An imposing book by virtue of size alone, the 640-page Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives is also decidedly ambitious. The dual biography explores the profoundly different paths taken by two iconic and influential German artists in the years before and after Hitler’s rise to power.

The parallel stories of actress-singer Marlene Dietrich and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl are told via an interweaving of politics, culture, German filmmaking, Hollywood and the uncompromising personal lives of the two women. The author, Berlin-based historian Karin Weiland, is up to the task. She doggedly mined a mountain of source materials, including various German archives, and gives context to the complex historical narrative that shaped Dietrich and Riefenstahl. As translated by Shelley Frisch, who previously translated examinations of Einstein, Kafka and Nietzsche, this is a compelling work that provides both scholarly assessment and page-turning dish.

Born within a year of one another, Dietrich and Riefenstahl were part of the early German film industry. They even competed for the same role—cabaret headliner Lola Lola in the 1930 classic The Blue Angel. Dietrich got the part, which paved her way to Hollywood and international stardom. Riefenstahl went on to appear in a series of “mountain films,” a genre that showcased physicality and German nationalism. She also become a comrade of Hitler, and directed documentaries extolling the Third Reich. As every student of film knows, Triumph of the Will (1935) remains one of the greatest, most disturbing pieces of propaganda ever made. Riefenstahl followed it with the equally famous Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Dietrich, meanwhile, emigrated and became a favorite of American moviegoers—the most exotic transplant since Garbo. She took on U.S. citizenship and more than proved her patriotism with wartime work for the USO. She was actually given a rank and a uniform. Captain Dietrich was the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest distinction for civilian contributions to the war effort.

As for Riefenstahl, she later insisted she had no knowledge of what went on behind the walls of Germany’s concentration camps, and claimed to be ignorant of her country’s virulent and deadly anti-Semitism.

The two women enjoyed long lives, as well as latter-day attention. Dietrich reinvented herself in Las Vegas and took her act on the road—complete with diaphanous gown and teetering Ferragamo heels. Riefenstahl became a sought-after photographer and a darling of the film festival circuit. In covering their stories, the author has a clear favorite in the less complicated–and controversial–Dietrich. Your decision awaits.

Subversive historian Sarah Vowell offers another idiosyncratic chronicle of our nation’s coming-of-age with Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. This lively account of the Marquis de Lafayette and the American Revolution is of a piece with Vowell’s previous books, which include Assassination Vacation (2005), a tour of sites dedicated to murdered American presidents, and The Wordy Shipmates (2008), a raucous look at the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These seem like sober subjects, but Vowell enlivens the proceedings with her prickly persona, her thing for slang and her taste for recondite factoids of Americana. 

With her new book, Vowell delivers a fascinating portrait of Lafayette as a dashing young French aristocrat who believed in the cause of the American colonists. Driven by a desire to make a name for himself and by a loathing for the British, Lafayette sailed to America, where he served in Washington’s army, befriending the founding father and becoming his confidant. Through the filter of the Frenchman’s story, Vowell examines the culture of the Revolution. She goes in-depth on the rifts between the Loyalists and the Patriots, between the Continental Congress and the army, and augments the trip back in time with incidents from her travels to historical spots. During a visit to Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley, where Lafayette was wounded in 1777, she takes in a re-enactment of the Frenchman’s story presented as—of all things—a puppet show.

The enjoyment Vowell seems to derive from poking around in America’s obscure corners is part of what makes her historical narratives vital. In tracing history’s circuitous path, she demonstrates how we got where we are today—and sheds light on where we might be heading next.

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

Ancient Rome helps define the way we understand the world and think about ourselves. The ideas of liberty and citizenship, the Western calendar, phrases such as “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and much more came from this one source. Renowned classicist Mary Beard, a professor at Cambridge University, has spent much of the last 50 years studying the literature of the Romans and the thousands of books and papers written about them. Her magnificent, eminently readable SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is an authoritative exploration of how a small and unremarkable village became such a dominant power on three continents. The title of the book refers to the Senate and the Roman People, the main sources of authority in first-century BCE Rome. 

Beard says two things undermine modern myths about early Roman power. First, it’s true that Roman culture placed a high value on success in battle. She doesn’t excuse its terrible brutality. However, violence was endemic in that era, and other peoples were just as committed to warfare and atrocities as the Romans. Second, the Romans didn’t plan to conquer and control Italy. They saw their expansion in terms of making alliances with other people rather than gaining territory. The only long-term obligation the Romans imposed on those they defeated was the provision and upkeep of troops for the Roman armies.

From early times, Roman culture was extraordinarily open to outsiders, which distinguished it from every other ancient city. Peoples of Roman provinces were usually given full citizenship.

Beard notes that the most extraordinary fact about Roman culture is that so much of what they wrote still survives. She gives particular attention to Cicero, where we find “by far the most sustained insight” into the life of a notable Roman.

SPQR is the best kind of history. With a deep knowledge of her subject and a healthy skepticism about what we think we know, she enlightens us with riveting prose while broadening our perspective.

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

James A. Michener had his Tales of the South Pacific. Now comes Simon Winchester—an equally engaging storyteller—with his tales of the vast Pacific, all 64 million square miles of it. To make such a gargantuan subject manageable, he selects specific events which he says symbolize larger cultural, political and scientific truths about the region. One of the most intriguing of these is how Japan’s perfection of pocket-size transistor radios not only gave rise to the Sony consumer electronics empire but also changed how much of the world entertained itself. 

Winchester primarily concerns himself with events that occurred after 1950, the year President Truman gave the go-ahead for developing the hydrogen bomb. In the course of testing that dreaded device, the U.S. callously uprooted island-dwellers from their ancient homelands and showered the area with nuclear detritus, evidence of which still abounds. But the tide has been turning against such arrogance, Winchester says. The French and then the Americans were driven out of Vietnam, Britain had to relinquish Hong Kong to China and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 forced the closing of two huge American military bases, thus creating a power vacuum into which the Chinese military has steadily moved. Winchester’s final chapter describes how China is systematically pushing out into the Pacific to lay claim to what were once Western-dominated waters.

Elsewhere, Winchester probes such Pacific-oriented science stories as the discovery of deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, the alarming phenomenon of coral bleaching and the rise of super storms. But he provides lighter fare, as well, as when the 1959 movie Gidget sparked an international enthusiasm for surfing, a sport long established in Hawaii.

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

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.