Hot sun, hype, mobsters and money: it’s Las Vegas, baby. Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, a companion to the PBS American Experience documentary series (and co-author Stephen Ives’ film, Las Vegas), promises and delivers on its title. This western Capital of Sin began as a bleak boom-and-bust railroad town (and gateway to Hoover Dam) in which, says co-author Michelle Ferrari, “There was not much to see.” True, unless you had opportunistic eyes and entrepreneurial spirits as did mob man Bugsy Siegel and a parade of other high rollers who forged The Strip from a dusty street. Ferrari and Ives have claimed their window of opportunity to plumb Las Vegas in this wonderful wacky tale of the small desert oasis (yes, really!) that grew into a glittering grotto of gambling and good times. With classic photos capturing Sin City’s characters, hijinks, kitsch and casinos, the book also offers four essays by guest authors (Jim McManus, David Hickey, Max Rudin and Marc Cooper) that are odes to the town’s glitz, glam and perfidy. Settled by Mormons, built up by mobsters, and fueled by the likes of millionaires Howard Hughes and Steve Wynn, the city’s hedonistic roots are bared in vivid neon in Las Vegas, negating the town’s latest advertising claim that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

The holidays are almost here, with a flurry of gift-giving just ahead. The following big, beautiful books are full of vibrant narrative and photography that celebrates America’s artistry, industry, cities and most especially her people, a treasure beyond price.

Destination America: The People and Cultures That Created a Nation examines 400 years of journeys to America in a succinct narrative that tracks the history of U.S. settlement and immigration, exploring who came to America and why. The driving motivation to immigrate is shown through man’s enduring desire for freedom from religious persecution, oppression, want, fear and creative repression. Though Destination America augments filmmaker David Grubin’s PBS documentary of the same name, author Chuck Wills has written an educational, stand-alone account of this country’s diverse peoples and cultures. The book’s images, enhanced by objective historical reporting, are portals into our past and present sometimes humorous, often heartbreaking, always illuminating. Destination America renders a multilayered portrait of America that will leave readers to ponder what it really means to be American. Wills posits a definition characterized by transience: “The one thing that unifies the 295 million people living in the United States today is that at some point . . . they, or their ancestors, came here from someplace else.”

In January of 1776, no one knew what the outcome of the American rebellion would be or could be. In the midst of this confusion, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. Arguing that America should not be ruled by kings, but by her people, Paine gave the country a glorious cause and clear purpose. Had he stopped there, he would have earned a secure place at the top of America’s pedestal of heroes. But he didn’t.

In 1794, Paine’s The Age of Reason blasted Christianity, and America blasted Paine. Paine went from hero to pariah at the speed of the printing press. When at last he died, no one would bury him. Even the Quakers refused to accept the apostate’s corpse. Paine had no family to care for his remains, and his country did not care for them either. Finally, a friend interred him in land on Paine’s own farm. But like Marley’s ghost, Paine’s body was doomed to walk the earth. A well-meaning admirer dug up the corpse, planning to build a suitable monument for the prophet of freedom . . . and from there began travels unimaginable. Unimaginable, except to Paul Collins.

Inspired by a letter in a 19th-century English newspaper, Collins set out to track Paine’s corpse, recording both journeys in The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. The book follows Paine’s body back and forth across the Atlantic, to London and to forgotten bits of English countryside, into the heart of Manhattan and out to rural New York state. Alongside this physical travel, Collins leads the reader through time, wandering with Paine’s remains through the 19th century and even the 20th. It is a tale filled with odd philosophies, arcane beliefs, fervent quackery, honest intentions, elaborate hoaxes and out-and-out fraud.

The book is delightfully constructed and deliciously written. Collins delves into remarkable bits of historical minutiae but that minutiae is always fascinatingly bizarre, wonderfully entertaining, and complementary to Collins’ quirky story. Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

Christmas is a Christian holiday commemorating the birth of a savior, but in the America of 1783, the Christmas season was dedicated to celebrating the achievements of a man who saved a nation. As the year neared its end, General George Washington traveled through the newly independent American colonies to spend the holidays at Mount Vernon and retire from public life. It would mark his first Christmas at home since taking command of the army eight years before.

Washington’s little-known six-week journey is the subject of Stanley Weintraub’s new book, <B>General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming</B>, 1783. A finalist for the National Book Award and author of many historical works, Weintraub has written not only a history book, but an insightful portrait of one of our greatest heroes. He documents Washington’s travels to New York City to accept control of the city from the British, to Annapolis to personally resign his military command before the Continental Congress, and finally to his home in Virginia. He intended the trip to be his final retirement from public life, although his country would call him back five years later to serve as its first president. During his journey, we see him feted at every stop, saying his farewells to citizens and troops. As Washington wrote to a friend, it was a scene of "festivity, congratulations, Addresses, and resignation."

It is Weintraub’s portrayal of Washington as man, however, that makes this book so intriguing. He humanizes the deity history has created while not diminishing his greatness. He shows that through Washington’s entire journey home, his apotheosis preceded, accompanied and followed him. While rising to the prestige of his reputation, Washington angrily rejected the omnipresent calls for his dictatorship or monarchy and continually spoke of the need to consolidate ruling power in the Congress. Weintraub doesn’t shy away from showing Washington’s foibles as well, including his admission to a friend that it soothed his vanity to sit for portraits. As the title suggests, the book is centered on Washington’s desire to be home at Mount Vernon for Christmas. That desire imbues the story and creates a wonderful anticipation in the reader. Sadly, description of the Washingtons’ actual Christmas experience is brief, due to a lack of documentation. Yet this does not diminish the book’s value to anyone who loves American history or admires our first president.

<I>Jason Emerson is a writer based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.</I>

appears at a particularly propitious time, given the current comparisons between the surprise Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor and the recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the many American ships and planes hit by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941, the USS Arizona was the greatest single loss. Under relentless bombing and strafing, the mighty warship exploded and quickly sank, taking to their deaths 1,177 sailors and Marines.

Jasper, a journalist; Delgado, an archaeologist and historian; and Adams, a photographer and shipwreck preservationist, unite to tell the story of the Arizona from its construction in 1914-15 to its destruction and eventual resurrection as a national monument. While the authors rely on previously published accounts to sketch in the big picture, they turn to several of the Arizona’s survivors to describe the dramatic battle scenes. The chapters leading up to the actual attack, however, are slow-going, involving the survivors’ recollections of their generally mundane shipboard duties. As is often the case with multiple authorship, the writers repeat details and incidents. They also attempt to add cosmic weight to this intrinsically important event by adopting a breathlessly reverential tone instead of the dispassionate one that sound history calls for. Thus, the people who died are all “heroes,” and their final resting place is “sacred.” On the plus side, the first-person accounts and the authors’ lucid reconstruction of the Arizona’s final hours are vividly cinematic and wholly absorbing. There is also a wealth of supporting material, including 16 pages of photos, a complete list of the Arizona’s dead and surviving and a citation of the major battles in the Pacific war. The book is a revealing glimpse into that other day that shook the world.

Edward Morris writes on history, music and other social matters from Nashville.

In A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, Simon Winchester covers the same historic territory, but devotes considerable attention to the science of shifting tectonic plates which bring about earthquakes. Winchester puts the entire episode into the context of science’s relatively new Gaia theory, which proposes that the entire planet is a living entity.

Winchester parts company with Smith on a number of key controversies. Unlike Smith, who believes much of the fire’s destruction was avoidable, Winchester writes of an apocalyptic blaze that defied any human attempts to thwart it: “No fire department anywhere in America, or probably anywhere in the world, could have possibly dealt properly with this conflagration, had they all the water that they could use. The 1906 fire was essentially uncontrollable . . . ” he writes. Winchester thinks dynamite was well managed to create fire breaks thatdid slow the spread of fire. Winchester draws heavily on first-person narratives of the time, noting that many who lived through the earthquake and subsequent fire had the presence of mind to write down their observations. Alexander George McAdie is noteworthy in this regard. Awakened from his slumber by the giant quake, the first thing he did was to note the time on his fob-watch. From there, he proceeded to time the quake’s duration all of 40 seconds.

In The Interpreter, noted academic and National Book Award nominee Alice Kaplan digs into the archives of World War II to shed some ominous light on U.S. Army courts martial. Her research focuses primarily on the trials of African-American GIs in post-liberation France, with particular emphasis on the case of Pvt. James Hendricks, who was accused, convicted and executed for the murder of a French farmer. Kaplan marshals statistics that imply an inordinate percentage of black GIs were found guilty of misconduct, and for counterpoint, she explores the trial and subsequent acquittal of George Whittington, a white Army captain also brought up on murder charges.

Kaplan infuses her general narrative and trial accounts with the unique perspective of Louis Guilloux, an acclaimed French political novelist who served as an interpreter at four of the courts martial and later produced a roman ˆ clef about those experiences called OK, Joe. Kaplan’s effort effectively revisits the shadowy workings of a predominantly white bureaucracy over a black minority, and there’s legitimate reason to suspect that ingrained bigotry might have played a role in trial results. Nevertheless, the author never proves the convicted soldiers’ innocence, leaving in her wake a trail of innuendo that seems designed more to stir up unpleasant memories than to uncover unassailable truth. Kaplan intently exploits the specter of Jim Crow in the WWII armed forces, further asserting that whatever their contributions, African Americans were excluded from the story of the Greatest Generation.’ This latter claim is dubious since accounts of African-American heroism do exist in the war literature. Furthermore, the U.S. military has become the leading institution in the postwar era to have offered opportunities for career growth, professional achievement and further education to the average African American.

The Interpreter remains an interesting and well-written slice of history, but its ultimate overall context raises broader questions about its author’s motivations.

Traditional histories of the European colonization of North America concentrate on British settlements along the Atlantic seaboard. The focus is often on the concept of a "new people" in a New World who found opportunities that were not open to them in their native countries. For historian Alan Taylor, who received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in 1996 for Mr. Cooper’s Town, that approach "provides only a painfully limited picture of colonial life."

In his new book, American Colonies, Taylor paints a broader and more complex portrait of colonization by going back thousands of years and proceeding to the more recent period emphasized in many histories. In particular, he emphasizes the crucial roles played by various powers the Spanish, Dutch and French who interacted on the continent and strongly influenced the direction of events before the American Revolution. Drawing on the latest scholarship, Taylor expands our understanding of our own history in this comprehensive and exciting book. Focusing on regional explorations that move forward in time, Taylor draws on environmental history of the region and ethnohistory of colonial peoples. He emphasizes the pivotal role in colonization played by Native Americans, who were "indispensable" as "trading partners, guides, religious converts, and military allies." He also probes the reasons the British ultimately prevailed in the settlement of North America. After all, at different times other countries had greater empires and more resources to put into colonization. In summary, he says, "The English succeeded as colonizers largely because their society was less successful at keeping people content at home." With free access to the overseas colonies, many poor and disaffected English citizens were eager to seek a new home.

Naturally, it made a significant difference which country or countries prevailed. Unlike the kings of France and Spain, Queen Elizabeth shared power with the aristocracy and gentry, whose representatives comprised Parliament. Only about 25 percent of the men owned enough property to be eligible to vote, and then only for the House of Commons, and women could not vote at all. Still, as Taylor writes, "the English constitution was extraordinarily open and libertarian when compared to the absolute monarchies then developing in the rest of Europe. Consequently, it mattered greatly to the later political culture of the United States that England rather than authoritarian Spain or France eventually dominated colonization north of Florida."

Taylor challenges some long held beliefs. "Contrary to popular myth," he writes, "most eighteenth-century emigrants did not come to America by their own free will in search of liberty. Nor were they Europeans. On the contrary, most were enslaved Africans forced across the Atlantic to work on plantations raising American crops for European markets. During the eighteenth century, the British colonies imported 1.5 million slaves more than three times the number of free immigrants." The author confronts the belief that 17th century English colonists fled religious persecution at home to go to a land that offered religious freedom. "In addition to omitting economic considerations, the myth grossly simplifies the diverse religious motives for emigration," he says. "Not all colonists had felt persecuted at home, and few wanted to live in a society that tolerated a plurality of religions."

Full of surprising revelations, this superb book is history at its best.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

By tragic default, the Empire State Building has regained its rank as the tallest building in New York City. The restored status, of course, results from the cataclysmic terrorist attack that obliterated the World Trade Center in September. The earth’s tallest structure from 1931 until the 1972 opening of the first of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Empire State Building not only altered but defined New York City’s skyline.

Although other construction projects in this country and abroad subsequently stretched higher into the sky, the Empire State Building remains in the company of the Great Wall of China and the Eiffel Tower as one of the most recognizable structures on the planet. In Empire, completed before September’s attack, author Mitchell Pacelle delivers a thrilling history of the mythic building, which has drawn its share of suicidal souls and was the site of a 1997 shooting rampage by a Palestinian visitor.

The leveling of the World Trade Center by two aircraft recalled the day in 1945 when the Empire State Building itself was struck by an Army Air Corps B-25 bomber lost in dense fog. That incident occurred on a Saturday, when the building was relatively empty. Fourteen lives were lost, the fire was extinguished in four hours, and the building opened for business two days later, thus erasing any questions about its structural integrity. Pacelle recounts these and other sensational moments in the life of the building, but the real strength of his book lies in the story of the infighting and negotiating for ownership of the skyscraper the stuff that might land on a newspaper’s business pages rather than on the front page. In much more than a simple story about ambitious architecture, Pacelle, a Wall Street Journal reporter, describes what the Empire State Building’s 3.8 million annual visitors cannot see from its observation decks, and some of his disclosures are bewildering. For instance, real estate tycoon Donald Trump finagled half-interest in the partnership that owns the building without putting up a nickel. The owners have no clout in operating the building and receive only a puny percent of its income, most of which goes to a lease-holding group controlled by Trump rival Leona Helmsley.

For most of the last decade, nobody knew who really owned the skyscraper. Trump’s involvement traces to Hideki Yokoi, an entrepreneur with an unsavory background who built a multi-billion dollar empire in Japan’s post-war boom. In a day when cramped, two-bedroom apartments in Tokyo were selling for $1 million, Yokoi went on an international buying binge and acquired the Manhattan colossus the ultimate architectural trophy for $42 million. Kiiko, his illegitimate daughter, scouted and nailed down properties for Yokoi around the world, but a series of acquisitions ended in a feud in which he accused her of stealing the 102-story structure from him. Yokoi, who ordered his trousers sewn with the wallet pocket in the front to foil pickpockets, saw his dynasty collapse in Japan’s financial tailspin before he died in 1998 at age 85. But the animosity between Helmsley and Trump, who had been enlisted by Kiiko in a failed attempt to break Helmsley’s lease, continues to this day. Few principals emerged unscathed some were jailed from what Empire carefully documents as a story of greed, ego and vengeance in "the world’s largest Monopoly game." In the hands of another writer, the financial and legal maneuverings a complicated but critical part of the building’s history might confuse the reader, but Pacelle, mercifully, has made it easy for those of us without accounting or law degrees to understand. Some day the story will demand a sequel, and Pacelle, winner of the NewYork Press Club’s Business Reporting Award in 1999, is the one who ought to write it.

Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.

Little-known fact: the White House is one chilly mansion. Abigail Adams burned cords of wood in numerous fireplaces, to little avail. The Trumans used electric heaters. Said Jackie Kennedy: Surely, the greatest brains of Army engineering can figure out how to have this heated like a normal rattletrap house! No such luck. Second little-known fact: White House dinners seem to bring out the kleptomaniac in guests. In Lincoln’s administration, they literally tore up curtains to steal souvenir lace. They were slightly more discreet a century later, but no less felonious. You wouldn’t believe how many spoons disappear! said Luci Baines Johnson. The President’s House is a public institution, an office building and a museum. But for more than 200 years, it’s also been a home for a parade of very different families. In First Families: The Impact of the White House on Their Lives, veteran Time magazine journalist Bonnie Angelo takes us on a relaxed, friendly meander through their experiences, good, bad and wacky. Angelo tackles the huge topic thematically, rather than chronologically, skipping around among the administrations to cover moving-in anxiety, love, interior decorating, grief, servant trouble and much in between. Her anecdotes are innumerable, their entertainment value high.

From FDR’s era alone: the White House cooking was horrendous, but no one could convince Eleanor to replace the housekeeper. (Revenge for Franklin’s mistresses?) During a wartime visit, Winston Churchill drank Scotch at breakfast, and wandered the halls naked. Stalin’s foreign minister, V.M. Molotov, carried a gun in his suitcase. The White House valet panicked when he unpacked it; the Secret Service remained unfazed.

The main pattern that emerges in First Families is that happy families tend to stay happy in the White House, and unhappy ones don’t improve. Luckily for the American polity, most of the married couples seem to have loved one another, and the kids had fun, once they got used to being in the public eye. As Luci Johnson put it, You can adjust or you can adjust! Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and England’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a few disagreements about fighting the Axis powers during World War II. And their personalities differed, as well. For instance, Churchill frequently and unashamedly cried in public, while Roosevelt struck Vice President Harry S. Truman as “the coldest man I ever met.” However, their differences were outweighed by their similarities. They both loved politics, history, strong liquor, and neither outdid the other in confidence and courage.

In Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, author Jon Meacham tells the remarkable story of the two men who mapped the strategy that saved the world from the Axis war machines. From the beginning of the war until Roosevelt’s death, the two exchanged nearly 2,000 messages and spent parts of 131 days together to forge a united Allied stance. FDR’s schedule was so docketed with heavy matters that when his sons needed to talk with him they had to make appointments.

There were some light moments. Once, when FDR rapped on Churchill’s bedroom door in the White House, Churchill shouted, “Come in.” On seeing a nude Churchill dictating to an aide, FDR apologized and retreated. Churchill stopped him and said, “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide from you.” The book details FDR’s hidden romance with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and Eleanor’s stoicism. No evidence links Churchill to extramarital dalliance, but in a rare moment of anger his wife Clementine hurled a plate of spinach at him. (It missed.) Meacham, Newsweek’s managing editor, examines the strain between Churchill and FDR at the crucial Tehran and Yalta summits, and he explores the perplexing question of why Churchill decided not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral. Refraining from second-guessing, as some historians are wont to do, Meacham makes clear that if Churchill and FDR’s compatibility and mutual affection had not allowed them to do what they did, we all would be living in a very different world.

Echoes of classical Greece are all around us. A short list of influences would include our vocabulary; the roots of sciences and mathematics; culture and the arts; and even the role of the military. American democracy did not derive directly from Greece, but Athenian political ideals, had a significant impact on Enlightenment thought. Using a wide range of sources, Thomas Cahill gives us a sophisticated, gracefully written introduction to this subject in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. The latest in the author’s internationally best-selling Hinges of History series skillfully combines history and carefully chosen excerpts from the works of Homer, Plato, Sappho, Pericles and others with insightful commentary. The underlying question for the Presocratics (the philosophers before Socrates and Plato) was “what is the nature of reality?” Their quest for an answer helped create such disciplines as philosophy, theology, the physical sciences, psychology, political science and ethics. The author is keenly aware of the negative and contradictory aspects of life that lay behind such achievements. “One needn’t sail the wine-dark sea for long before realizing that the classical Greeks were classically classist, sexist and racist.” At its height, the population of Athens was probably not more than 250,000. It is likely that slaves made up 40 percent of that number and that metics (resident aliens in Athens for trading purposes) were also close to 40 percent, leaving a citizen population of just over 20 percent. For those citizens, Cahill argues, “Athens, the world’s first attempt at democracy, still stands out as the most wildly participatory government in history.” Cahill’s enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. His discussion leaves no doubt that “whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on the way back.” Readers will find Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea both satisfying and enjoyable.