On November 11, 1918, at 10:59 a.m., war raged in Europe. One minute later, the guns went silent. This book is the story of that moment and that war. Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour refers to the terms of the armistice signed in France at 5 a.m. calling for fighting to cease six hours later, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918. Since the armistice established the political and territorial results of the war, any further combat gains or losses had no bearing on the final outcome. From the point of the signing (indeed, from the moment the armistice negotiations began) military action was both superfluous and meaningless, an exercise in machismo devoid of purpose or rationale. And yet the fighting continued, right up to the final hour, egged on by generals more concerned about dubious points of honor than the lives of their men.

Best-selling author of Roosevelt’s Secret War and co-author of Colin Powell’s My American Journey, Joseph Persico creates more than a historical account of events or an examination of high strategy. These are in the book, but for Persico the real story of the war is told by those who lived it: the men in the trenches. Using personal letters, diaries and memoirs of men and women from all sides of the war, Persico recreates the experiences, thoughts and emotions of the common soldiers German, American, English and French. Their words and actions reveal their motivations, their fears, their proudest moments and their failings. Against these, Persico contrasts generals and politicians lost in grand delusions of empire or utopia. Through all these eyes, the reader sees the war. The result is a study in paradox, as soldiers surrounded by horror and death relish their life in the trenches, while their leaders seek an end to war, but order men into senseless slaughter for no achievable purpose.

Persico alternates between the story of the war’s final hours and the progress of the war from 1914 to that last day. The result is a personal level of suspense about the fate of the soldiers whose lives Persico follows. The reader sees the end, the final futile result of years of struggle, lurking ahead for the heroes on a quest for purpose, meaning and glory that simply are not there. We read about soldiers who enter the war convinced of the grandness of the idea, steeped in traditions of parade ground marches, stirring songs and patriotic certitude, only to discover mud-filled trenches infested with vermin, disease and death.

This is not a pleasant book, but it is a superb one. Readers will not settle back to be amused by it or set it aside lightly to be picked up again when the fancy strikes. This is a book about war on its human level, at every human level, from the day laborer gone to fight because he’s told to, to the aristocratic son of privilege gone to fight because the act seems glorious. Even the war’s origins span the gulf of human experience, from an impoverished radical assassin to an absolute monarch. This is a story of a war begun by madness, fought without purpose, guided in folly and ended without accomplishment. It is a story worth reading.

Howard Shirley is a writer and military enthusiast in Nashville.

In 1095, Pope Urban II called for Western European Christians to wage a holy war to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims. Those who served as “soldiers of Christ,” the pope said, would be cleansed of sin. Within several months, 100,000 men and women, from virtually all stations of life (no kings volunteered), answered the call. Their religiously motivated and violent actions set in motion events that radically transformed the relationship between Christians and Muslims; the reverberations are still with us. Thomas Asbridge, a British scholar and Crusade historian, tells the story of the three-year, 3,000-mile journey in his magnificent The First Crusade: A New History. Working from firsthand accounts and the latest Crusade scholarship, Asbridge skillfully combines religious and military history, challenging long-held views in the process. “The crusade was designed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the papacy,” he writes, “the campaign must be seen as an attempt to consolidate papal empowerment and expand Rome’s sphere of influence.” The crusaders themselves had many motives for undertaking the journey; Asbridge is convinced that greed was not a primary one. Recent research shows how incredibly expensive and extremely frightening the journey was. He does note, however, that “perhaps the most significant insight into the medieval mentality offered by the First Crusade is the unequivocal demonstration that authentic Christian devotion and a heartfelt desire for material wealth were not mutually exclusive impulses in the eleventh century.” The First Crusade reached its nadir in June 1098 at the Great Battle of Antioch. Death, hunger, threat of a Muslim attack and a morale crisis appeared to signal defeat. It was only the discovery of a small shard of metal thought to be part of a Holy Lance an event interpreted as a “miracle” that, along with gifted leadership and a lot of luck, inspired the crusaders to achieve a stunning victory against all odds. Asbridge’s excellent account of the first Crusade is consistently enlightening. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

There was one brief shining moment some 40 years ago when the word and the image were in fine balance in the world of politics. Into that time came John F. Kennedy. A handsome man, Kennedy cared very much how he looked, almost to the point of excessive vanity. But he also cared deeply about what he said and how he said it. His rhetorical hero was Winston Churchill, whose bold speeches had fortified a nation fighting for its life. Kennedy was no Churchill, yet whatever else American historians ultimately conclude about him, they will remember his 1961 inaugural address, which contained the memorable line, “Ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country.” In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, Thurston Clarke devotes the kind of attention to Kennedy’s speech that Garry Wills and other writers have recently given to Lincoln’s speeches. His book unintentionally serves as a coda to those analyses; as he notes, the Kennedy administration was the last period in U.S. politics when speeches mattered as much as pictures. And beyond his explication of the words, Clarke shows that it was the perfect speech for that particular point in time. Many who remember those elegant, but powerful phrases assume they were written by Kennedy’s brilliant speechwriter Ted Sorensen an assumption that would have enraged Kennedy. Clarke examines the speech drafts and other evidence to argue that it was a true collaboration between the two men, with the most memorable lines written by Kennedy himself. Certainly the speech was imbued with the president’s philosophy and life experience. As he closely examines the 10 days leading up to the inauguration, Clarke also provides a vivid portrait of the time, the place and the man. Clarke is no unthinking Kennedy acolyte. The president is described in all his complexity, at once brilliant, arrogant, brave, reckless and deadly earnest about making the United States a beacon of freedom in a new era. We seem finally to be far enough away from the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination to see his administration with some objectivity. But as Clarke demonstrates, Kennedy’s presidency started with what deserves to be counted among the great speeches of this country’s history. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

When Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse died in 1691, at the age of 53, she was the richest woman in what was then the English province of New York. Although she was helped early on by an inheritance from the death of her first husband, the achievement was almost exclusively hers. She had a rare combination of extraordinary business acumen including attention to detail, a single-minded ambition and vision with regard to how to achieve continued growth and diversity in her businesses. Jean Zimmerman tells Margaret’s story and that of three of her descendants in the lively and informative The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty.

Zimmerman says Margaret’s independent spirit was central to her successes, but acknowledges that luck also played a crucial role. Growing up during the Dutch Golden Age, Margaret was a product of an egalitarian Dutch tradition, which made such success not only legally possible but also socially acceptable. She had landed in a new country in the process of inventing itself, a place where Old World rules did not always apply. Although higher education was not available to girls and women, Holland was the sole nation in seventeenth-century Europe to offer girls primary education as a matter of course, Zimmerman writes. Further, the Dutch Reformed Church urged equality for women and the Dutch legal system was fairer to women than any other in Europe. When New Netherland came under English rule in 1664, however, the rules began to change; with each passing year, there were fewer women engaged in commerce and their entitlements were restricted. Even then, Margaret, tough and shrewd, was able to exercise much control over business matters.

Zimmerman writes that New Netherland had a number of power couples that grew their fortunes as partners, but no colonial duo matched Margaret Hardenbroeck and Frederick Philipse (her second husband) for mutual involvement in a large-scale commercial enterprise. The family had extensive real estate holdings, but shipping was their area of expertise; they dealt in furs, linens and other textiles, tobacco and slaves ( neither Margaret nor virtually any of her American contemporaries saw trafficking in slaves as wrong, Zimmerman tells us).

Almost half of the book tells Margaret’s story, but Zimmerman also paints vivid portraits of three other women in the family, giving us a mini-history of the wealthy circles in which they moved and how they were affected by events. Catherine, who married Frederick after Margaret’s death, was a first-generation American whose main role was to be a wife. Beyond that, her legacy was to oversee the construction of an impressive stone church. Joanna, who married Margaret’s grandson, concentrated on matters of taste and style and promoting her husband’s career. Her world was shaken when her husband presided over conspiracy trials stemming from a suspected slave revolt. Joanna’s daughter, Mary, was courted by a young George Washington and then married a Loyalist.

Anyone interested in the Colonial period will enjoy The Women of the House. Jean Zimmerman’s extraordinary research and energetic writing helps readers better understand and appreciate the roles played by women during that era. Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Let’s say you like a good gossipy book as much as the next person, but you have a certain reputation to uphold and can’t be seen on the beach with the latest celebrity tell-all. Then you must read When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age, a fascinating social history as well as a fun gossipy read. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain) knows his history. In this book, he looks at the post-Civil War period through a study of the Astors and their lavish hotels. Once simply a place for the stranded passenger to stay the night, hotels became destinations all their own. With their restaurants, tea rooms and open lobbies, they became a place where the public could gather, and they defined what luxury meant to the growing middle class. Furthermore, they were architectural and technical wonders, their plumbing and electrical capacities usually exceeding those in the homes of all but their wealthiest guests.

The real fun of When the Astors Owned New York, however, is its stories of the Astor world. Cousins William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV did not like each other. Their joint venture, the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel, was in fact two hotels: A contract specified that corridors connecting the two buildings could be sealed off if the fragile truce, uncomfortable for both parties, failed to hold. It seems that every famous person had some connection with the Astors or one of their hotels and John Jacob Astor IV became irretrievably tied to our country’s history when he went down with the Titanic. Kaplan has an eye for both the dishy details and the deeper meaning beneath them. This vision makes When the Astors Owned New York the best kind of history: entertaining. Faye Jones is on the faculty of Nashville State Community College.

In the 1990s, a shipwreck was discovered just off the coast of Panama, and from all indications it was a ship from the age of discovery, that exciting, tragic time when two civilizations discovered each other. The discovery of a ship five centuries old is a momentous event, but this shipwreck was something even more special. Its location raised the tantalizing possibility that it might be the Vizca’na, one of Columbus’ four vessels on his last voyage, abandoned due to an infestation of Tarado Navalis shipworm. The Voyage of the Vizca’na: The Mystery of Christopher Columbus’s Last Ship really tells the story of two voyages that of Columbus, with a readable, insightful look at his life and voyages, and that of the various governmental, scientific and private players jockeying to claim the wreck.

German journalists Klaus Brinkbaumer and Clemens Hoges write for the news magazine Der Spiegel and are also students of maritime history. Furthermore, Brinkbaumer is a diver and Hoges writes about underwater archaeology, making them the perfect pair to examine the tale of what really happened to the Vizca’na.

Much has been written about Columbus’ life and accomplishments. He has been accused of genocide and lauded as one of history’s greatest navigators, sometimes in the same sentence. Sadly, as this book shows, the motivations of men haven’t changed much for the better. This is a fascinating, and sometimes frustrating book, but a topic well worth exploring. Being one-quarter Cherokee himself, James Neal Webb likes to joke that when it comes to Columbus, his family met the boat.