The role of codes and codebreakers in World War II has captured public attention recently in The Imitation Game, the biopic about Alan Turing, and the BBC’s miniseries, “The Bletchley Circle.” Bestselling author Max Hastings notes in his introduction to The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945 that his book doesn’t aspire to be a comprehensive narrative of intelligence efforts throughout World War II. Yet he manages to create something even more interesting—a fast-paced narrative that provides rich historical context and leaves readers with a thorough appreciation of the complexities of this mesmerizing subject matter.

Hastings begins by setting the stage for the exploration of the elements of this secret war, reminding readers that many of the conflict’s outcomes were “profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot.” This “struggle for knowledge” was, Hastings tells us, unceasing. Taking a chronological approach, Hastings explores not only the context of the major intelligence efforts, both Allied and Axis, but also brings to life some of the fascinating human stories of those who engaged in spying, information gathering, and code-breaking.

In addition to historical figures like Turing, who has become more widely known in recent years, Hastings introduces a host of characters nearly unknown today, including Ronald Seth, one of the few British agents “turned” by the Germans. He also describes German intelligence efforts, providing a cogent analysis for the Nazis’ failure to match Allied successes in code-making and in code-breaking.

This impeccably researched account will be eagerly embraced by those familiar with WWII history. But readers new to the topic shouldn’t be put off by the size of this hefty volume. Hastings understands that we’re all thrilled by a good spy story, and in this masterful, gripping narrative, he delivers just that.

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read. University of New Mexico Professor Paul Andrew Hutton’s meticulously researched and exhaustively chronicled history of the longest war in U.S. history (1861-1886) reintroduces the many legendary heroes and villains of the early days in America’s Southwest. It is also a thorough accounting of the cost—in lives and destinies—paid by Native Americans, the settlers who claimed their tribal lands and the postwar military forces left looking for another fight.

Leading the way through these tales of barbarism and perfidy in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas is Felix Ward, a one-eyed 12-year-old boy of mixed Irish/Mexican heritage, whose kidnapping by the White Mountain Apaches in a raid on his family’s ranch ignited the many simmering conflicts between settlers and natives. Adopted by the tribe and taught their traditional ways, the youth became Mickey Free, riding astride two cultures as an expert Apache scout for the U.S. Army and the adopted son of his Apache captors. Revered for his hunting and tracking skills and reviled as a “miserable little coyote,” Mickey Free figured in almost all encounters between these enemies, who “could never decide if he was friend or foe.”

Hutton brings to life many characters, among them Geronimo, the last Apache chief to surrender and doomed to become a tourist attraction; Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan, who reportedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian;” the ever-elusive Apache Kid; warriors Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Lozen, and Victorio; and Army scouts Kit Carson and Al Sieber. All played their parts in the “bleak and unforgiving world” known as Apachéria, and all figured in the Indians’ ultimate removal from their tribal lands.

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

The genesis of journalist William Geroux’s new book about U.S. Navy Merchant Marine sailors and their families in World War II is almost as fascinating as the book itself. Geroux first came upon the idea 25 years ago, while covering a forum in which men shared memories of watching merchant ships—targets of German U-boat attacks—explode off the coast of Virginia.

Intrigued, the reporter began to research Mathews County, Virginia, which sent one of the largest concentrations of civilian merchant mariners into treacherous Atlantic waters during the war. The result is The Mathews Men, a gripping, nearly lost story of World War II (“Hurry,” the author was told, while gathering names of possible interviewees) and a moving portrayal of family and community.

Geroux brings a reporter’s keen eye for detail and natural flair for storytelling to his account, which was informed by interviews with surviving members of the Hodges family, which sent seven sons to the Merchant Marine. We meet Captain Jesse Hodges and his wife, Henny, who somehow managed to bear 14 children and run a 60-acre farm while Jesse was absent for long stretches at sea.

After Pearl Harbor, conducting “unrestricted submarine warfare” meant that Japanese shipping was a major target for U.S. submarines in the Pacific. Likewise, American merchant ships carrying critical war supplies were fair game for German U-boat captains in the Atlantic. Geroux brings readers onto ships and into lifeboats to experience U-boat attacks and harrowing survival stories. In his appendix, he lists the 43 ships sunk or damaged by the Germans. Along with the participants, readers experience both the terror at sea and the agonizing tension of families who waited for loved ones to return.

The 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor will occur in December, a reminder that the last survivors of the Greatest Generation will not be with us much longer. Thankfully, Geroux’s dedication and curiosity came in time to bring readers the story of the courageous seamen from Mathews County.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Material historian Mark Kurlansky tells the history of the world through things. In his bestselling books Cod and Salt, he focuses on a particular commodity and explores how it has shaped our global society. Readers will find his latest offering, Paper: Paging Through History, an engaging and informative journey through the history of paper, printing and writing.

Kurlansky focuses on an idea he calls “the technological fallacy.” This is the commonly held belief that new technologies change the world. For example, hasn’t our world changed impressively since the birth of the Internet? But Kurlansky asks us to think differently: It is not so much that new technologies change society, he argues, but that social evolution drives technological innovation. Technologies develop to support social change.

This was as true for ancient Sumeria, Kurlansky proposes, as it is for us. Writing, as we know it, developed in Sumeria as characters called cuneiform that were pressed into clay tablets that denoted trade in commodities. As trade grew, society developed a need to record it. But clay tablets were heavy, and not easily portable, so from that need emerged the invention of papyrus, a lightweight writing material made using the reeds that grew by the river Nile. 

Following the trail of his subject throughout history, Kurlansky begins with Han China, when paper as we know it was most likely invented. After six centuries, during which paper was exclusively an Asian phenomenon, Islamic cultures switched from papyrus to parchment to support developments in mathematics. European paper-making lagged far behind until the Italian Renaissance in the 1500s. Following his topic across time and cultures, Kurlansky leads us into the 21st century and current debates about the end of printing.

Capacious and elegant, Kurlansky’s Paper is an essential history of the stuff books are made from.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Between February 1937 and October 1938, roughly 2,800 Americans fought on the side of the elected government of the Republic of Spain against a fascist rebellion of army officers and Catholic Church leaders led by Francisco Franco. It was, notes Adam Hochschild in this vibrant, compelling and disheartening account, the only time that so many Americans went off to fight in someone else’s civil war. More than a quarter of the volunteers died in the effort.

The fascist uprising began in early 1936 shortly after an underfunded coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, workers and anarchists unexpectedly won the national election and began to transform “the Western European nation closest to feudalism.” The reforms provoked an organized military revolt. At that time wealthy landowners had “holdings sometimes larger than 75,000 acres,” while a vast number of the country’s 24 million people scratched out livings on small plots or had no land at all and worked for the big landowners. As part of the changes after the elections, anarchist-led Catalonia launched a vibrant social revolution that attracted a number of adventurous Americans, among them a 19-year-old newlywed named Lois Orr.

The liveliness of Spain in Our Hearts arises from Hochschild’s deft use of letters and memoirs from idealistic Americans (and others) like Orr. Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the war (but not on the social revolution in Spain) and later transmuted his experiences into the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, figures prominently in the story. So do numerous American journalists, including two New York Times reporters filing slanted stories from opposite sides of the conflict. There is also George Orwell, whose conflicting experiences while fighting for the Republic led him to write a landmark book on the war, Homage to Catalonia. And then there are people like Bob Merriman, a likely model for Hemingway’s fictional hero Robert Jordan. Merriman was a tall, charismatic volunteer whom a classmate, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, described as “the most popular of my generation of graduate students at Berkeley . . . and one of the bravest.” What happened to Merriman is one of the mysteries that haunts this narrative.

This story is also haunted by the complex geopolitics of a war that has been largely overshadowed by World War II. American volunteers, most of them political radicals, viewed the civil war as a first step in a global fight against fascism. Opposing them were Hitler and Mussolini, who used their vigorous support for Franco as a brutal testing ground for their weapons and military ambitions. Meanwhile, American and Western European governments clung to “neutrality,” refusing assistance to the elected government of Spain and forcing the Spanish republic to make, as Hochschild calls it, “a devil’s bargain” for support from the Soviet Union under Stalin.

It was a bargain that led to demoralizing infighting, which helped bring about Franco’s victory in Spain. Weeks before the last American volunteers marched out of Spain in defeat, Neville Chamberlain and allies allowed the emboldened Nazis to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Two weeks afterward, the Nazis attacked synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in what is known as Kristallnacht.

The American volunteers in Spain were, as Hochschild points out, in some ways deluded by their idealism. But they were also prescient in their concern about the rise of fascism. They turned out to be some of the best and most valiant fighters for the cause. As Hochschild writes, “the Americans in Spain win a place in history not for who they were or what they wrote but for what they did.”

In his new book, bestselling military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell turns his attention to a forgotten story of the American Revolution. Today, only a rusted metal sign memorializes 256 Maryland soldiers who fell during the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776. The men were part of a legendary regiment whose heroic actions in that battle—and others in the years to come—helped determine the outcome of the war. 

O’Donnell became curious about the men while on a walking tour of the Brooklyn neighborhood where the undiscovered remains of the soldiers still lie. Through his research, he uncovered the fascinating story of Major Mordecai Gist, who formed an independent company of men in Baltimore in 1774, when war clouds were gathering. The unit would become one of only a few that fought throughout the war, disbanding in November 1783. (Gist, who survived, named his sons Independent and States.)

O’Donnell gives a stirring account of the remarkable resilience and bravery shown by the Maryland soldiers. In the summer of 1776, British troops and warships sailed into New York’s harbors, set on invasion. Compared with the British, the American army was a ragtag affair. 

General George Washington “faced a nearly impossible strategic situation,” O’Donnell notes. Although outmatched and outmaneuvered, the Marylanders proved to be stalwart and daring soldiers, helping to cover the Americans’ retreat and causing Washington to cry, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

While O’Donnell focuses on the Marylanders, his absorbing narrative takes readers into the larger story of the Revolutionary War itself. In the process, he makes a compelling case for honoring these forgotten heroes with more than a rusted sign.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Of all the weird twists in the 40-year drama of building the Washington Monument, perhaps the oddest was in 1855, when a band of rebels staged a coup and seized the project, largely because the board overseeing the construction had accepted a commemorative stone from Pope Pius IX. The Know-Nothing Party faction didn’t give back the monument until 1858.

Of course, the “monument” was then a 153-foot stump, decades from completion. As John Steele Gordon shows in his enjoyable Washington’s Monument, a history of the memorial specifically and obelisks more generally, dysfunction is not a modern phenomenon. Officials dithered over a suitable honor for George Washington from 1783, when Congress first passed a resolution, to 1888, when the obelisk-shaped tower, by then its full 555 feet, officially opened. The pattern: initial community enthusiasm, declining interest, failed fundraising, government bailout.

Gordon calls it “obelisk-shaped” because a real obelisk is by definition a monolith, carved from a single piece of stone. Obelisks were first erected—probably—by the ancient Egyptians, to stand in pairs outside temple entrances. There are still plenty of them around, and Gordon interweaves their stories with that of our monument.  

The heroes of Gordon’s book are the engineers who figured out how to move the ancient obelisks and build the Washington Monument. Each project presented a huge logistical challenge, overcome by technical innovation. These were astounding feats, forever capturing the public imagination: Some 600,000 people visit the Washington Monument annually.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Journalist and globe-trotter Eric Weiner, perhaps best-known for his bestselling book The Geography of Bliss, continues his pursuit of big questions in The Geography of Genius. Why, he wonders, do some conditions give rise to networks of innovators who transform the world? As such a question suggests, Weiner is thinking about genius in a fresh way. He adroitly sidesteps our cultural myth of the solitary prodigy slaving away in isolation and instead thinks about genius as (always) socially situated, clusters of diamonds shining brightly in their original settings. “Certain places, at certain times, produced a bumper crop of brilliant minds and good ideas,” he explains.

Weiner generates a list of such places and times, and that list becomes his (and the reader’s) travel itinerary. From ancient Athens to contemporary Silicon Valley, with stops in China, India and Austria along the way, it’s a pleasurable ride. Like Socrates, Weiner enjoys coming to insights through dialogue, and so readers are introduced to a number of characters with whom he discusses his theories about genius. These interlocutors—whether Tony, who owns Tony’s Hotel in Greece, or Friederike, a “friend of a friend” who hosts a classical music show at a radio station in Vienna—add an immediacy the book. The reader has the sense that the ideas and insights arrived at through this talk are spontaneous. The progression feels natural, which is a pretty neat trick.

The fun, relaxed mode is also maintained when outside scholarship is brought in to help situate and consider a particular genius at hand, for instance, whether or not Beethoven’s messy habits contributed to his musical genius. Turning to research at the University of Minnesota that studied whether research participants came up with more creative ideas in messy environments or clean ones, Weiner manages to illuminate Beethoven through an unlikely blend of scholarship, musings about the popular photograph of Einstein’s chaotic desk and on-the-ground observation in Vienna. Well read, thoughtful and above all curious, Weiner invites the reader to explore a satisfying take on a meaningful topic while also enjoying daily pleasures in cities around the world.