Everyone is connected, the argument goes, by a mere six degrees of separation: You have met someone who has met someone (and so on) who has met Queen Elizabeth II. James Burke takes this idea back through history to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. One by one, he traces the 56 names forward through time in American Connections: The Founding Fathers. Networked., leaping across oceans and continents (and even through outer space), until arriving at a modern resolution usually a person with the same name, but in some cases a ship or a shared residence 200 years apart.

Burke’s book is neither history nor biography. Perhaps the best description is to call American Connections a curiosity an experiment in what you can do with names, people and places, from the mundane to the bizarre, to arrive at connections that no one would imagine possible least of all the Founding Fathers. American Connections is best read in small servings, where the oddities can be appreciated as tasty morsels. Pick it up and read about Samuel Adams’ accidental connections with spies, transvestites, poisoners and movie stars. Later, move on to Stephen Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and discover his links to a Nazi warship. Or follow founding father Matthew Thornton to the planet Mars. Burke’s writing moves quickly and is often mixed with wry humor, which adds to the fun. Try it, and see where the quirks of history’s network can lead. Who knows you might find a connection to yourself. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

It is only in hindsight that the course of a particular war seems inevitable. One reads the histories, sees the dominoes tumbling against each other in a clearly defined line and concludes it could not have been otherwise. The fact is, of course, that wars, particularly in their early stages, can shift in many different directions according to the actions that any one of the principals decides to take. It is only after armed forces are arrayed and hostilities commenced that alternate courses begin to close up.

In his latest book, Fateful Choices, British scholar and teacher Ian Kershaw, who won a Wolfson Literary Award for History for the second volume of his study of Adolf Hitler, examines 10 crucial decisions made by national leaders at the outset of World War II, choices that, he maintains, caused that global conflagration to evolve as it did. Those fateful choices all made between the spring of 1940 and the autumn of 1941 were England’s decision to fight Germany rather than make concessions; Hitler’s decision to fight the Soviet Union; Japan’s decision to invade British, French and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia and to ally itself with Germany and Italy; Mussolini’s decision that Italy must invade Greece; Roosevelt’s decision that the U.S. would provide material support to England’s war efforts without actually joining the war; Stalin’s decision to ignore the evidence that Germany was going to attack Russia; Roosevelt’s subsequent decision to wage an undeclared war against Germany; Japan’s decision to declare war on the U.S.; Hitler’s decision to follow Japan’s lead against the U.S.; and Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jews. (This final chapter is heartbreaking to read because there is so little real-world context to make the slaughter seem even remotely rational.) As weighty as Kershaw’s agenda is, he lightens it considerably by compacting each decision into a relatively fast-paced and stand-alone chapter. The number of principal players in the six nations involved is quite daunting, but the author provides a vital dramatis personae (complete job titles, responsibilities and dates) to simplify the matter.

Explaining the urgency under which these crucial decisions were made, Kershaw observes, The colossal risks which both Germany and Japan were prepared to undertake were ultimately rooted in the understanding among the power-elites in both countries of the imperatives of expansion to acquire empire and overcome their status as perceived have not’ nations. The imperialist dominance of Great Britain and the international power (even without formal empire) of the United States posed the great challenge. Whether history teaches anything useful and, if so, what it teaches, is not resolved here. But the study is, apart from its other virtues, a fascinating examination of the differences between how sweeping decisions are made within democracies and within dictatorships. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

With Last Flag Down, their fast-paced Civil War naval history, John Baldwin and Ron Powers add to the recent flotilla of books on the Shenandoah, the daring Confederate raider that preyed on Yankee whaling and merchant ships as far away as the Indian, Pacific and Arctic oceans. Baldwin and Powers’ account draws heavily and creatively on the logbook of Baldwin’s relative, the Shenandoah’s 24-year-old executive officer, Lt. William Conway Whittle.

The Shenandoah has always held a certain mystique for Civil War buffs. Launched in Scotland in 1863, the sleek, black, three-masted racing clipper, christened the Sea King, departed London in October 1864, allegedly as a British transport. Surreptitiously, however, the industrious Southern purchasing agent James D. Bulloch had acquired the vessel for the Confederate navy. Off Madeira, beyond the purview of the U.S. and royal fleets, Rebels converted the Sea King into the armed cruiser Shenandoah. Equipped with a hoisting propeller, a lowering smokestack and eight guns, the swift ship then commenced a year-long world cruise that covered more than 58,000 miles. It then decimated the U.S. whaling fleet in the cold waters of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean.

Baldwin and Powers suggest that to a certain degree, the Shenandoah became the South’s last-gasp secret weapon. Under the command of Lt. Cmdr. James I. Waddell, it successfully roamed international waters in search of Yankee whalers, ultimately bagging 38 prizes. However, the Shenandoah accomplished too little, too late.

After Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army in April 1865, the Shenandoah remained on the prowl in the North Pacific, capturing and burning U.S. ships. Not until August 1865 was Waddell convinced that the Confederate cause had indeed been lost. Unsure of the legal status of himself and his crew, he disarmed the Shenandoah and sailed nonstop to Liverpool, England, arriving in November 1865. The crew lowered the Confederate flag for the last time and awaited their fate.

John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Constructing an atomic bomb particularly one portable enough to be sneaked into a target city is a fiendishly difficult task, William Langewiesche says in The Atomic Bazaar, even for the most well-equipped terrorist network. The greater danger is that poor or underdeveloped nations with unstable governments will be tempted to create atomic arsenals, just as Pakistan and India have already done and as Iran and North Korea seem intent on doing. Despite the efforts by major powers to curtail them, raw materials and know-how are in abundant supply on the world market.

Langewiesche, who subtitles his book The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, offers a well-balanced assessment of where atomic dangers lie and why. He visits the fortified Russian nuclear city of Ozersk to determine how highly enriched uranium might be secured and smuggled out through lax border crossings. Then he sketches in the remarkable career of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic weaponry and, for too long a time, a disseminator of nuclear technology to anyone willing to pay for his lethal expertise. National pride and perceived national interests have both driven developing countries toward acquiring nuclear weapons, although, as Langewiesche points out, some have found the actual building of a production system too daunting to carry out.

Information on who’s doing what in this arena is spotty at best. Langewiesche says that one of the most reliable sources for keeping abreast of nuclear goings-on has been Mark Hibbs, an American-born, German-based reporter for the arcane trade publications Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel. His account of how Hibbs spots nuclear trends in market minutiae makes for an absorbing story and illustrates just how difficult it is to keep the dreaded genie in the bottle.

The desire for self-sufficiency, which will drive proliferation forward, is a measure of a new reality in which limited nuclear wars are possible, Langewiesche concludes, and the use of a few devices, though locally devastating, will not necessarily blossom into a global exchange. . . . [T]he spread of nuclear weapons, even to such countries as North Korea and Iran, may not be as catastrophic as is generally believed and certainly does not meet the category of threat that can justify preemptive wars. Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

In the year after World War I ended, the United States practically suffered a nervous breakdown. The peace conference to conclude a treaty with Germany began at Versailles in January, but by year’s end was in shambles. The bright vision of Woodrow Wilson for a world of nations cooperating for peace ended in rancorous squabbles and squandered hopes. The president, stricken by a stroke as he campaigned across the nation to rally support for Senate ratification of the treaty, was by Christmas 1919 a ghostly presence in the White House. The Senate defeated the pact after the troubled old man refused to compromise and the American people quickly abandoned him and his too-complicated plan to remake the world.

Fear, not hope, predominates in Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919, Ann Hagedorn’s account of this annus terribilis. Hagedorn argues that America during this time quailed in fear of the Russian Revolution. Soon police, government agents and editors looking for a headline spotted Bolsheviks everywhere. And with that fear came calls for starching the nation into a rigid conformity behind a war against the Reds now come home to our shores.

Hagedorn (Beyond the River) finds heroes who resisted the domestic spying and organized attacks on domestic radicalism carried out by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his 25-year-old deputy J. Edgar Hoover. Palmer, Hoover and their hirelings in an elaborate domestic intelligence apparatus regarded speech against government policy as potential sabotage and peaceful demonstration as a clear and present danger.

Fear also marks relations between the races at this time. Hagedorn juxtaposes the terrorism against black people in the United States against Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination of peoples around the world. Time and again she returns to the heinous crime of lynching as evidence of American hypocrisy weighing down the president’s claims of American righteousness. Reviewers will inevitably draw parallels between Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, as Hagedorn and her publicists clearly intend we should.

James Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.

The United States of America officially gained independence from Great Britain in 1783 but the nation itself was not yet fully born. Despite its name, the United States hardly consisted of united states; instead regional disputes over tariffs, territorial claims and international trade made the nation more like a household of squabbling siblings than the harmonious community envisioned in the slogans of 1776. By 1786 men were taking up arms to rebel again, against the very people they had fought beside just three years before. The little-known Shays’ Rebellion resulted in fresh blood soaking the snows of New England a brutal wake-up call that if something wasn’t done soon, all the patriots had fought for would fall apart.

The Summer of 1787 is David O. Stewart’s fascinating account of the response to the crisis: the great Constitutional Convention that produced the nation we know today. Far from the staid and formal procedure depicted in classic American paintings, Stewart presents a process marked by discord and confusion and no small dash of hypocrisy as the delegates argued over what to do about everything from navigation rights to slavery. On some points they made good decisions, even brilliant ones; on others bad, and on all they compromised, trying to craft law that would reconcile their hopes for the future with the sometimes petty expectations of their present.

Stewart writes skillfully and fluidly, making what even the delegates acknowledged as a tiresome process into an interesting, compelling read. He doesn’t gloss over the men’s faults, but presents the Founding Fathers as they were: men with self-interests as well as altruism, flaws as well as wisdom. The forging of a nation is truly a messy process, especially when the laborers do not even know if the nation will accept what they have wrought. Stewart captures this element magnificently, giving the reader an active sense of the tension and doubt the framers faced. The Summer of 1787 is a worthy contribution to the history of the Constitution, not only for its insights into the minds that made our nation, but also as a thoroughly enjoyable read. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, historian and journalist Benjamin Woolley has constructed a far-ranging account of the political machinations and human suffering that went into creating and preserving this tormented English outpost. Original investors gambled that the settlement would yield gold or other mineral riches. In this, they were soon disappointed. It wasn’t long, however, before the region sprouted a more viable form of wealth: tobacco. In 1617, a shipload of that addictive weed netted the colony its first profit. Two years later came the first cargo of African slaves.

Those who know Jamestown only through college textbooks and random PBS specials are likely to visualize it as a lonely, sequestered place clinging to the edge of a trackless wilderness. Not so, says Woolley in Savage Kingdom. Virtually from the time they came ashore, the colonists discovered an array of Indian villages whose inhabitants might be friendly one moment, incredibly savage the next. Still, the interlopers were far more inclined to seek out the natives than avoid them and trading began almost immediately, in no small part because the settlers were low on food. Then there were the equally crippling problems of leadership and priorities. While common sense called for such mundane acts of self-preservation as hunting, planting and building fortifications, the group’s charter and natural inclination were to search for treasure. The mercurial Capt. John Smith, who wrote his own lurid and self-aggrandizing narrative of the times, emerges as Jamestown’s most fascinating figure. Pocahontas, Smith’s supposed savior, is a peripheral character in Woolley’s story until she marries settler John Rolfe. As long as Woolley focuses on the day-to-day life of Jamestown, the drama runs high, but it bogs down perilously when he delves into London politics. Isolated from the mother country, Jamestown became a complete story in its own right; ultimately, that was the story that mattered. Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

There is no dearth of literature on World War II and the Holocaust. But events so cataclysmic, even 60 years later, continue to inspire research into stories not yet fully told. Such is the case with Roger Cohen’s Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble. In early 1945, as Allied bombers began to wreak havoc on Germany’s major cities, Nazi soldiers were ordered to construct a synthetic fuel facility outside the quaint East German village of Berga. To accomplish the necessary hard labor, 350 American GIs captured during the Battle of the Bulge were transferred to the construction site, along with a detail of Hungarian Jews who were otherwise destined for concentration camps.

Berga, it turns out, became little more than a concentration camp itself, where prisoners were beaten, starved and driven beyond their physical endurance, primarily doing the dangerous work of digging underground tunnels. Approximately 25 percent of the captured U.S. soldiers were Jewish, a fact that does not appear coincidental, and it is the intersection between the GIs and the Hungarian internees that drives this account beyond the mere numerical facts and recalls the ugly ghost of Nazi anti-Semitism.

Cohen, a former European bureau chief for The New York Times, followed the human trail of this story with the assistance of the late documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, whose work helped lead Cohen to Berga survivors. Their testimony fills in the blanks about the horrific experience and the fate of those who perished. Cohen also draws upon a few published accounts as well as the records of the National Archives, which well document the awful Berga reality. That evidence includes photographs of the camp when liberated by Allied troops, reproduced here in all their stark grimness. Cohen also provides some background on individual Nazi officers at Berga, and catalogs the policies of such heinous Third Reich figures as Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. This volume certainly functions as yet another reminder of the horrors of war, but its ultimate value exists as a testament to the courage of the men who endured and learned to forge on with their lives.