How much more can possibly be written about World War II? A whole lot, as American historian Rick Atkinson said in a 2013 BookPage interview. (“There will be more to write about this [war] forever,” Atkinson told us.) James Holland’s The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941, the first of a planned three-volume series called The War in the West, is a great example of how a re-examination of historical accounts leads to new insights that urge us to reconsider the common wisdom about one of the most well-documented wars in history.

Holland, a best-selling British Gen-X military historian and novelist, and his publisher have promoted this book as a revisionist history of the war because it challenges the widely held view that at the outbreak of the war, Germany held all the cards in terms of the best trained and equipped military. Britain and its allies wandered about in a tactical desert, out-trained, out-armed, out-foxed and out-maneuvered until the slumbering British war machine and then the Americans awoke and mobilized, so the old story goes.

Examining the operational minutia of the war—the economies of scale in the production of uniforms and weaponry, for example—Holland complicates that earlier notion in fascinating ways. It’s obvious but has been largely unremarked, he notes, that to have a mechanized army (one of the supposed advantages of the German army) you also need to have the truck and tank mechanics and the supply chain to keep the machines running. To a surprising degree at the outbreak of the war, Germany still relied on the horse, and did not have the necessary infrastructure to sustain its supposed mechanical advantage.

Holland also argues that earlier views of the progress of the war follow Hitler’s own strategic biases in seeing World War II as a land-based operation in which the huge German army dwarfed the small British army. But this ignores the fact that in a global war the advantage lies with those who can protect their sources of raw materials, as the dominant British Navy could and did.

This, in very reduced form, is the provocative thesis of this book. Fortunately, Holland supports this thesis with riveting detail and a novelist’s narrative skill. Like Atkinson, he draws vividly on personal and official accounts, ranging easily between front-line experiences and high-level strategy to tell the gripping story of the war in Europe up until the German invasion of the U.S.S.R., a period when the U.S. had not yet entered the war. It’s a compelling account, one that readers with an abiding interest in World War II will want to add to their libraries.

The stupendously wealthy 5th Duke of Portland had a very weird obsession: building underground. At his order, tunnels, a ballroom, a church and a vast network of chambers were constructed underneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey in England. It might also be said he lived an underground life, avoiding human contact whenever possible. He communicated with his servants by written message and traveled mostly at night, with a lantern attached to his belt.

So when a middle-aged widow named Anna Maria Druce claimed in court in 1898 that her late father-in-law T.C. Druce, a successful London retail merchant, had, in fact, been the late 5th Duke in disguise, it seemed improbable, but perhaps not impossible. So began one of the stranger legal cases in British history. It was a public sensation for the next decade.

Author Piu Marie Eatwell brings this bizarre story to a modern audience in The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse, and it’s as entertaining now as ever. In vivid, cinematic scenes, she lays out the battles between Anna Maria and her allies against the 6th Duke and her own Druce relatives, who thought she was nuts. The case got even more outlandish as secrets emerged about T.C. Druce that brought a whole new cast of colorful Australian relatives into the picture. To top it off, the legendary Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard played a pivotal role in the inquiry.

Wonderful as that all is, the best part of the book is the last third, where Eatwell describes her own investigation. The outcome of the Druce case in 1907 is a matter of record, but there was much those Edwardian lawyers either didn’t know or didn’t reveal. Eatwell finds letters, documents and pictures that provide a completely different perspective on the odd 5th Duke—and expose anew the extraordinary hypocrisy of which some 19th century patriarchs were capable. 

Like so many Americans, writer Rita Gabis has mixed ancestry. Her late father was Jewish and her mother is a Lithuanian Catholic, whose family emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Gabis knew her maternal grandfather—“Senelis” in Lithuanian—as a fond elderly man who bought her treats and took her fishing. But she had one disturbing memory: the time he told her, “No be like your father . . . Jews no good.”

It wasn’t until Senelis was long dead that her mother mentioned that he had worked for the Germans during the war—that is, the Nazis occupying Lithuania. He was a police chief. In other words, there was a good chance her dear grandpa had persecuted Jews.

A Guest at the Shooters’ Banquet is Gabis’ gripping, psychologically acute account of her search for the truth about him, a wrenching personal journey. Was Pranas Puronis a Lithuanian patriot who helped the Nazis’ victims? Or was he one of the killers? Trapped or complicit? Gabis talks with relatives and Holocaust survivors, digs through records, travels to Lithuania and environs. Most moving are her interviews with elderly Jews who escaped the bloodlands where their families and friends died—remarkable people of brains, courage and wisdom.

Their country had been a stew of competing ethnicities. Many Lithuanians hated the Soviet Russians who were the first occupiers and welcomed the Germans as liberators. While some Lithuanians helped Jews, it is clear that others massacred thousands of Jews and Poles, under the direction of Germans. It was less clear to Gabis for a long time what role her grandfather played in that horror. Everyone seemed to have a different story.

Ultimately, an obscure Polish court file provides answers. But it’s Gabis’ resolute hunt and expressive prose that really illuminate these years of anguish.

One of the most rewarding aspects of travel can happen before we leave home: reading about our destination. While a good guidebook is indispensible, a history can do much to enrich our understanding of the place and people we are about to meet.

Such is the case with Susanna Moore’s vibrant new book, Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii. A novelist (The Life of Objects) who has also written a memoir about growing up in the 50th state (I Myself Have Seen It), Moore brings considerable storytelling skills to her subject. She sees the history of the Hawaiian Islands as “a story of arrivals,” one that encompasses not only flora and fauna blown by the winds but early Polynesian travelers, explorers, missionaries and whalers.

Moore focuses most intensively on the often heartbreaking clashes that arose when native Hawaiians came in contact with Europeans, beginning with Captain Cook’s landing in 1778. For the native people of Hawaii, foreigners became “the source of the darkness that made darkness.”

It took a little more than a century for this isolated, structured society to undergo profound cultural and social transformations that had a devastating impact. As Moore notes, “the Hawaiian people, thanks to the introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity, and an encompassing melancholia that overtook them with the loss of their culture, came close to disappearing as a race.”

While Moore’s book does not extend to present day, it will likely make readers curious to find out more, which is just as it should be. “The task of understanding the past is never-ending,” she writes. Paradise of the Pacific reminds us that beyond Hawaii’s beautiful beaches lies a complex, multi-layered history we can only begin to appreciate.

No one writes about history like Judith Flanders. Reading her work (The Victorian City, Inside the Victorian Home) is like going back in time with an expert guide at your side.

In her new book, The Making of Home, Flanders ventures beyond one city or time period to explore the political, religious, economic and social factors that led to the notions of home that still influence us today. Make no mistake—this is not a history of decoration or architecture. As Flanders puts it, “It is not the style of chair that is my primary concern, but how people sat on it.” 

While such a broad topic might be dry in the hands of a lesser writer, Flanders boasts an astounding ability to seamlessly weave facts and ideas. In her discussion of the evolution of lighting inside and outside houses, we’re treated to Robert Louis Stevenson’s comments on gas street lamps: “The city-folk had stars of their own; biddable domesticated stars.” Like those stars, every page of this remarkable book sparkles with insights. 

If you’re left curious to know more about, say, the impact of technology on kitchen design and women’s lives, The Making of Home includes extensive notes and an 18-page bibliography.  

As Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” In The Making of Home, Flanders helps us appreciate how much there is to know about something we care about so deeply.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, September 2015

David Maraniss didn’t set out to write a ghost story, but Once in a Great City, his glimmering portrait of Detroit, has a lingering, melancholy quality that will leave the reader thoroughly haunted. 

The story begins on November 9, 1962, a day of tragedies: The Ford Rotunda, an architectural masterpiece that was once one of the nation’s top five tourist attractions, burns to the ground. On the other side of town, the Detroit police ransack the Gotham, a landmark hotel memorialized in prose by Langston Hughes. The Gotham eventually becomes a parking lot, and the Ford Rotunda is never rebuilt.

These troubling opening passages seem to portend the storms that will crash upon the city, yet Maraniss doesn’t linger in the gloom. Instead, he regards them as cracks in an otherwise gorgeous facade, for Detroit in the early 1960s was a tremendous place to be. From the inventors of the Mustang to the producers of Motown Records, Detroit’s movers and shakers were extraordinary. Maraniss brings them to life in vivid flashes, recounting details like the story behind Motown producer Berry Gordy’s nickname, and the tenor of the voice of civil rights advocate Reverend C.L. Franklin, the father of Aretha Franklin.

Once in a Great City has it all: significant scenes, tremendously charismatic figures, even a starry soundtrack. (I challenge anyone to read this book without sneaking off to listen to old Motown favorites like “My Guy.”) Maraniss chronicles events from the fall of 1962 through the spring of 1964. Reading about the city in its heyday is like falling backward in time and running into someone whose youthful blush you’d completely forgotten. Detroit is that someone. She is bright and laughing, flickering before you like a specter from the past. I doubt I’ll forget her anytime soon.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, Dr. Sumner Jackson, a high-profile American-born surgeon, found himself in the perilous position of living a few doors down fashionable Avenue Foch from the Gestapo headquarters. At the time, Jackson was in charge of the American Hospital in Neuilly, only a brisk bicycle ride away from the home he shared with his wife, Toquette, and teenage son, Phillip. America was not then at war with Germany, but Jackson had worked in Paris long enough to count himself among the vanquished and, thus, sympathetic to the resistance.

Alex Kershaw (The Bedford Boys) describes in stark detail how the City of Light quickly became a city of intrigue and terror. Jackson’s neighbor and nemesis was Helmut Knochen, head of the Gestapo in Paris. In addition to the spying apparatus he imported from Germany, Knochen also tapped into the local criminal underworld to recruit an army of informants and torturers. At first, Jackson’s high-placed connections insulated him and his hospital from oppressive German oversight. But his and his wife’s willingness to aid members of the resistance kept them in constant danger of being discovered.

Kershaw shows how Parisians generally and Jews specifically suffered terribly under the occupation. While German officers dined in splendor, ordinary citizens faced starvation. And there were other outrages, too. In 1943, the Germans publicly burned more than 500 works by Miro, Picasso and other artists, deeming them “degenerate.”

A few months before the Allies liberated Paris, the Germans finally imprisoned the Jacksons, including son Phillip, whose family archives and personal recollections served as principal sources for this tense and compelling narrative.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What motivated Adolf Tolkachev to begin spying for the CIA? Was it for money? Did he require an ego boost? Was it based on his hatred of the Soviet system? It likely was a combination of all three. But what mattered most to the CIA was that Tolkachev was delivering a treasure trove of Soviet military secrets during a critical period of the Cold War. Tolkachev’s daring exploits are described in riveting detail in David E. Hoffman’s The Billion Dollar Spy.

Hoffman is a distinguished journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. But in The Billion Dollar Spy, Hoffman’s writing rivals that of noted spy fiction writers the likes of John le Carré, Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum. The difference: Hoffman uses real facts to tell a stranger-than-fiction tale.

It took Tolkachev a year to get the CIA’s attention. A Soviet radar designer, he prowled the streets of Moscow, banging on the widows of cars with U.S. diplomatic license plates. Finally, in 1978, after his fifth attempt, he found a CIA contact. And for the next seven years, he supplied the agency with thousands of pages of classified Soviet military documents. The material provided important insights into the design of Soviet radar and aircraft systems, allowing the Pentagon to improve its defenses while saving the U.S. millions of dollars.

The book contains many potboiler plotlines: the humble civil servant snapping photographs of secret files; the clandestine meetings with his CIA operative; the money exchanges; the near-misses with the KGB. And there are some humorous moments, like the time Tolkachev requests rock albums from his American counterpart, the list containing artists ranging from Led Zeppelin to Alice Cooper.

The Billion Dollar Spy is a page-turner that stands up to any spy novel, not only for its lively writing, but also because it isn’t just based on a true story, it is a true story.

Robert Kennedy often worked in the shadow of his brother John, but he found a sense of purpose and identity when he committed to wipe out corruption in the labor movement. His white whale was Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union, who was uncannily able to evade charges for years despite being up to his neck in criminal behavior. In Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa, author James Neff follows their clashes against a backdrop of Vegas lounges, the Hollywood tabloid press and Washington politics.

We know today that this story doesn't end well for anyone involved; Kennedy was gunned down in 1968 and Hoffa disappeared in 1975, the likely victim of a mafia hit. That said, reading about their years of conflict is as grabby as a James Ellroy-Mario Puzo mashup. Neff's straightforward reporting dazzles us with the odd cameo appearance from Marilyn Monroe, and amps up the shock of violence that includes dousing a reporter with acid.

Hoffa was born poor and was proud of his self-made status, sneering at the Kennedys and their coddled lives. Robert Kennedy plays into this perception when he first takes on Hoffa, barely bothering to build a case against him since his guilt seems self-evident. When that fails to bring him to justice, hundreds of investigators hand-copy IRS documents to build a case, yet once again there's little punishment. Hoffa's cockiness goes too far when President Kennedy is assassinated; upon hearing the news, "(H)e was said to have stood up, climbed on a chair, and cheered," a move that caused several of his employees to quit. Refocusing on building the case against Hoffa helped Kennedy heal after the devastating loss of his brother.

Vendetta makes it clear that crime sometimes pays very well, and that justice can be anything but swift. It can also make for highly entertaining reading.