipped off locks of his mane. It was the custom of the time, before the popularity of photography. Nearly two centuries later, the hairs collected by a young musician, Ferdinand Hiller, gave Russell Martin fodder for Beethoven's Hair. The book, a mystery of sorts, is best described as chemical thriller meets historical "how-dunit." The 500 or so hairs, snipped (and, more importantly, pulled) from the head of the master composer, traveled in a tightly sealed locket from Germany, to Denmark, and into the U.S., arriving at a Sotheby's auction.

After the auction, the delighted new owners ushered the hairs into the hands of scientists known for their expertise in hair analysis.

Because some of the pulled hairs contained follicles, DNA testing was also possible. And so it fell to William Walsh, a chemical engineer working at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, to oversee the analysis of Beethoven's hair. Walsh orchestrated the testing process in such a thorough and controlled manner that the results of the testing simply could not be doubted. In doing so, he solved the riddle of the musician's deafness and other ailments. Beethoven's Hair is a tale of science and humanity, and those who love classical music, as well as those who love a good tale, will enjoy untangling it.

Diane Stresing is a writer in Kent, Ohio.

Veteran political journalists and pundits Eleanor Clift and Tom Brazaitis interviewed scores of political women to answer this question. In their new book, they explore the possibilities and pitfalls awaiting women who aspire to the highest office. They also profile women elected at various levels of government and explain why female candidates win (or lose) elections. The fact that voters and politicians now take this question seriously reflects how hard women have worked to become contenders. A 1936 Gallup poll revealed that 65 percent of voters would not vote for a woman for president, regardless of qualifications. This book recounts how a feminist fantasy was transformed into serious possibility by activists, donors, and female candidates, all of whom took great risks to make it happen.

Clift and Brazaitis analyze Hillary Clinton's unique attempt to transform herself from first lady to senatorial candidate, and describe the emotional ups and downs of Geraldine Ferraro's groundbreaking candidacy for vice president in 1984. They reveal the problems that plagued Elizabeth Dole's run for President in 1999. The careers of women who have left their mark on Congress and state institutions come under the microscope: Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, Ann Richards, Mary Landrieu, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Christine Todd Whitman, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Elizabeth Holtzman, and many others. The authors explore the candidates' motivations and behind-the-scenes maneuvers to get elected and consolidate power.

From these many portraits, common themes emerge. The most serious problem is money. According to one consultant: "Money and media nothing else matters." Women have great difficulty attracting money from big party donors. Some women have found ways around this bottleneck it helps to be successful in business first.

For female office seekers, family is a problem. Married women are accused of neglecting their families. Single women are assumed to be lesbians or "out of touch." Family relationships receive merciless scrutiny. Women must be nice, walking a fine line between "strident" and "weak." Toughness is essential; one opponent's political announced: "I'd like her for my daughter, but not District Attorney." Female candidates are often labeled as "bleeding hearts," although a new breed of conservative women has made this harder to do automatically. In addition to their informative accounts of women who have gone before, Clift and Brazaitis include advice from media consultants on how a future female presidential candidates can capture attention and avoid being stereotyped.

Mary Helen Clarke is a writer and editor living in Nashville.

Along with everything else about the Korean War, the 406 men of Task Force Smith are little remembered now. They are not bathed in the reverential glow of a Pearl Harbor. They have no influential organizations to remind their country that they, too, once stood like Horatius at the bridge. They are merely 406 human pieces of the multitude of forgotten pieces that make up the Forgotten War.

Task Force Smith was a motley collection of scared young men from the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, thrown hastily into the breach a few days after the Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. Ill-prepared, under-trained, pulled from comfortable occupation duty in Japan, they were the first American forces flung into the onrushing North Korean tide. They got swamped.

Do not expect great, national patriotic observances of the 50th anniversary of the Korean War. Do not expect an outpouring of stories and interviews in the press. Do not expect extensive television coverage. The war's aging veterans do not expect it. They have grown used to not expecting.

Do not expect, either, a burst of books such as greeted the 50th anniversary of nearly every historic turning of the Second World War. The Korean War has long been a non-starter as far as publishers are concerned. But the Free Press, fortunately, has had the grace and wisdom to bring out Stanley Weintraub's MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.

MacArthur's War is an extended slam at General of the Army Douglas MacArthur by a highly respected historian who has a string of books to his credit (including several on war-related subjects) and who is himself a Korean War veteran. Weintraub does not come up with anything new, but marshals the existing evidence in the case against MacArthur in a more extended and focused manner than anyone has done before the case being that MacArthur took a war that was his to win and, through his megalomania and overweening sense of destiny and self-importance, turned it into a military and political quagmire.

The author does not deny MacArthur's great accomplishments. His proconsulship over United States-occupied Japan had been good for the country. When war came to Korea and he was given authority to act, he acted swiftly. His decision to make an amphibious landing at Inchon three months into the war, perceived by all his military advisers as madness, turned out to be a masterstroke.

But beyond that, oh my. The list of blunders seems endless: MacArthur's decision to commit troops piecemeal, against all military rules. Likewise his decision to divide the command in Korea between two forces, Eighth Army and X Corps. His "running the war by remote control from Japan." His insubordination to civilian and military authorities, to whom he routinely lied or failed to tell the whole truth. His continual overstepping of restrictions on pursuing the war in North Korea.

Worst of all was MacArthur's stance toward Taiwan (then known as Formosa) and Communist China. MacArthur was fixated on the twin topics of unleashing Chiang Kai-shek's troops on Taiwan to fight in Korea, and on expanding the war into China.

Another historian, Bevin Alexander, has said there were two wars in Korea: one against the North Koreans, which the U.N. forces won, and one against the Chinese, who poured into Korea to protect their threatened homeland, which they did not win. MacArthur wouldn't settle for limited victory, and, Weintraub writes, "almost every day saw another attempt by MacArthur to sabotage efforts to bargain for a compromise end to the war."

Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty manner before a fall, Scripture says. And how. MacArthur's insubordination grew so outrageous that in April 1951 President Harry Truman sacked him. After a brief, giddy period during which his devoted followers hailed him as a demigod (or higher), MacArthur, in a phrase from his own famous speech, faded away.

As have the veterans of the war he bungled. Weintraub believes the war was worth fighting and that it reached its minimal objectives, and has no sympathy with "apologists and revisionists in the West" who buy North Korea's version of events. He laments the fact that Korea's missing in action have been forgotten (unlike the far fewer MIAs of Vietnam) along with their more fortunate comrades who marched out of the war and into anonymity. Attention must be paid.

Roger K. Miller, a Wisconsin freelance writer, is writing a novel based on the life of a U.S. Army rifleman from Pennsylvania who died in a POW camp in North Korea.

In Confederates in the Attic, journalist Tony Horwitz scours Civil War battlegrounds adjacent to shopping malls and sends dispatches to his fellow Americans that sound less like news bulletins than wisecracks in a musical comedy.

After nine years in foreign countries, Horwitz moved to Virginia, where he discovered an America obsessed with the war in ways that stirred up his own memories of photographs that he had studied as a child with his father. "Lying awake in the night, pondering Civil War obsession, I'd plotted a hard-core campaign of my own. Super hard-core . . . The scheme . . . was to spend a year at war, searching out the places and people who keep memory of the conflict alive in the present day."

Chapter by chapter, Horwitz travels to each of the Eastern and Western Southern states where great battles were waged and pictured in etchings his grandfather showed him through a magnifying glass. His power to magnify the emotional impact and significance of details has evolved from childhood into a skill enjoyable to watch. Horwitz's re-enactor friend Rob takes him on what he calls "The Civil Wargasm," a high-speed car tour of the war's greatest sites. "This is my true calling a Civil War bum,' he said, biting into the day's first plug of tobacco. "The Gasm's a Bohemian thing, like a Ken Kesey bus tour, except that we're tripping the 1860s instead of the 1960s.'"

Experiencing what Rob calls a "period rush," Horwitz, too, becomes a captive of the past. "Our Gasm wasn't yet a day old but already I resented"—at Manassas—"the intrusion of current events."

Horwitz's single-minded comrade Rob exhibits in speech and behavior his evolution into what he is: a macho male accoutered with all the gadgets of the late 1990s and speaking its lingo to express a mania for every detail of the Civil War. Roving over hallowed places at a speed Civil War soldiers never imagined, Rob consumes facts and fables of the war the way he wolfs down Big Macs.

"The Old South was plowed under," wrote Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare in 1945, after a journey similar to Horwitz's. "But the ashes are still warm." Horwitz elaborates upon that epigraph throughout the book. "Vicksburg confirmed the dispiriting pattern I'd seen elsewhere in the South . . . Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents, one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past."

If Horwitz wields humor as a shield against a hydra-headed monster of obsession, in the end, it doesn't save him. "While I felt almost no ideological kinship with these unreconstructed rebels, I'd come to recognize that in one sense they were right. The issues at stake in the Civil War race in particular remained raw and unresolved . . . But while my travels had brought me to some understanding of others' obsession, I still felt strangely unable to explain my own."

As a qualifier to an underlying purpose that couldn't be more serious, Horwitz's humor has the effect of luring and then lulling those readers who may think preoccupation with the Civil War is ridiculous. Such readers will come away from Horwitz's battleground scenes more open than before to possible ways of seeing and feeling the relevance of the war to their own lives.