The Paris World’s Fair of 1889, held to mark the centennial of the French Revolution, also looked to the future. Gustave Eiffel’s Tour en Fer was and remains an engineering marvel, in part because the builder had only minimal technical training in engineering and architecture. What he possessed can’t be fully explained, as genius cannot be. But in Eiffel’s Tower, Jill Jonnes (Empires of Light, Conquering Gotham) presents an engaging story of a great engineer, one with an “attractive boldness, impetuosity, and natural courage.” His triumphant creation marked the beginning of the age of technology.

Eiffel “loved designing and erecting gigantic practical structures,” Jonnes writes. His career as a builder of railroad bridges had demonstrated his meta-cognitive skills in mathematics and logistics. In winning the commission for the fair’s centerpiece, he stood against the arts and cultural establishment of his day, who reviled the proposed tower. Jonnes’ account of its construction is thrilling. Eiffel’s plans sometimes depended on measurements with a margin of error no greater than one-tenth of a millimeter. His cranes hoisted large plates of metal high into the sky, and each level depended on the solidity and integrity of those below it. The builders worked their hammers and stoked their forges hundreds of feet above the ground in the icy winds of Paris winters, driven by a fiendish schedule so the tower would be ready when the fair opened. At 984 feet it was done, on March 31, 1889, then and forever a symbol of French grandeur.

Returning throughout to the tower, Jonnes tells the rest of the story of the Paris exposition through the lives of others drawn there dreaming big dreams. William (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody took his Wild West Show to the fair, and Parisians overflowed the stands. James McNeill Whistler’s exhibit enjoyed a brief adulation, while Paul Gauguin’s exhibits garnered less enthusiasm. As the years passed, other lives revolved around the great structure, including the soldiers determined to raise the tricolor above Paris when the Nazis were defeated. That moving story fittingly closes this absorbing, wonderfully crafted and well-told tale.

James Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

Mid – April 1961: the Bay of Pigs Invasion. May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space. Late May 1961: President and Mrs. Kennedy travel to Paris. Of the three events, the last might seem the least significant, but that visit – of which JFK famously quipped “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it” – led to a spectacular feat. The first lady charmed Parisians with her style, grace and fluent French and scored an even bigger coup when the French Minister of Culture promised to loan her the “Mona Lisa,” the most valuable work in the Louvre. Margaret Leslie Davis perfectly captures the magic of the Kennedy White House, behind – the – scenes maneuvering and the stories of the major players on both sides of the Atlantic in Mona Lisa in Camelot.

In the beginning, only Mrs. Kennedy and Andr

During the 19th century, as the United States developed economically, many people broke family ties, some forever, and headed west or to sea where they could reinvent themselves. A notable exception was the Whitman family of Brooklyn. Walter Sr. was a master carpenter and engaged in building houses. There were nine children in all; at a time of high infant mortality, only one died in infancy. The best known today is the second oldest, Walt, who became perhaps the most original American poet of the century. But his youngest brothers—George, who distinguished himself as an officer in the Union army during the Civil War, and Jeff, who became one of the century’s great engineers—were well-known and admired during their lifetimes. The entire family, and especially these three brothers, remained close throughout their lives.

Robert Roper, award-winning author of works of fiction and nonfiction, explores the brothers’ relationship and, by extension, the many wounded Civil War soldiers Walt visited in hospitals in the superb Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War. Walt made more than 600 visits and claimed to have tended to 80,000 to 100,000 men in his role as a nurse, or, as he preferred, "visitor and consolatory." His close friend and biographer, John Burroughs, described him as a "great tender mother-man" at a time when most nurses were men. Walt wrote that it was a womanly, indeed a motherly, approach that was most helpful in the hospitals.

Roper shows in detail how crucial his relationship to his family was in this endeavor and in his development as a writer and poet. He also describes how the three Whitman brothers were skillful in dealing with other people, especially other men, good at personal politicking and winning their trust, while advancing their own self-interests. He shows how each brother was always alert to the needs of the others.

A key role in the family was played by their mother, Louisa, who remained Walt’s most intimate correspondent until her death in 1873. After her husband’s death in 1855, her sons, primarily Walt, were responsible for the family income. George, who led soldiers in 21 major battles and was in a Confederate prison camp toward the end of the war, also wrote letters to her that dealt with virtually every aspect of his experience. Roper strongly disagrees with those Whitman biographers who have portrayed her as ignorant and incurious; instead, he demonstrates her ability to understand and appreciate a wide range of experience.

This fine book has several focuses. First, it is a biography of a family, especially during the war years, told in great part with a judicious use of letters. Secondly, Roper details Walt’s work in the hospitals and shows how he was able to write about it at a time when other gifted writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James and William Dean Howells did not write about the war at all. Roper is aware of Walt’s limitations in this regard—he was a knowledgeable noncombatant but never saw a battle in progress and in writing of soldiers’ experiences, he did not get into their complex feelings. And finally, Roper probes Whitman’s thoughts about death, suffering and killing, among other subjects.

Roper’s evocative narrative impressively conveys the life and times of one of America’s greatest writers in a time of the nation’s greatest crisis.

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

Nathan Hale is best known for what are reported to have been his last words, often misquoted or paraphrased, before he was hanged by the British as an American spy during the Revolutionary War. The most authoritative source we have puts Hale’s famous last line this way: “I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged that my only regret is that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.” As M. William Phelps demonstrates in his extensively researched and compellingly written new biography, Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America’s First Spy, the young man responsible for these last words was a serious scholar and fun – loving patriot, a man of courage and accomplishment. Phelps takes issue with those who see Hale as no more than one of many junior officers who, had he not died as he did, would not have been long remembered.

Phelps goes to great lengths to separate fact from legend or myth; the footnotes alone make for fascinating reading. Drawing on letters to and from Hale and many other sources, Phelps is able to plausibly reconstruct his subject’s life: his youth on a Connecticut farm, his student years at Yale, his time as a teacher, his service as an officer in George Washington’s army and his capture and execution in New York. Phelps also keeps us advised of developments in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and troop movements in Boston and other places throughout Hale’s life. We get a strong sense of Hale’s growing commitment to the new republic and, from his upbringing in a religious home, his understanding that it was God’s will for him to fight against England.

Based on Hale’s journal during the period when he served in Boston, Phelps shows that he was held to a much higher standard than other captains because he was intelligent, well – educated and well – read. Many others of his rank were illiterate. Also, it is very likely that one of the reasons Hale was chosen for the ill – fated spy mission was his scientific knowledge.

Phelps quotes from the diary of a British officer who heard about the spy’s death from witnesses at the scene. They spoke of Hale’s composure and resolution and reported that Hale said it was the duty of every good officer to obey orders given by his commander – in – chief and “desired the Spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.” This extraordinarily well – documented biography brings Hale and his times vividly to life. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace told the story of how the atomic bomb was constructed in the "secret city" of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Now in The Irregulars, she uncovers another World War II episode: the invasion of Washington, D.C., by a corps of dashing, well-spoken British spies whose job was to turn the country from isolationism to full-throated support of England’s fight against fascism.

Among this gifted phalanx were the playwright and actor Noël Coward, future James Bond creator Ian Fleming, future advertising genius David Ogilvy, classical scholar Gilbert Highet, the ridiculously rich and handsome Ivar Bryce (of whom it was said, "It’s terrible the advantages he’s had to overcome") and, towering above them all, budding writer and Royal Air Force veteran Roald Dahl. Dahl is the focus of Conant’s breezy (but well-documented) narrative.

Organized under the British Security Coordination by Canadian-born spymaster William Stephenson, these agents planted news stories, sowed suspicion toward England’s perceived enemies, whispered into influential ears at cocktail parties and summer outings, and flattered and romanced America’s most powerful women, from liberal first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to conservative U.S. Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (wife of Time and Life publisher Henry Luce). Through the patronage and close friendship of American newspaper and oil tycoon Charles Marsh, Dahl quickly became a fixture in the Washington social scene. He became a trusted companion of Vice President Henry Wallace, played poker with Missouri Sen. Harry Truman and swapped stories with rising political star Lyndon Johnson. Dahl’s was hardly a furtive cloak-and-dagger operation.

Even after America committed itself wholeheartedly to the war, the "Irregulars" stayed on, monitoring and nudging internal politics and gathering information about the country’s plans for its postwar global dominance. Dahl would go on, of course, to become internationally famous as the writer of adult and children’s fiction (most notably Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and husband of the actress Patricia Neal.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.