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.

More than a decade ago, historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed triggered a firestorm in academic circles with her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Gordon-Reed's work examined a contention that had long been rumored but never given this type of exhaustive examination: that America's third president and beloved Founding Father had a sexual relationship with the slave Sally Hemings, one that lasted long enough to produce seven children. Even after a separate DNA study came out a year later establishing a genetic link between Jefferson and the Hemings family, there were still skeptics who doubted the veracity of Gordon-Reed's findings.

Now she attempts to put any remaining doubts about the Hemings-Jefferson liaison to rest with The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. A behemoth of a book that offers more information about the relationship than anyone might have envisioned, it represents seven years of research and spells out links, connections, bloodlines and familial ties so completely that it shreds any questions of authenticity. Gordon-Reed also carefully follows the genetic trail of the Hemingses from their origins in Virginia during the 1700s on through their dispersal after the death of Jefferson in 1826.

Gordon-Reed's book unravels some of the intricate, often confusing details about exact links and specific relationships. For example, Sally Hemings was the daughter of slave Elizabeth Hemings and slave owner John Wayles. Wayles in turn was the father of Jefferson's wife Martha. Thus Sally Hemings was the half – sister of Jefferson's "legitimate" wife, something that no doubt triggered the flood of denials when the relationship issue was initially raised.

Gordon-Reed is just as meticulous in tracking the connections between brother and sister, parent and child, aunt and uncle, sometimes spending so much time ensuring genetic accuracy that her narrative can become a bit daunting, though still fascinating. She also describes events at Monticello and elsewhere, providing intriguing detail about Philadelphia's emergence as a major city in the late 18th century, the workings of plantation life and Jefferson's later adventures in travel and diplomacy. Simultaneously, the Hemingses are embroiled in their own dramas and intrigues, even sometimes accompanying Jefferson on his travels, as when Sally and James Hemings went to Paris with Jefferson.

It was an unorthodox (to say the least) situation, particularly in later years as Jefferson increasingly tried to dictate choices, manage affairs and generally run the Hemingses' lives in a manner that resembles that of an aging but concerned father, rather than that of a dispassionate merchant trying to maximize his assets. Gordon-Reed understands that she's in delicate emotional territory here, since some readers will resist any attempt to humanize or explain the Jefferson – Hemings situation as anything other than rank exploitation. As she demonstrates, it was much more complicated than that, even with the ugly and dehumanizing reality of slavery always at the core of things. The Hemingses of Monticello explores a thorny but important chapter in American history with distinction and clarity, offering a poignant, if also often ugly, chronicle of slavery, secrecy and family tension.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville City Paper and other publications.

These days, it's hip to be Basque. After all, these inhabitants of northern Spain and a slice of southern France, so long unremarked by the outside world, just built the stunning Guggenheim Museum in their port town of Bilbao. They're on the cutting edge of a borderless European Union. Not least, their famous sauce of salt cod, cooked in olive oil with hot pepper and garlic, is likely to be simmering at the finest French restaurants anywhere.

Mark Kurlansky's insightful history shows that although the Basques have been extraordinary inventors and discoverers, they have not always enjoyed such acclaim. In fact, if there were a medal for the most underappreciated people on the planet, the 2.4 million Basques would win hands down.

These adventurers have a little-remembered history of firsts. They were the first Europeans to cultivate tobacco; the first to admire hot peppers imported from the Americas; and the first to break the Dutch monopoly on chocolate. They sailed in the Spanish Armada and built ships with venture capital. And sorry all you Francophiles, it was the Basques who popularized the beret as a fashion statement.

The Basques are also the only Spaniards who visibly resisted the dictator Franco in the early 1970s, and much of this book is devoted to following the political intrigue that made some Basques such terrorists throughout the 1980s. Kurlansky offers a fine opportunity to catch up on Spain's postwar political trials. He also gives a powerful account of the 1937 attack on Guernica, where German and Italian bombers flew low over the town square, dumping splinter bombs at the busiest moment of the market day.

Kurlansky, who wrote Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, has again put his appetite to work. This book is peppered with recipes for traditional Basque dishes. A roasted sea bream swims in a touch of oil and garlic; red beans from the region of Tolosa are cooked in earthen crocks and garnished with pickled green peppers.

For all his Basque boosterism, Kurlansky remains a wry observer of these neglected and maligned tribes living in the shadows of the Pyrenees. The singular remarkable fact about the Basques, he marvels, is that they still exist.

Jeff Byles is a reviewer in New York City.

In 1995, America witnessed the most publicized real estate transaction since the Oklahoma land rush. Buyers queued up, $1000 checks in hand, to enter a lottery. A low number guaranteed them the opportunity to buy a piece of a dream: a home in Disney's Utopian new community, Celebration.

Located adjacent to Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, Celebration promised a return to the ideal of the American small town, and who better to serve up that dream than kindly old Uncle Walt?

It had been an idea a long time in the making. Disney's original idea for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was very similar to Celebration, so similar in fact that an EPCOT promotional video made shortly before Disney's death in 1966 was expertly edited and used in the promotion of Celebration. Remarked one viewer, He hasn't changed a bit. EPCOT was to be a town of skyscrapers and monorails, a postmodern community of 20,000 with an eye to the future; Celebration, by contrast, found its muse in the past. Celebration promised state-of-the-art infrastructure, progressive schools, and high-tech shopping convenience, together with a sense of community unknown since the 1950s. Houses were to be spaced more tightly together than in the typical suburb to foster a feeling of togetherness. Front porches were to be located close to the street (and to one another) so that neighbors could be, well, neighborly. It was a dream that was to go horribly awry, a place where badly built homes sank into the swamp, where alligators were regular visitors to the family swimming pools. Encephalitis-bearing mosquitoes bred in the backyards, and people complained endlessly about the unfulfilled promises.

Two new books address the phenomenon of Celebration: The Celebration Chronicles by Andrew Ross and Celebration, USA by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Although they touch on many of the same issues, their perspectives could scarcely be more different. Ross chose a rental apartment as his domicile, Frantz and Collins a $300,000 house. Ross moved from Manhattan, Frantz and Collins from suburban Connecticut. Ross is divorced, a rare solo denizen of Celebration; Frantz and Collins are married with school-age children.

Ross tells us of his humorous experiences with interior design consultants who helped in the decoration of his apartment:

"She warned me that she was itching to be let loose to redesign my 'little space.' Protocol demanded that she consult my tastes, however, and she promised that when the time came we would go shopping together in the showrooms. Passing on each of the national traditions on offer, I expressed my preference for Mediterranean colors and local decorative elements. This was a frank provocation, because it did not cater directly to the expertise of my guests . . . But they were undeterred by my lack of imagination. What colors interested me? Turquoise and jasmine. Both were 'in' at the moment. Everything I mentioned happened to be 'in.' We agreed on leopard-skin prints . . . "

Frantz and Collins on new neighbors:

"In Celebration, friendships, like the town itself, were instant, popping up as fast as the moving trucks unloaded new lives. The natural instinct was to resist these new relationships even as we went on forming them. On the surface, they sometimes seemed too easy. Yet what was this community itself except common interests and a shared outlook on life? The same dreams brought most of us to Celebration, just as the earliest city dwellers sought safety and better lives through group living five thousand years ago."

Both books, though quite different in nature, are insightful and thought-provoking. Each offers good humor, excellent research, compelling anecdotes. Celebration was (and is) a town of contradictions: modern vs. traditional, individuality vs. conformity, nature vs. mankind. A microcosm of America, with a uniquely Disneyesque twist.

Bruce Tierney is a writer and songwriter.

William Strachey wanted to be a writer. He hoped to publish travel narratives and sonnets; his best friend in London was John Dunne. Strachey enjoyed reading the chronicles of New World explorers and had seen indigenous people who were captured and brought to Europe. But in 1609, after 10 years in London without any notable success and his inheritance running low, the 32- year-old left his wife and two sons behind and signed on for the largest expedition ever sent to Jamestown by the Virginia Company.

Strachey’s extraordinary journey to Jamestown was interrupted by a hurricane and a shipwreck in Bermuda, where he was stranded for almost a year. He was a careful observer and gifted writer about that experience as well as about the life of the Jamestown colony, where he was especially interested in the native people. Strachey could not know until later that his writing would inspire the last play William Shakespeare wrote alone, and that the play would include many of Strachey’s own words, among them the play’s title: The Tempest.

Hobson Woodward masterfully tells this fascinating, harrowing story of adventure and survival in A Brave Vessel. Drawing on Strachey’s journals and other authoritative sources, Woodward shows, in a most compelling manner, how dangerous such a voyage was.

The place in Bermuda where Strachey and his shipmates finally landed after being tossed by the storm was the only place on the island’s entire coast deep enough to allow a large ship to approach so close. On the island, there were much hard work and mutinies, but the voyagers had found a generally wonderful place that was free of disease, unlike plague-ravished London. Many did not want to leave, but most did. What they found when they finally arrived in Jamestown, however, shocked them. Only about 90 of the 245 original settlers had survived a winter of starvation and Indian attacks. Conditions were so bad, the colony was abandoned and only the arrival of a new governor, Lord Delaware, reversed the decision that would have perhaps changed the course of history, and even theatrical and literary history. Strachey was appointed secretary of the colony, allowing him to do officially what he hoped to do on his own—write about events and people in the New World.

Strachey also wrote to a possible patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, who had earlier supported Dunne. The narrative sent to this “Excellent Lady” is most likely the source from which Shakespeare read Strachey’s work. In two excellent chapters, Woodward discusses in significant detail the parallels between Strachey’s writings and The Tempest. They include the use of certain words, expressions and themes unique to Strachey. Woodward also notes, for example, that Shakespeare’s character Caliban had attributes that appeared to come from a mix of animal allusions in Strachey’s text.

Woodward believes that while Strachey would have been flattered to see his influence in the play, he would have also believed that The Tempest was merely popular entertainment that would fade away. He would have felt it was up to him to write a work of literature that would endure.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

While it’s easy enough to show that the events of any given year were pivotal to one cause or another, Fred Kaplan makes a persuasive argument in 1959: The Year Everything Changed that the highlighted year was a real political, scientific and artistic watershed. It was the year Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission issued its withering report on racial discrimination in America, the microchip and the birth control pill were introduced, and the first American soldiers were killed in Vietnam.

In addition, relations eased between the U.S. and Russia, thanks to high-level diplomatic exchanges; scientists probed deeper into space; courts overturned literary censorship laws; and jazz musicians, painters and comedians debuted exciting new forms of expression. (Having been a 24-year-old and reasonably culturally aware graduate student in 1959, this reviewer thinks Kaplan should have also mentioned the then rising tide of politically tinged folk music.)

Fortunately, the author does a great deal more than merely enumerate this torrent of transitional wonders. He also fills in each of their backstories and demonstrates subtle connections between seemingly discrete occurrences. Naturally enough, he ends the book with a chapter on Sen. John F. Kennedy laying the groundwork for what would turn out to be his successful run for the presidency the following year.

As Kaplan correctly concludes, 1959 set the stage for the massive “upheavals of the subsequent decades.” America would quickly end its love affair with Castro. The Cuban missile crisis would soon sweep away the threads of harmony between the two reigning superpowers. Civil rights would move from the courts into the streets of Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham and beyond. The pill would enable Americans to make love without fear even as they made war with increasing fearfulness in Vietnam.

“Above all,” says Kaplan, “there was suddenly a palpable sense [in 1959]—brought on by jet travel, space exploration, and the shift from nuclear domination to a competitive arms race—that the world was shrinking and that America was part of that world, locked into it, no longer merely affecting events but also affected by them. . . . ”

Fifty years later, the country is still coming to terms with those realities.