There was not a clearly designated successor when Elizabeth I died in March 1603. The traditional approach meant that James VI of Scotland, the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots, would become the English monarch. But, as Leandra de Lisle demonstrates in her masterfully researched After Elizabeth: The Rise of King James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England, James was far from being the straightforward choice. He was personally excluded from consideration, in the eyes of many, by a law that barred from the throne anyone born outside the allegiance of the realm of England. However, he was helped by the fact that other claimants had similar problems.

De Lisle shows how courtiers began considering who would succeed Elizabeth from the beginning of her reign in 1558 and describes the various contenders and their supporters in some detail. An Oxford-trained historian, she writes with admirable clarity. James and Elizabeth come to life before us and the intricate world of those who exercise the levers of power behind the throne is vividly recreated as they maneuver for position and prestige. A highlight of the book is the narrative of James I’s journey from Edinburgh to London, from April 5 to May 7, 1603. This trip gave the English their first opportunity to see and form impressions of their soon-to-be king. Although one of the most intellectually brilliant men ever to occupy the British throne, James’ decisions brought disappointment to many. He did not introduce toleration of religion for Catholics as he’d promised, and though he made significant reforms to the Church of England and brought about a new catechism and translation of the Bible, he did much less than many Puritans had hoped for. De Lisle says that James’ accession owed almost as much to luck as to political talent. If Elizabeth had died two years earlier, it is likely that ambitious and powerful figures might have taken the crown from him or accepted him only with conditions. If she had died later, Spain, France and the Vatican would have chosen an English candidate on whom they could all agree. As it happened, the timing of Elizabeth’s death caught James’ opponents by surprise. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Lawyer/historian James L. Swanson is the coauthor of Lincoln’s Assassins (2001), an enthusiastically received volume that primarily provided a visual record of the persons, places and events surrounding the April 1865 murder of the president and its aftermath. With Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, Swanson explores in dramatic detail John Wilkes Booth’s escape from Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., along with his subsequent flight through Maryland and Virginia, which culminated in his death at the hands of federal cavalry troops.

Rather than merely present a recounting of facts already fairly well known, Swanson draws on the official record and other published testimony and then infuses his text with a fictional sensibility that attempts to get inside the minds and hearts of the principals. Booth, a noted actor in his time and a member of a famous theatrical family, takes center stage, with Swanson offering a nearly heartfelt portrait of the man’s personal charisma and the fanatical devotion to the Southern cause that drove him to his deadly deed.

Swanson also comprehensively covers the backstory leading up to Booth’s history-changing act including his abortive scheme to kidnap Lincoln, which morphed by happenstance into a hastily arranged but effective assassination plan. Swanson’s depiction of the nation’s capital in the days following Lee’s surrender to Grant is vividly wrought, as are his profiles of the public officials determined to bring Booth to justice. In particular, we’re introduced to a heroic secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, who essentially took control of the government in the critical days following Lincoln’s slaying.

With its colorful historical backdrop and tragic underpinnings, the book gathers steam as it goes, with Booth, hobbled by a broken leg, haltingly making his way through the countryside and later across the Potomac River, eventually betrayed by Confederate sympathizers. This is a true-adventure tale of the first rank, and, not surprisingly, the book’s already been snapped up by Hollywood, with Harrison Ford tapped for the lead role as of one of the agents heading up the Booth manhunt. Martin Brady is a writer in Nashville.

<B>Lincoln’s enduring message of hope</B> In his magnificent new work, <B>November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg</B>, author Kent Gramm explains his unusual interpretation of the most celebrated speech in American history, delivered on November 19, 1863. November is nature’s elegy, he writes. Let the month itself stand for grief and faith, a gray month of blank sky and cold winds, beginning in remembrance and ending in expectation a month through whose strange beauty we all must pass and whose alien work must truly be our own. Over 24 chapters, he describes a month in Gettysburg, noting what Lincoln did on the corresponding day in 1863 and relating the events of Lincoln’s life and presidency to momentous events that occurred during subsequent Novembers. Events examined through the lens of Lincoln’s great address include: the 1918 battle death of the promising young poet, Wilfred Owen; Kristallnacht, the 1938 attack against German jews, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and the 1965 battle in Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley, the first major U.S. engagement of the Vietnam War.

Through the book, the author reminds readers of the essential unity of all elegies: lament and hope. Lincoln came to Gettysburg in 1863 as the Civil War raged. With his brief but memorable speech Gramm says that Lincoln, instead of dedicating a cemetery, dedicated a nation and thus transformed grief and despair into purpose and hope.

Essentially, Gramm’s book is a journey of hope. Tragic events, he insists, must be redeemed or they will remain nothing more than tragedies. <B>November</B> is an eloquent, melancholy and beautifully written tribute to Lincoln’s oration. But the book’s power springs from Gramm’s remarkable ability to weave Lincoln’s sentiments of hope and faith into the other stories he tells. <I>Robert Mann is author of</I> A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (<I>Basic</I>).

The early years of the 20th century in Europe were characterized by an accelerating arms race. According to historian David Fromkin, “Europe’s main business had become the business of preparing to fight a war.” In Germany alone, about 90 percent of the Reich’s budget was spent on the army and navy. Total arms spending by the six Great Powers of Europe increased by 50 percent between 1908 and 1913. Yet the Great Powers had lived in peace since 1871. Why should the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand have led to the world’s most devastating war up to that time? Fromkin, best known for his highly regarded study A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Middle East, tackles the origins of this deadly conflict in his magnificent, consistently compelling Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? Using the latest scholarship, and writing with clarity and insight, Fromkin presents evidence that demonstrates that WWI was really two wars. The first was the local war between Austria and Serbia, which was connected with the killing of the Archduke and his wife, Sophie. The second, and much larger, Great War “was caused by the struggle for supremacy among the great European powers . . . Germany deliberately started a European war to keep from being overtaken by Russia,” Fromkin asserts.

The author points out that in the years before the war, many Germans thought their nation was becoming weak. This idea was entirely false: the country was actually growing stronger, in part because of its concern about encirclement by other powers. This concern spurred military funding and development to even greater heights. Germany’s growing military might so concerned its neighbors that France, Russia and England began making contingency plans for self-defense if Germany attacked them.

The author masterfully guides us through the complexities of appropriate prewar European diplomatic and military history. His portraits of the various decision makers and detailed discussions of their policies command our attention.

One of the most fascinating political relationships Fromkin discusses is between Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. “Time and again, through the frequent war crises that were so conspicuous a feature of their time, both men chose peace, and were distrusted by the military in their respective countries for having done so.” Fromkin believes the questions about the origins of the Great War are the most important in modern history. Since the 1960s, new information, primarily from German, Austrian and Serbian sources, has become available. The author asserts that his book “is an attempt to look at the old questions in the light of the new knowledge, to summarize the data, and then to draw some conclusions from it.” I can enthusiastically recommend the result. Roger Bishop is a bookseller in Nashville and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

It took only 18 minutes for the Cunard liner Lusitania to sink after the German submarine U-20 torpedoed it off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. From this blink of history’s eye, Diana Preston has pieced together an adventure story as intriguing and convoluted as the most cunningly fashioned spy novel. She weaves her dramatic tale from a close reading of hundreds of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, court records and related sources.

To put the tragedy in context, Preston first sketches the evolution of the submarine as an instrument of war and notes the resistance it met initially from home military establishments. Nonetheless, when World War I started in 1914, Great Britain had a fleet of 75 subs in service, and Germany had 28. The latter country’s underwater boats, however, were superior and deemed essential to breaking the crippling blockade Britain had imposed. Into this deadly new twist of warfare sailed the luxury liner Lusitania a carrier of civilian passengers, according to England, but a vessel with military significance by German standards. Well before the Lusitania set out from New York on its final voyage, German submarines had been sinking supposedly civilian boats near England. So open were Germany’s intentions on this point that its embassy placed an advertisement in American newspapers warning passengers that they traveled on British ships at their own risk. Most Lusitania passengers, while aware of the warning, accepted the Cunard company’s argument that the ship was too fast and would be too well protected when it reached home waters to be in danger. From such well-known figures as socialite Alfred Vanderbilt to lowly members of the ship’s enormous crew, Preston fleshes out the characters of many of the liner’s passengers. The author also takes us up to the Lusitania’s bridge to become acquainted with the dour, old-school captain, William Turner, and down into the dark and stifling bowels of the U-20, where its relentless commander, Walther Schwieger, waits for his prey.

As vivid as Preston’s descriptions are elsewhere, they rise to the level of poetry when she describes the chaos and elegant acts of heroism that occur as the great ship goes down. The scenes in the water as friends are separated and mothers lose their babies are heartbreaking. Still, Preston is admirably even-handed, refusing to depict the Germans as villains and enabling us to see the reasonableness of their actions from their point of view. The sinking cost 1,198 lives, 128 of them American. While this slaughter provoked an outcry in America, which was still officially neutral, it did not immediately draw the country into war against Germany. That would not occur until nearly two years later. And many more sinkings lay ahead.

<B>Man or machine? It’s a mystery</B> You may have run across the topic of Tom Standage’s new book. The story of the chess-playing contraption called the Turk shows up in volumes on the history of computers, technology and, of course, chess. It’s one of those remarkable little moments in history that would make a wonderful movie. With <B>The Turk</B>, Standage gives us the first full-length treatment of this very peculiar story, a fascinating narrative characterized by rivalry, deception and adventurous travels. In 1769, Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian aristocrat, vowed to Austrian Empress Maria Theresa that he could invent a machine that would be powered by clockwork. Within months, he returned with a mechanical man called, because of his clothing and appearance, the Turk. It was a machine that could play chess. Or was it? At the time, rival inventors protested that Kempelen’s Turk was actually a hoax. They insisted that it was not a machine at all but a conjuring trick in which a small human hidden inside played chess games by operating the arms of the wooden figure. Standage explores all the historical personages involved in this curious saga and examines at length the rival theories about the Turk. Was the Turk a supremely good fraud or the world’s greatest automaton? He was created during a busy time in Europe, as the industrial revolution gained momentum and changed the very structure of society. Despite naysayers, the Turk’s career lasted 85 years, during which he crossed paths with a variety of notables, including Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great and Edgar Allan Poe.

Standage is a vivid and straightforward writer who demonstrates a casual mastery of his chosen topic. In his excellent previous book, <I>The Neptune File</I>, he recounted one of the great stories in astronomy the discovery of the planet Neptune. On a smaller scale, with his fascinating new book, he explores the implications of humanity’s changing relationship with technology in the early days of the industrial revolution. He tells the Turk’s compelling story as it occurred, without revealing the mystery of the machine until the book’s last chapters. <I>Michael Sims’ new book, </I> Adam’s Navel, <I>will be published by Viking next year.</I>