Those of us who are fans of gangster stories have been saturated (oversaturated, perhaps?) in the Lucky-Bugsy-Meyer saga, rooted in New York but with memorable offshoots in Havana, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Well, here’s a fresh cast and venue: the casino crowd of Hot Springs, Arkansas, arguably America’s gambling capital until it all came crashing down in the mid-1960s.

Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky do make cameos in The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice, David Hill’s true crime narrative of the spa resort town from the ’30s through the ’60s. But the big players are the less-remembered mobster Owney Madden, casino boss Dane Harris and a raft of crooked homegrown pols, judges and cops—with a fleeting appearance by Hot Springs resident Virginia Clinton and her promising son Bill.

It’s still astonishing how open Hot Springs’ vice industry was, with city leaders acting as an integral part of the criminal establishment. Madden was the mob’s guy in town, but he quickly assimilated to the local landscape. Harris, the son of a bootlegger, had aspirations of respectability; he’s the Michael Corleone of the story. He wanted the clubs, led by his gang of Vapors, to be glossy entertainment palaces. Harris did his best with payoffs and vote-buying, but internecine fighting that featured bomb explosions and pressure from Bobby Kennedy’s Department of Justice ended his dream.

The history is fascinating, but what makes The Vapors a compelling—and ultimately heartwrenching—book is the author’s account of his own family, who lived in Hot Springs during the casino heyday. His grandmother Hazel Hill landed there as a teen, drifted into casino work after leaving her violent, alcoholic husband and neglected her sons as she fell into her own sad addictions. Hill tells the hard truth of her life with compassion and context.

Amid all this mayhem, one person in the book emerges as a beacon of decency: Jimmy Hill, Hazel’s youngest son and the author’s father. Intelligence, hard work, athletic talent and loyal friends led him to a better life. Dane Harris should have been so lucky.

During the 1920s and ’30s, Americans who wanted to learn what was happening in other parts of the world depended on newspapers, magazines and books. In her beautifully crafted and engrossing Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, Harvard historian Nancy F. Cott vividly portrays the important work and complicated lives of four prominent foreign correspondents during a time of monumental change. Bright and resourceful, they let Americans know what was happening in the devastating aftermath of World War I—in Europe as fascism was on the rise, in a deeply divided Middle East, in Russia when Stalin ruled and in China as revolution grew. They were astute observers and often better than diplomats in assessing what was going on.

Aspiring novelists Vincent Sheean and John Gunther were eager to get to Europe, where they hoped to find work as journalists to support themselves. Dorothy Thompson wanted to get to Europe, too, uncertain of how she would earn a living but proving to be a natural reporter. Rayna Raphaelson Prohme yearned to go to China, where she believed a historic transition, “the biggest struggle that is taking place in all the world,” was happening.

Sheean became best known for his Personal History, a bestselling account of his life during the 1920s. Gunther wrote the bestsellers Inside Europe and Inside U.S.A. but is best remembered for his Death Be Not Proud, a portrait of his son’s illness and death. Thompson’s reporting, including an interview with Hitler, was exceptional, and she became an influential newspaper and magazine columnist and radio commentator. Prohme’s path was quite different from the others but certainly fascinating.

This wonderfully readable narrative will hold your attention from beginning to end and features cameos by journalist Louise Bryant (the widow of fellow journalist John Reed) and the prominent authors Rebecca West and Sinclair Lewis, who was Thompson’s husband when he received the Nobel Prize in literature.

The 37th and 38th Congresses, who served from 1861 until 1865, were among the most important in American history. They passed legislation that kept the nation together during the Civil War, but they also broke ground on other extraordinary measures—such as Western homesteading, land-grant colleges and the Transcontinental Railroad, which transformed the U.S. socially and economically. In his compelling and vivid Congress at War, Fergus M. Bordewich delves deep into the difficult day-to-day politics that drove these achievements.

In focus are four key members of Congress. Three were Republicans: Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, both called Radicals, and Senator William Fessenden of Maine, who was more cautious. The fourth was Clement Vallandigham, a Democrat from Ohio with Southern sympathies.

Stevens, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, dealt with the daily expenses of the military, as well as critical war measures. Fessenden’s greatest contribution to the Union victory was his leadership of the Senate Finance Committee, where he raised the money to sustain the war through crisis after crisis. What’s more, his vote to acquit Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial may have decisively changed the course of history. Vallandigham was one of the great dissenters in our history, while Wade ably and effectively chaired the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Many congressmen insisted that they had the power to shape the course of the war. Some were even ahead of President Lincoln in such matters as the emancipation of slaves, enacting an incremental series of laws that helped abolitionism become public policy. One of their boldest and most controversial actions was the establishment of the aforementioned Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which, over four years, investigated almost every aspect of the war and pressured the president to move more decisively against slavery and to take more aggressive military action.

This recounting of a pivotal time in our history is superb and deserves a wide readership.