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.

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.