During the Cold War, generations grew up with the knowledge that one mistake by those in power could doom the entire planet. When the other side is prepared to destroy you utterly, you tend to view every conflict as life or death. The Olympics, for instance, were much more than athletic competitions during that era they were ideological battlegrounds. So it was somehow appropriate that in 1972, in the waning days of the superpower struggle, a chess competition between an American and a Russian focused the world’s attention on the chilly environs of Reykjavik, Iceland.

Bobby Fischer Goes To War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (the authors of the surprise 2001 hit book, Wittgenstein’s Poker) is a detailed account of the most famous chess match in modern times, and a fascinating story it is. What should have been a straightforward us-against-them-morality tale was turned on its head by the personalities of the participants. The Soviet Grandmaster Boris Spassky was handsome, well spoken, gracious and self-effacing, while the American, Bobby Fischer, was a rude, greedy, tantrum-throwing bully. That Fischer was a genius at chess who was playing for “our” side was beside the point many Americans at the time were rooting against him.

Using various sources, including contemporary interviews with many participants, documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union and U.S. material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Edmonds and Eidinow explore the background of each man. Spassky, while a star at chess, was hardly a poster-boy for the Soviet system. Much to the consternation of his superiors, he often was more concerned with his game than his ideology, and he openly flaunted the rules most Soviet citizens lived by. Fischer was a rule-breaker as well; with his enormous talent, he demanded and got special treatment from tournament committees around the world, alienating almost everyone with whom he came into contact. While Spassky’s faux pas could be shrugged off due to his distracted nature, Fischer’s actions were more calculated, and as the authors show us, his irritating behavior reached unbelievable heights at the World Championships in Iceland.

Swirling around the two grandmasters’ gamesmanship were their respective governments. Henry Kissinger personally pleaded with Fischer to take the fight to the Soviets, while at the same time the American embassy was hoping the contest would end quickly, before Fischer damaged foreign relations irreparably. The Russian contingent in Iceland increased dramatically during the match, from psychiatrists surreptitiously analyzing Fischer to KGB agents examining Spassky’s food. In truth, they had good reason to worry about Spassky his health fluctuated during the tournament but they should have looked no further than Fischer’s antics to determine the cause of Spassky’s angst. Fischer objected to the auditorium, the lights, the cameras, the size of the audience, the amount of prize money, the noise level, the color of the chess board and on and on; the psychological stress on Spassky must have been tremendous. Considering his tactics, Fisher’s eventual victory was not surprising.

Fischer’s “take no prisoners” attitude the attitude we celebrate every day in American sports, from headfirst slides in baseball to strutting end-zone celebrations leaves a bitter taste in this particular contest. It’s hard to feel any joy at Fischer’s victory over Spassky, especially in light of Spassky’s gracious defeat and Fischer’s eventual emergence as a Nazi apologist.

Bobby Fischer Goes To War takes a compelling look inside the world of high-stakes chess and recalls the fears and suspicions that marked a dangerous era in world history. James Neal Webb plays chess though not very well in Nashville.

Publishers know that three subjects sell books: sex, the Civil War and the Nazis. American Scoundrel, Thomas Keneally’s fast-paced, smooth-as-silk biography of the colorful Civil War general Daniel E. Sickles, contains nothing on the Nazis, but has plenty of sex and lots on the Civil War to satisfy readers’ prurient and historical tastes.

Keneally, author of Schindler’s List and other novels, is a gifted writer who captures the mood and manner of an age in succinct verbal portraits. In Dan Sickles he uncovered a remarkable and colorful subject for a biography. Almost larger than life, Sickles was a Victorian American who seemed to be everywhere, know everyone and was always forgiven for his many transgressions.

A New York City lawyer, Sickles rose quickly in Democratic political circles, serving in Congress from 1857 to 1861. He had many influential friends in high places, including President James Buchanan. Sickles’ connections came in handy when, in February 1859, he murdered his close friend, Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key), the lover of Sickles’ wife, Teresa. Sickles, whom Keneally describes as “sexually precocious” and an obsessive womanizer, surrendered to authorities. While he was acquitted for defending his family’s honor, Key’s murder hung like a cloud over Sickles for the remainder of his long life.

When in 1861 the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Sickles rushed to defend the nation’s honor, leading a brigade of New York volunteers and serving as a brigadier general. One of President Abraham Lincoln’s few competent generals early in the war, he was promoted to major general and assumed division command. At Gettysburg, Sickles sustained a severe wound in his right leg, which led to its amputation. For decades afterwards he engaged in an acrimonious public debate with General George G. Meade, whom he blamed for his own recklessness at Gettysburg and for his loss of command. Despite his war wound and wounded pride, Sickles remained in the U.S. Army until 1869. In the postwar years he served as military governor of South Carolina, U.S. minister to Spain (where he became the lover of Queen Isabella II and one of the ladies of her court, whom he married) and U.S. congressman.

Keneally describes Sickles as “a man who could convey an intense feeling of tribalism, of inclusion, of the rightness of the factional argument.” Throughout his interesting and provocative life, Sickles consistently flouted conventional notions of ethics and morality. And he got away with it. John David Smith is professor of history at North Carolina State University. His most recent book is When Did Southern Segregation Begin?

Tom Holland’s academic credentials are flawless: he’s a graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge as well as an acclaimed radio personality and author. In his fourth book, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, Holland charts the decline of the Roman Republic, anticipating the age of emperors ushered in when Julius Caesar, then governor of Gaul, commanded his loyal legions to march on Rome. The resounding legacy of his symbolic crossing of the Rubicon river into Italy persists today as the code word for any irreversible step in history. Holland traces the rise of the world’s greatest empire from its inception through bloody civil war to a Golden Age under Augustus, and provides sensitive insight into the sociological and ideological workings of the early republic in all its contradictory complexity. This was an empire whose very foundation myth was based on the fratricidal killing of Remus by Romulus; whose political system thrived on competition and cutthroat ambition; and whose sons laboured under the threat of civil war. Rome, the mighty city that would hold most of the civilized world beneath its sway, was doomed to tear herself apart from within.

History lends its own cast of epic characters: heroes, murderers, kings and queens condemned to grovel before the might of Rome. A pantheon of illustrious figures Cicero, Augustus, Cleopatra are brought to life by a narrative that is lucid, stylish and witty, and interesting in its analysis. Rubicon surveys an age of military expansion that saw the decline of some of history’s most powerful empires, underpinned by persistent internal power struggles that drenched the streets of Rome with the blood and horror of civil war, wars immortalized by the greatest generation of Roman poets.

Informative, balanced and accessible, Holland’s compelling brand of narrative history is a praiseworthy rendition of one of the most complex periods in history. Perhaps not academically groundbreaking, but a timely look at a civilization whose similarities to modern-day America are becoming increasingly relevant. Justin Watts earned a degree in classics from Oxford University.

Amplifying a little-known slice of Southern history, journalist Alan Huffman has reconstructed the riveting true story of freed slaves who fled Mississippi to establish a new home in Africa in the 1840s. Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today tells this stranger-than-fiction story in compelling style, capturing the hope, conflict and tragedy of the endeavor.

Isaac Ross was a Revolutionary War veteran who had established a sprawling, 5,000-acre cotton plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi. When he died in 1836, Ross’ will stipulated that all the slaves of the Prospect Hill plantation be freed upon his daughter’s death. The plantation would be sold to finance a journey for any freed slaves who wanted to emigrate to Liberia, a province in Africa where a colony of freed slaves had already been established.

Legal battles by some of Ross’ heirs delayed execution of the will for more than a decade, but by 1849 about 200 of the Prospect Hill slaves had been freed and had settled in Liberia. (Slaves who chose to stay behind were sold at auction, but the will specified that family units could not be separated.) Some who moved to Liberia emulated what they had seen back in Mississippi, building Greek Revival-style mansions in their new African homeland.

As it turned out, the freed slaves were not welcomed with open arms by the residents of the colony and a violent, bloody and bitter battle ensued between the tribes and the colonists. As part of his research, Huffman went to Liberia in search of the group’s descendants. There he discovered that conflicts between natives and freed slaves have echoed throughout the country’s history, even up to today’s civil war.

Events move swiftly in this complex and turbulent tale, but with the skill of a Southern storyteller, Ross weaves the threads together in a clear and readable narrative. Piecing together a story he first heard about during his own Mississippi childhood, he has produced a well researched account that illuminates a distant event and its lasting legacy.

Duck, a cattle herder in a poor, isolated region of Chilean Patagonia, is in the midst of one his frequent drunken episodes. And he has a knife to the throat of his American friend, author Nick Reding."Why you here?" Duck asks."The road," answers Reding, who has been chronicling the life of Duck and his family for his book The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia. The incident lies at the heart of this beautifully novelized nonfiction work about the culture of Chilean cowboys, or gauchos, and their kin – a cattle – herding, hard – living bunch that includes the alcoholic Duck and his angry wife Edith, who believes her violent husband is possessed by the devil. The road to which Reding refers is the Careterra Austral, or the Southern Highway, a leg of the Pan American Highway, which runs through the United States, Central America and South America. The road for the first time forces interaction between the gauchos, whose lives have changed little since the 18th century, and the modern world that begins with the city of Coyaique, where the 21st century has definitely arrived.Serving as reporter, novelist and anthropologist, Reding presents the gauchos through keen observation and linguistic investigation. We learn, for example, the origins of the word "gaucho," most likely derived from huacho or guache, which means "orphan" in several Indian languages.The reader accompanies Duck and Reding on cattle drives and visits to distant neighbors. Meanwhile, the author weaves into his narrative the figurative language of fiction, relaying several of the gauchos’ mysterious, magical myths – stories that somehow arise from the austere reality of their daily lives.During the year he spends with Duck, Reding learns of the cowboy’s hopes for a better life in Coyaique – a desire that leads the family to the slums of that city, where the book comes to its sad conclusion.Reding renders the Patagonian landscape in wonderful detail. The end of the world may seem like a long way to go for a story, but the trip was more than worth Reding’s – and the reader’s – while.

Dave Bryan is a writer in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Civil War, James McIvor explains in his splendidly concise and deceptively powerful book, God Rest Ye Merry, Soldiers: A True Civil War Christmas Story, transformed Christmas into today’s national holiday. For four bloody years, December 25 provided soldiers in blue and gray with a much needed respite from the horrors of internecine war and the grueling daily routine and emotional stress of the volunteer soldier. Often soldiers celebrated the seasonal holiday encamped within shouting distance of their enemy. Each Christmas became a special time to reflect on their loved ones, their cause and their reasons for leaving home to fight.

McIvor writes with precision and grace and has unearthed a lode of Civil War-era Christmas poems and songs that general readers will enjoy. He also has mined a cache of original letters and diary entries that convey the pathos and tragedy of war without romanticizing the complexities, frustrations and ambivalent feelings that Union and Confederate soldiers and their families espoused.

On Christmas Day, 1862, for example, a war-weary woman in Richmond, Virginia, reflected on the absence and loss that the day signified. The Christmas dinner passed off gloomily, she wrote. The vacant chairs were multiplied in Southern homes, and even the children who had so seriously questioned the cause of the absence of the young soldier brother from the festive board, had heard too much, and had seen too much, and knew too well why sad-colored garments were worn by the mother, and the fold of rusty crape placed around the worn hat of the father, and why the joyous mirth of the sister was restrained, and her beautiful figure draped in mourning. Nineteen months of war already had left tens of thousands of men dead. It was hard to celebrate. The unidentified Southern lady remarked poignantly that tears had taken the place of smiles on countenances where cheerfulness was wont to reign. McIvor’s little book underscores the meaning of Christmas for nations at war, when memories of home and longings for the safe return of loved ones preoccupy families rich and poor. In 1870, the U.S. Congress finally legislated what Americans North and South had already ritualized Christmas became a national holiday. John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author and editor of many books.

<b>FDR’s Christmas visitor</b> Given their educations, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would doubtless have been intimately familiar with the proverbial loss of a kingdom for want of a horseshoe nail. In other words, small mistakes can determine big outcomes even those as big as World War II. So when Japan forced the United States into the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, small mistakes could have badly damaged the new Anglo-American fighting alliance. Roosevelt and Churchill helped avoid strategic errors right from the start by convening in Washington, D.C., for what we would now call a summit.

Immediately after the Japanese sneak attack on December 7, 1941, Churchill rushed across the Atlantic, accompanied by his senior military advisors. Over the next month, they met with Roosevelt and his top aides to forge a new coalition. <b>One Christmas in Washington: The Secret Meeting Between Roosevelt and Churchill That Changed the World</b>, by historians David Bercuson and Holger Herwig, chronicles the crucial weeks that ultimately led to the defeat of Germany and Japan. Bercuson and Hedwig ably blend the substance of the debates over command structure, production goals and war strategy with biographical background about the main players and colorful descriptions of their social interaction. As we all know, the outcome was successful but the authors show the road got quite rocky. The American generals thought the British were arrogant and greedy for U.S. arms; the British thought the Americans were clueless amateurs. Within each country’s negotiating team, the Army, Navy and Air Force representatives fought out their usual rivalries.

Ultimately, responsibility for success or failure lay with the two national leaders. Churchill, always stubborn, was a diehard imperialist; Roosevelt, who called himself a juggler, had an essentially anti-colonial view of the world. But they came to terms, the torch passed from Britain to the U.S., and the American century followed. <i>Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.</i>

Here’s an interesting fact about the two of the most influential Americans of the 19th century Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, though linked in many ways, never actually met. Does that matter? From the standpoint of history, not really. In a fascinating new book, writer Daniel Mark Epstein argues that, although they were not personally acquainted, the two men had a profound effect on one another and on their nation.

Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington offers an analysis of their historic contributions to society and a discussion of their literary connections. The book opens before the Civil War, when Lincoln first read Whitman’s radical book of poems, Leaves of Grass, which his law partner brought into their office in 1857. Lincoln privately complimented the poet’s freshness and vivacity of language and sentiment. Although he never publicly expressed his admiration for Whitman’s poems, their influence imbues his own speeches and other writing, Epstein argues. Of course, Lincoln’s influence on Whitman was massive. The president’s brooding, care-worn face and his great burden inspired the poet, who served as a nurse in Washington’s military hospitals. The two men passed so frequently in the streets that they began to exchange friendly nods, a ritual that led to the poet professing “love” for Lincoln.

Epstein poignantly recalls Whitman’s experience near the end of the war, when the relevance of his collection, Drum Taps, was displaced by the South’s surrender and by Lincoln’s assassination. He examines the creation of Whitman’s great eulogy to his fallen hero, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and follows Whitman into the 1880s, when he began lecturing about Lincoln to enthusiastic audiences.

Epstein’s book serves double duty as an engaging wartime history and an insightful work of literary analysis, capturing an era and two great men who helped to shape it. Jason Emerson is a former National Park Service park ranger at the Abraham Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Illinois, and a published poet.

World War II was a calamitous event that dramatically changed everything even the game of golf. John Strege’s When War Played Through: Golf During World War II profiles golf’s impact on the war effort and effectively catalogs the challenges the sport faced in maintaining its public profile during difficult times. Unlike major league baseball, which continued throughout the war, golf in the U.S. took a hiatus from 1942 through 1945. Through the efforts of the game’s greats (Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson) and entertainers like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, golf became a key source of fund-raising and morale-boosting, and even a form of occupational therapy for wounded GIs (which helped spur the sport’s postwar boom as a more plebeian pursuit).

Strege ranges widely over people, places (both home and abroad) and episodes great and small, recounting rubber shortages that affected the supply of golf balls; the untoward use of prestigious venues like Augusta National for military training and victory gardens; and even the strange occurrence of Allied POWs building a makeshift golf course at Stalag Luft III, site of “the great escape”of movie fame. He shares how Dwight Eisenhower’s well-known affection for the game found more prominent exposure after he became U.S. president, and we even get a little history about the Bush clan in the person of Prescott Bush, the current president’s grandfather, who was an avid, 2-handicap golfer, and who served as national campaign chairman of the USO during the war. (Another tidbit: golf’s Walker Cup is named for the current president’s maternal great-grandfather.) More poignantly, Strege relates the stories of promising young golfers (e.g., Georgetown University’s John Burke) who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Concluding chapters offer an overview of the game’s “return to normalcy,” highlighted by the irrepressible Nelson’s unprecedented 11 consecutive PGA victories and the surprise 1946 Masters victory of little-known Herman Keiser, a sailor who had served on the USS Cincinnati.