<b>Follow-up to Churchill’s English-centric view of the world</b> Sir Winston Churchill ended the fourth volume of his <i>History of the English-Speaking Peoples</i> with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. As the first day of that new century dawned, the British Empire spanned the world. Its decline was imminent, but its leaders did not know that. With the exception of Theodore Roosevelt, about to become president of the United States, few Americans imagined their nation’s ascendancy as an international power. Yet the 20th century was to belong to the English-speaking peoples, who defeated Germany and its allies in two world wars, threw Communism on the ash heap of history, and are now struggling against Islamic fascism and terror.

What connects these countries in which the majority of the populations speaks English as a first language the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Ireland is greater than what separates them, Andrew Roberts finds in hs continuation of Churchill’s work. He weaves the strands of major political developments in each country over a century, as this band of nations persisted, triumphed and is doughtily defending themselves still. He declares, they are the last, best hope for Mankind, and their century of sway has been a most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded, and self-sacrificing <i>imperium</i>. Roberts’ scholarship is sweeping, touching on cultural, scientific and intellectual endeavors. Despite his unabashed triumphalism, he marches boldly into minefields of controversy (e.g., Britain’s disastrous handing over of India, Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan), marshaling his evidence and weighing it like a jurist.

It is emphatically not that the English-speaking peoples are inherently better or superior people that accounts for their success, Roberts observes. Instead, he says they have achieved better systems of government than most nations, marked by popular participation and accountability. The English-speaking people cherish the rule of law, with principles established in England’s Glorious Revolution (1688) and the U.S. Constitution (1789). Finally, he says, they tend to be unromantic and literal-minded, seldom dreaming the dystopian dreams of revolutionaries and jihadists.

Never eschewing an opinion, Roberts invites revisionism of some of the century’s supposedly settled issues. He credits Neville Chamberlain’s government with building the armaments that enabled English fighter pilots to win the Battle of Britain and declares that Khrushchev, not Kennedy, won the standoff over Soviet missiles in Cuba. He holds that the U.S. Supreme Court made the legally right decision in the case of <i>Bush v. Gore</i>.

Yet a motif of something akin to sadness surfaces from time to time in Roberts’ epic tour, and that is our English-speaking civilization’s guilt that sometimes amounts to self-hatred. More in sorrow than in anger, he chronicles what he considers the capture of universities in the United States by leftists and politically correct faddists who plunged higher education into an age of darkness.

A plodding prose style would have sunk a book of this scope and scale. Happily, Roberts writes with verve, engagement, Žlan. He enjoys the telling anecdote and the foibles of the characters who bestrode the last century. He sums up masses of detail in pithy paragraphs, and presents his several journeys around the globe with seamless organizational skill.

<i>Jim Summerville writes from Dickson, Tennessee.</i>

In February of 1910, two trains set out to cross the Cascade Mountains of Washington state, steaming from Spokane to Seattle through the remote Stevens Pass. That the Great Northern Railway could build and maintain such a route was heralded as an example of man’s triumph over nature but nature had not yet begun to fight. Within hours, both trains would become trapped in the middle of the stark and desolate pass, caught by a snowstorm greater than any recorded to that day. By the time the ordeal was over, both trains lay crushed by a massive avalanche, and nearly 100 passengers, crew and railroad workers lay dead under the snow. The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America’s Deadliest Avalanche tells their story and the story of those few who survived, as well as that of the railroad men who struggled to free the trains only to have their efforts thwarted and their wisest choice turned into the worst mistake of all.

The book surges along with the inexorable pull of a suspense novel. Gary Krist uses letters and journals of the victims as well as court documents and (often unreliable) newspaper accounts to great effect, reproducing both the conversations and thoughts of the victims and their would-be rescuers. The result produces a dramatic arc that builds in tension as the inevitable disaster approaches, allowing the reader to connect with the participants and become concerned about their fates. The characters themselves are fascinating, a mixture of the heroic and the callous, caught in a battle of man and his machines against the might of nature. The story of the disaster is also linked to the story of the American railroad system and the famous (and sometimes infamous) industry barons who built it, a connection Krist explores with an objective eye, never losing sight of the human drama of the event itself.

The White Cascade offers something for readers of many genres, from history and railroad buffs to fans of disaster stories and tales of human nature. The writing is fluid, skillful and taut, consistently compelling throughout. The trip through The White Cascade is a journey worth taking. Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

The foreign aid provided by France during the American Revolution was crucial to the outcome of the uprising. French funds kept the Revolution alive. As Stacy Schiff points out in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga were French. Four years later, when the British set down their muskets at Yorktown, they surrendered to forces that were equal parts French and American, all of them fed and clothed and paid for by France, and protected by (a French) fleet. Critical to getting this aid from the French monarchy was Benjamin Franklin, revered throughout the world as a scientist and philosopher. But the aid did not come easily. The story of how it was obtained is fascinating and messy, as diplomacy often is. As part of his eight-year mission in France, Franklin also assisted in negotiating the 1783 peace settlement, the terms of which are arguably America’s greatest diplomatic triumph.

Schiff, who received the Pulitzer Prize for biography for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) in 2000, tells this story in engaging detail in the most insightful A Great Improvisation. As she writes, He was inventing foreign policy out of whole cloth, teaching himself diplomacy on the job, while serving as America’s unofficial banker. In addition, Franklin was in charge of his budding nation’s naval affairs and dealing in other areas that were not part of his official instructions. Such matters would have been difficult enough if those who shared his objectives were compatible personally and strategically, but this was not the case. One example was that John Adams, among others, understood that Franklin’s reputation was merited and benefited the American cause. What irked his American colleagues was the difference between the man and the myth. In their eyes, Schiff observes, He ruled by fiat; the Enlightenment-embodying democrat was a bully at home. . . . As his dissenting colleagues saw it, there were no checks on Franklin’s behavior. As (he) saw it, he was operating in a vacuum, forced to make sweeping decisions in areas far outside his expertise, with no hope of guidance in Europe and little in America. To further complicate matters, there were British and French spies everywhere Franklin turned.

The many-sided Franklin and his cause are always at the center of events in A Great Improvisation. But Schiff’s extraordinary scholarship and gift for vivid re-creation of the period also help us to better understand the other major personalities and complex issues involved. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

In America’s 20th-century historical myth, author Lance Morrow says, John F. Kennedy is the Light Prince, Richard Nixon is the Dark Prince and Lyndon Johnson is the False Claimant who came in-between the shapeshifter” who was part victim, part monster. This has its truth of course, as all myths do. But in ways we don’t often consider, these three memorable, if not great, presidents had their similarities. They were of the same generation, shaped by Depression and World War. And they each made key personal choices in the year 1948 that ultimately led to both their triumphs and downfalls. Morrow, a veteran Time magazine writer who now teaches at Boston University, zeroes in on that year and those choices in The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon in 1948, his perceptive, provocative rumination on how the United States started down the path to what it is today. All three men were relatively young congressmen in 1948. Nixon and Kennedy were at the start of their political careers, but Johnson was in the middle of his, and he was deeply frustrated. His primary campaign to move up to the Senate revealed him to be a man willing to do anything to gain power. Nixon in 1948 maneuvered to national prominence by inserting himself into the epic showdown between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss over Chambers’ accusation that Hiss had been a Communist spy. At the expense of both men, Nixon emerged as the Young Crusader, headed for the stars. It was a deeply traumatic year for Kennedy, whose favorite sister, Kathleen, died in a plane crash. Family patriarch Joe Kennedy lied about the circumstances of her death. And Kennedy himself decided to lie about his near-fatal attack of Addison’s disease the start of years of deceit about his health. In writing that is always thoughtful and sometimes gorgeous, Morrow shows that his protagonists opted for amorality at a time when the nation itself was struggling with its post-war self-image. Anne Bartlett is a journalist Washington, D.C.

<b>The general’s story</b> The year is 1971. Army Lieutenant Ezell "EZ" Ware Jr. is the copilot of a Huey Cobra gunship, assigned to do covert missions in Vietnam. His captain is a white man from West Virginia who hates him not because of anything Ware has said or done, but because Ware is black. Returning from a mission, their chopper is hit. They crash in the Vietnamese jungle, with little more than two pistols, a handful of snacks and one canteen. The captain is seriously injured, but together the men must survive tigers, leeches, disease, starvation and Vietcong guerrillas. To do it, they must overcome their hatred for each other.

This is not a Hollywood thriller; it is a true story from Ware’s remarkable life. <b>By Duty Bound: Survival and Redemption in a Time of War</b> tells the story of that life, which begins with a boy born into abject poverty, abandoned by his parents, surrounded by a society that hates him. Despite these obstacles Ware not only survives, but thrives, becoming a decorated Army officer and eventually a general in the California National Guard.

Switching easily back and forth between Ware’s experiences growing up in Jim Crow Mississippi and his harrowing trek through enemy territory, By Duty Bound is a portrait of a man following the vaguest hints of hope for escape, for a better life, for freedom whether from Vietcong guerrillas or the violent racism of his own countrymen. In the end, his story is as much about America’s struggles as it is about Ware himself. It is a story worth the telling, and worth the reading.

<i> HOWARD SHIRLEY</i>

Joseph Wheelan raises serious questions about Thomas Jefferson’s legacy as a wise, elegant and eloquent Founding Father in Jefferson’s Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary. “Belying his carefully constructed image of benevolence was Jefferson’s dark history of vindictiveness,” Whelan writes. That aspect of the third president’s character is the focus of this book about Jefferson’s efforts to rein in the power of the federal judiciary, which he believed had overreached its authority, as well as his zeal in tracking and prosecuting his former vice president on a charge of treason.

Aaron Burr was bright, energetic and from a distinguished family. A skilled politician, he came close to being elected president in 1800. Although he was on the Republican ticket as its vice presidential candidate, the electoral system at that time gave him the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson. The tie in the House of Representatives was not broken until a Burr supporter switched his vote to Jefferson in exchange for the latter’s commitment to certain Federalist policies. Burr’s refusal to bow out of the presidential race, after having agreed to do so, fueled a hostility that created an irreparable breach between the two men. In 1806, when Jefferson learned that Burr was pursuing an ill-advised attempt to appropriate Spanish territory in North America, the president led an effort to bring him to trial. Wheelan’s narrative skillfully weaves together political, legal and diplomatic history leading to the most important of Burr’s trials at Richmond, Virginia, in 1807. The re-creation of this lengthy trial, which occupies a considerable portion of the text, is masterfully done. It was the “trial of the century” with appearances by some of the country’s best lawyers, including William Wirt, whose published text of his speech for the prosecution became an “instant classic” according to Wheelan. Wheelan says this speech “probably single-handedly did more than anything else to fix Burr’s villainy in the public memory.” For the defense, Luther Martin spoke for 14 hours over a two-day period.

The presiding judge was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. A Federalist appointed by John Adams and under threat of losing his position, Marshall rendered his opinion in a four-hour presentation which found that the prosecution had not made its case; the jury found Burr “not guilty.” Jefferson’s extraordinary efforts to convict Burr included a national manhunt, a dragnet for evidence and a trial with 140 witnesses, though the president knew his adversary was not guilty.

Wheelan’s stimulating book, with its finely drawn portraits of Burr, Marshall and Jefferson, among many others, helps us to better understand a crucial episode in the early history of the country.

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

Philip II of Spain was, without question, the most powerful ruler in Europe during the 1580s. A zealous Catholic, he felt it was his role to eliminate heretical Protestantism from the continent. At the same time, he envisioned a Spanish empire that would stretch from the Baltic to the New World. As his country’s relationship with England faltered, Philip began to prepare for what he hoped would be the first link in a chain of events to achieve his goals. He decided to invade England. The result was not what Philip had hoped, but led instead to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, one of the major events of Elizabeth I’s reign and of European history in that period.

Neil Hanson, using a wide range of sources, recreates the period and personalities in both countries in magnificent detail in his The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada. He explores the diplomatic, military and commercial aspects of the event as seen from the highest level Philip and Elizabeth and their numerous advisors and military leaders and from the lowest the galley slaves and seamen. As Hanson shows, the outcome came as a surprise to many (“some felt that the mere sight of [the Armada] would be enough to make Elizabeth capitulate”). Others, however, were not so certain of victory. The Venetian ambassador in Madrid noted that the Englishmen bear “a name above all the West for being expert and enterprising in maritime affairs, and the finest fighters upon the sea . . . for the English never yield.” English ships that were not only faster and easier to maneuver, but were also, Hanson writes, “armed with weapons that were, by the standards of the day, precision engineered, delivering projectiles with greater frequency, velocity and accuracy, over a greater range.” Hanson also portrays the sharp contrast between the two royal leaders. Philip, austere and remote, consulted with others, yet remained the grand strategist. He had known battle only once, but, having ruled for 30 years, did not lack self-confidence. Neither did Elizabeth, though Morgan believes, “It was evident that neither the Queen nor her ministers had the slightest comprehension of the tactics that had brought her fleet to victory.” Hanson’s riveting narrative enlightens and stimulates our thinking about a major turning point in European history. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

All right, you maggots, listen up! You say you don’t know what MRE stands for? Can’t tell an RPG from a BAR? Wonder how to dig a foxhole? Well, the Gunny’s gonna tell ya, as only your ever-lovin’ Gunny can! For the straight skinny on all things military from medieval crossbows to futuristic jet fighters few books are more fun than Mail Call. Mail Call is based on the popular History Channel show of the same name, hosted by actor and retired Marine Gunnery Sgt. R. Lee Ermey, “The Gunny” to his fans. The book follows the format of the show, answering viewers’ questions about military life, history and hardware in layman’s terms.

Mail Call draws on a variety of experts, including historians, engineers and military personnel and sometimes the Gunny himself. The book is a quick, fun read, with interesting sidebars, quick facts and photos from the show. Mail Call is divided into six parts Weapons, Gear, Grunts, Airplanes, Ships and Vehicles and each question and answer section is written in a conversational style that’s often quite funny. And of course, the book is peppered with the Gunny’s favorite drill-sergeant jargon, familiar to his fans (and generations of hapless recruits). Oh, and in case you didn’t know, an MRE is a “Meal Ready to Eat” (a precooked food package), an RPG is a Rocket Propelled Grenade, and a BAR is a Browning Automatic Rifle. To find out how to dig a foxhole, you’ll have to read the book!