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.

Armchair explorers will be delighted to hear that Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, is back with an adventure that is even more astonishing than his previous book.

Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery is the story of the greatest American scientific exploration you’ve never heard of. We all know who discovered America, but how many of us know who discovered Antarctica? The surprising answer is Charles Wilkes, a young navy lieutenant appointed to lead this country’s first great scientific naval voyage, the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, known as the “Ex. Ex.” The mission, in the spirit of Lewis and Clark, was to explore the southern Pacific ice fields and map the islands of the South Seas and the northwest coast of America. This was a noble mission, fraught with danger, but the personality of Wilkes himself led to even greater challenges. From his earliest days, Wilkes was determined to achieve greatness whatever the cost, and as the expedition proceeded, the amiable lieutenant rapidly morphed into an egocentric martinet. Observing all this was William Reynolds, an educated, articulate midshipman who kept a secret journal of the voyage, and who, along with several embittered officers, brought charges against Wilkes at the voyage’s end.

Though the Ex. Ex. has been largely forgotten, its contributions were enormous, from the discovery and first exploration of the Antarctic coast, to the expedition’s superb maps, which were still in use as late as World War II. The volume of specimens brought back was astonishing, and these indirectly led to the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, in part because of the obsessively driven Wilkes.

Sea of Glory is an engrossing depiction of danger, bravery, cruelty and, perhaps, even madness. A worthy follow-up to In the Heart of the Sea,, Philbrick’s latest is a fascinating look at a long-forgotten piece of American maritime history.

In recent decades, some historians have challenged the conventional view that there was a decline and fall of Rome. These historians write instead of a period of late antiquity characterized by transition and transformation. Other scholars question whether it was barbarian invasions so much as a change in Roman military policy that led to Rome’s changed status. In The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins not only vigorously defends the conventional view, but explains the complex realities of the Roman empire and its neighbors in fascinating detail.

Ward-Perkins, who is particularly concerned with the impact of economic change throughout the empire, convincingly demonstrates that after the fall of Rome, there was a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. Everyone, kings to peasants, was affected. The decline in the quality of pottery, the absence of tiled roofs and good tableware and the almost total lack of coinage in daily use in the post-Roman West are all part of the same phenomenon.

Ward-Perkins says evidence strongly indicates that political and military difficulties destroyed regional economies. As the Roman state began to fragment, the intricately structured economy suffered.

Although life was difficult for many, popular revolts against imperial rule did not bring down the empire. Ward-Perkins says that is not surprising because Roman rule, and above all, Roman peace, brought levels of comfort and sophistication to the West that had not been seen before and that were not to be seen again for many centuries. He points out that the Germanic aggressors did not mean to lose the sophisticated economy; they wanted a share of it. However, their invasions led to the dismemberment of the empire and the destruction of the potent, yet fragile economic structure. The author makes a compelling case for his point of view and thus helps readers restudy and rethink a major period in world history. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

The story of the Jamestown colony the first permanent English settlement in the New World is familiar to most of us, but it has often been hard to separate the facts about the colony from myth. Combining a gift for storytelling with meticulous scholarship, historian David A. Price sorts reality from legend in his splendid new book, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation.

At the center of Price’s narrative is the clash of cultures between the newcomers, led by Captain John Smith, and the natives, represented by Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas. Most of the original colonists had come expecting to find riches, but instead found themselves victims of disease or Indian attack. Smith believed it was important to understand the language and culture of the natives and to use a combination of diplomacy and intimidation to keep Powhatan’s tribes from crushing the colonists. He was no less strict with the settlers themselves: during his brief presidency of the Jamestown council, Smith made it clear that those who didn’t work wouldn’t eat.

In 1619, a General Assembly was established in Jamestown, and broad-based property ownership was introduced, both “critical milestones on the path to American liberty and self-government,” Price points out. Just after the close of the Assembly’s first session, in a strange historical coincidence, the first ship of Africans landed in Jamestown. Although historians differ on their original status, Price suggests these Africans may have had the legal position of indentured servants. “It is too unbelievable to credit, but nonetheless true, that American democracy and American slavery put down their roots within weeks of each other,” notes the author.

Although he would never achieve an official position in the colony to match his talents, John Smith’s contribution to the founding of America extended far beyond Jamestown. His 1608 account of the new colony was the first to reach the public. This engrossing narrative of the settlement and Smith’s role in it is superbly done. Roger Bishop, a Nashville bookseller, is a regular contributor to BookPage.