Simon Winchester journeys through space and time with equal aplomb. He had already earned his stripes as a travel writer when he decided to plunge into history to tell the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and two of its principal creators. No one was more astounded than he was when in 1998, that story, The Professor and the Madman, became a bestseller.

Now comes The Map That Changed the World, Winchester’s account of trailblazing English geologist William Smith. Born in 1769 and largely self-educated, Smith worked as a surveyor, a profession that took him into coal mines and canal excavations where he noticed patterns in the exposed layers of rocks and the fossils trapped within them. From his observations, he created in 1815 a huge, multicolored map of England that detailed with great accuracy the world that lay beneath the nation’s surface.

Apart from its value to commerce, the map was an implicit assault on the Christian church’s most cherished creation myths. Smith seemed on the verge of scientific celebrity and the wealth that went with it. Four years later, however, he was in debtors’ prison, and lesser men were claiming his achievements as their own. As with The Professor and the Madman, Winchester presents The Map That Changed the World as a drama of discovery, despair and redemption, one that plays out across the lifetime of its protagonist.

Speaking from his home in Dutchess County, New York (he has another in Scotland), Winchester says he first heard of Smith while an undergraduate at Oxford. "I think I became interested in him because my tutor [Harold Reading], who I dedicate the book to, told me — and I think this is what lodged in my mind for all those 30 years — that William Smith had been very much a hero of his. After this extraordinary success of The Professor and the Madman, I was wondering if there was another character whose life trajectory was similarly interesting and which also illuminated some wider field. And I thought of William Smith."

Heightening his interest in Smith, no doubt, was the fact that Winchester had studied geology in college "24 hours a day for three years" with the intention of earning his living at it. "Immediately after leaving Oxford," he recounts, "I went down to western Uganda and worked in the mountains on the Congo-Ugandan border, prospecting for copper. I had a fascinating time, but it really wasn’t what I was most suited to, I don’t think."

In Uganda, Winchester read Coronation Everest, James Morris’ 1958 account of being a Times correspondent on a Mount Everest expedition. "I was interested in mountains," he continues, "so I thought, well, instead of working in the mountains and hitting bits of rock and sending them off to be examined, I would try to get a job going to exotic places and writing about them generally. So I wrote to James and said, ‘Can I be you?’ as it were, and he wrote back and said, ‘Absolutely. If you want to leave Uganda, come back and get a job on a local paper in Britain and keep in touch.’ That’s what I did."

James Morris underwent a sex change in 1972 and emerged as Jan Morris. "We’ve remained closely in touch and have written a book together," says Winchester. "We’re the best of friends. But it’s rather odd when your mentor goes from one gender to another."

Winchester moved to America in 1972 to work as a correspondent for the Guardian, a post he held until 1976. "During that time I began getting freelance work from magazines like Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and the Smithsonian," he says. "Nowadays, I find that I have a far more sympathetic audience among editors in America than I do in Britain. There are so many more magazines that will print long and relatively serious pieces in America than there are in Britain. I’ve just done a big piece in the Atlantic about Roget’s Thesaurus. There’s no magazine in Britain that would spend 15,000 words on Roget’s Thesaurus. This is a country which really, in my view, respects writers. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to spend my time here."

As a travel writer, Winchester favored grand projects. His books took him through Korea, along the length of the Yangtze River and throughout the colonial remnants of the British Empire. What they did not do, he freely admits, was make money. "I never ever had had a book that really earned out its advance, I don’t think. And then suddenly I changed from writing about travel to writing about history, never having any experience of doing such a thing, and extraordinarily [The Professor and the Madman] took off."

Winchester has developed a pattern for his histories: "I try to cover the story in a chronological, linear sort of way, but I very deliberately go off in an exuberant way along all the tangents that seem valuable and interesting. . . . If I’m interested in the railway that was built where the canals used to be, then I’ll write about that. If I’m interested in fossil collections, then I would write about the nature of fossil-collecting generally."

There have been three book projects, Winchester says, that he decided to abandon well into the research stage: one on Manchuria ("because the Chinese have destroyed so much relating to the history of the Manchu people"), the second on Shanghai (after another "very good book" on the subject was published) and the third on Arctic explorer and National Geographic founder Adolphus Washington Greely (after Winchester found that a fellow writer was already 15 years into writing his own life of Greely).

"The next book I’m doing," Winchester reveals, "is a big study of the 27th of August, 1883, which is the day that the volcano at Krakatoa exploded. I want to take a look at that extraordinary day [and] the immediate aftermath. It had a great global effect." As a part of the book, Winchester says he will also weave in how the telegraph quickly carried news of the eruption around the world.

"My big dream is a book I’ve been planning to do for years," he says. "It’s to write a sort of a hymn to the joys of tramp steamers. I want to buy an 800-ton tramp steamer with a crew of six, sail it around the world for two years, picking up and discharging cargo and running it as an actual business. And I want to chronicle all this in a very romantic way. But for some funny reason, publishers don’t seem terribly keen. I wonder why that might be?"

Edward Morris reviews and interviews from Nashville.

Author photo by Marion Ettinger.

Gold had been found at various places in California before James Marshall made his now-fabled discovery in January 1848 near the sawmill he was building for businessman John Sutter. But coming as it did in the same year that America took California from Mexico, Marshall's far richer find was pivotal in changing the course of national history. Fueled by the ambitions and needs of hordes of fortune-seekers, the territory would, within the next two years, be admitted into the Union as a "free" state, thereby heating up the political pot that ultimately exploded into the Civil War.

In The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, historian H.W. Brands examines these whirlwind developments through accounts left by those who took part in them. After setting the scene of the discovery and explaining how word of it spread around the world, Brands follows the individual progress of a handful of pilgrims as they travel overland or by ship to this 19th century El Dorado. He then demonstrates how the bustling region proceeded to cast its shadow over the rest of the country.

Chronicling an entire epoch was a new experience for Brands, a Pulitzer Prize nominee who teaches American history at Texas A&M University. "I had recently done a couple of biographies," he says, "and when you do a biography, especially the way I do it as a life and times you get a long but rather narrow slice of history. For example, I did a biography of Benjamin Franklin [The First American]. His life spanned almost the entire 18th century, with the result that, in tracing his life, I could trace the course of American history over nearly a century. But because I focused on one person, I tended to get a rather narrow view of that history. What I wanted was a different approach. In choosing the California gold rush, what I did was turn that window of history on its side, so that instead of being long and narrow, it was very wide but rather short. Instead of looking at 84 years the term of Franklin's life through one person, I looked at eight or 10 years through the eyes of the dozen or so people I focused on. This is the way of getting at an event as opposed to getting at a life."

Brands, whose other biography is T.R., a life of Theodore Roosevelt, says he spent about five years researching and writing The Age of Gold. "My interest in the gold rush began when I was in college," he explains. "I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and went to college in California. I had occasion then to travel around in the gold country of the Sierra Mountains. I was intrigued by it, and I've always had this notion to come back to that area and that subject."

Among the figures Brands accompanies on their arduous treks to the gold fields are Jessie Fremont, daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton and wife of California settler John Fremont, and Sarah Royce, who would become the mother of philosopher Josiah Royce.

Brands' descriptions of the parched landscape and daily privations that nearly took Mrs. Royce's life are especially vivid. "Before I was a historian," Brands says, "I spent a while as a traveling salesman. My territory was from the West Coast to Denver. So I drove along all the Humboldt River and over Immigrant Pass, east of Salt Lake City, across the Great Salt Desert and along large stretches of the Oregon and California Trails. Of course, you don't see it exactly as it looked in 1849, although I will say this, there are big sections of that part of the West where, if you just turn your back to the interstate or whatever paved road you're on, it looks a lot like it did 150 years ago." Because the gold attracted such an array of talents, energies and egos, it fostered a can-do attitude and an impatience with the status quo that, Brands argues, remains a part of the California character to this day. In his estimation, the gold rush was not a manifestation of greed. "Greed is what you call it if you think it's not deserved or it's excessive," he contends. "People who went to California didn't consider themselves greedy. They saw that this was an opportunity to improve their lives. Most of the people didn't think they were going to make $10 million. They would have been quite happy to make $500 or $1,000 enough so they could buy a farm, for example, rather than rent a farm, so that they would have enough money to marry their childhood sweetheart, so that they could start the business they wanted to start. For most of them, it was this opportunity to make a shortcut toward their vision of happiness."

Brands admits that his study of history has shaped his own political outlook: "I think it gives me greater tolerance for the fact that we always seem to muddle through, one way or another. There have been dozens of moments in American history where it looked as though we were in a crisis that the country might not survive and that some big decision had to be made and if it wasn't made right, then the entire American republican experiment would come tumbling down. Despite all of those grim warnings, the Republic still carries on. . . . There are these things [like the September 11 terrorist attacks] that pop up, and at the moment they seem to be the most important things one could imagine. It's easy to think and sometimes it's attractive to think that we live at this turning point in history, because it confers a certain kind of importance on us."

Brands' manuscript for his new book was already in the hands of his publisher when the stories broke about the alleged plagiarisms by fellow historians Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Even in light of this news, he says his publisher did not ask him to re-check his own work. "It's had a lot of reverberations in the historical community," he notes. "It comes down to a question of whether these were matters of simple oversight, or sloppiness or intent to deceive, and professional historians have taken different views. It's hard to say where the truth lies, but I think we all try to do the best job we can." Next up for Brands will be a book on the Texas Revolution of the 1830s.

Coming on the heels of the slaughter of millions, the Paris Peace Conference that convened after World War I was a surprisingly civilized gathering of the era’s top statesmen. In the first full-length look at the conference in more than 25 years, a descendant of one of those larger-than life political figures offers a fascinating portrait of the times, the personalities involved and the lasting consequences of their actions.

By redrawing national boundaries and stirring up ancient hatreds, the peace conference for all its good effects set in motion hostilities that still rage today. The complex story is sorted out and eloquently told by Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World. First published in England as The Peacemakers, the book has already won several awards and critical acclaim on the other side of the Atlantic.

Animating MacMillan’s narrative are the key participants: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Among the supporting cast of diplomats, aides, advocates and hangers-on swirling in and around the conference were future U.S. President Herbert Hoover; Lawrence of Arabia; Polish pianist/politician Ignace Paderewski; Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh (then a kitchen assistant at the Ritz Hotel); future secretary of state John Foster Dulles; and the delightfully adulterous Queen Marie of Rumania. MacMillan spoke to BookPage about Paris 1919 from Toronto, where she is professor of history and provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. The first topic of conversation is her personal connection to the historic event Lloyd George was her great-grandfather. She never met him, she says, and was only an infant when he died. Nor did this relationship provide her access to heretofore-unseen documents. “All his papers are pretty well public,” she explains. “Where [being related] helped, I guess, was that I talked to my grandmother a bit about [the conference] before she died. She’d been over there, so she had some funny stories for me.” MacMillan began researching the book about 10 years ago and spent three years writing it. She says she’s still not sure what prompted the massive undertaking. “It wasn’t my great-grandfather, really. In a way, that would have put me off more than anything else, because I didn’t want to look as though I was doing an act of piety. I was always interested in the period. What really got me started was that I was struck by how many interesting people were there. I think historians are great gossips.” This was the first major peace conference, MacMillan says, in which public opinion in different countries helped shape the negotiations. Approximately 700 reporters from newspapers around the world covered the event.

Of the “Big Three” leaders, MacMillan depicts Wilson as the one most damaged personally by the emotionally charged negotiations. Entering them as the uncompromising idealist with his noble but ambiguous 14-point proposal of how the conflict should be resolved he emerged battered by the tenacious forces of realpolitik. “I was very impressed by Wilson,” says MacMillan. “I think he had the right ideas, and I think he was very brave in pushing them. Where he really fell down and I think it was a character flaw was in not getting Congressional opinion behind him in the United States. In my view, he unnecessarily alienated the Republicans. . . . He tended to treat his Republican critics as if they were traitors and fools which is no way to win people over.” While the French, who had been devastated by the war, clamored for harsh penalties against Germany and while the Germans felt the penalties levied were excessively harsh MacMillan sides with a growing list of historians who argue that the conditions imposed did not, as popularly supposed, cause World War II.

“What’s happened in the past 15 years or so,” MacMillan explains, “is that a number of very, very good historians have started looking at the reparations issue, at German foreign policy and at the motivation of Hitler and the Nazis. Collectively, I think what they have said is, to begin with, that Germany never actually paid that much, that the terms were not unduly harsh, and that Hitler and the Nazis had expansionist plans right from the word go. I don’t think they went out and conquered half of Europe because of the First World War. That is something they would have wanted to do anyway.”

Some years ago, while following one of the blind alleys that writers so often encounter when hunting anxiously for their next "big book idea," Erik Larson stumbled across the gruesome particulars of Chicago serial killer Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes.

"I was suitably horrified," Larson recalls from the comfort and safety of his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Christine Gleason, M.D., head of the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. "I actually read a little more about Holmes," Larson says, "and then decided that he was a kind of slasher and that I wasn't that interested."

Instead, Larson tracked another small detail that played a bit part in another Gilded Age murder mystery. Which led him to begin reading about the big Galveston hurricane of 1900. Which resulted in Larson's thrilling 1999 best-selling narrative of that catastrophe, Isaac's Storm. Which proved to be a turning point.

According to Larson, although he had always known he wanted to write books, he approached a book-writing career obliquely. After college he got a job as a gofer in a publishing house and "convinced myself that I was actually kind of writing because I was working in publishing." Next he made the mistake of seeing the movie All the President's Men and "decided that's what I want to do: bring down a president." Unsure of his exact course toward that end, he determined to let fate rule, so he applied to only one journalism school. He got in. Eventually, he took a job with the Wall Street Journal, reluctantly accepted a transfer to San Francisco, where he met the woman who would become his wife, then a day after marrying her, moved with her to Baltimore where she had been hired by Johns Hopkins University. "I was going to write novels," Larson says, "but once again I took the oblique path and freelanced."

Larson says that in Baltimore he finally grew desperate to escape "the grind of doing periodic pieces" and wrote his first book, The Naked Consumer, which was barely noticed. His second book, Lethal Passage, was a critically acclaimed book about gun control that had a political impact "but didn't sell at all." By the time Larson published his third book, Isaac's Storm, in 1999 to critical and popular acclaim, he and his wife and their growing family were living happily in Seattle. And Larson himself had finally "hit upon something that I really enjoy doing—narrative historical nonfiction."

The pleasure Larson takes in the genre is evident in the vibrant detail of his newest book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. The devil in question is Dr. Holmes, the figure Larson rejected as a book subject some years before. "The White City" is the extraordinary Chicago's World's Fair of 1893, officially known as the World's Columbian Exposition because it was designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, but unofficially called "The White City," because of its enchanting and trend-setting architecture.

According to Larson, even while working on Isaac's Storm he continued to be tantalized not so much by Holmes himself but by the fact that Holmes lured young women to their deaths at his macabre World's Fair Hotel almost under the very lights of this great international attraction. "Interestingly," Larson says, "other people have written about Holmes but, to my surprise, the fair has always been almost parenthetical. And I kept thinking, here's this marvelous magical fair and as counterpoint to that was this dark, dark creature sort of feeding off the fair. I couldn't really tell one story without telling the other." He decided to tell both.

It was, frankly, a brilliant decision. Larson contrasts the story of Holmes with that of Daniel Hudson Burnham, the chief architect of the fair. Burnham cajoled and directed the nation's greatest architects and designers—Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan—to transform a swampy park on the shores of Lake Michigan into an astonishing wonder that logged more than 27 million visits during its brief existence, 700,000 of those visits coming in a single day. Burnham inspired George Ferris to design and build a 25-story circular amusement ride that eclipsed in size the tower Alexandre Eiffel had recently built in Paris and was capable of carrying nearly 2,000 people at a time, the first Ferris Wheel. Burnham's fair introduced to the world "a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat." It was visited by the likes of Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and George Westinghouse.

"One guy built this marvelous fair," Larson quips. "The other guy built this twisted hotel. They were both architects in a way." Taken together, the two stories allow Larson to paint a colorful and resonant portrait of the Gilded Age. "The thing I find so compelling in that period is that what defines it is sheer attitude. There was this overwhelming sense of unlimited possibility," he says.

Larson fleshes out his portrait of the age with lively stories about the competition between Westinghouse and Edison for dominance in the electricity market, the construction of the world's first skyscrapers, the practice of grave robbing among medical students. He describes the chilling effect of chloroform. He discovers that Chicago was called "The Windy City," not because of the fierce winds coming off Lake Michigan but because of the loud boasts issuing from local business leaders.

"I do all my own research," Larson says. "If I bring anything to the party, it's a knack for finding the telling details. What I love is the stuff that never makes it into professional history, because it belongs in the footnotes, because it's not appropriate. That's the stuff I live for."

And indeed, of its numerous pleasures, the greatest pleasure of The Devil and the White City is in its details.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

One day in 1995, journalist Paul Hendrickson, then a reporter for the Washington Post, found himself standing in Black Oak Books in Berkeley, California, where he was thumbing through a volume called Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. One particular photograph grabbed Hendrickson's attention, filling him with a sense of history, awe and, ultimately, an absorbing curiosity that would drive him to spend nearly seven years researching his latest book, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy.

Technically, Moore's candid black-and-white photo is fairly unremarkable. But its subjects—seven Mississippi sheriffs gathered on the campus of Ole Miss on Sept. 27, 1962, on the eve of the federally enforced enrollment of the school's first African-American student, James Meredith—evoked in Hendrickson a deep desire to investigate their lives and to re-examine a tumultuous era in a region infamous for its segregation and bigotry.

The seven men were the leading state law officers of their time. In the photo, they are gathered together affably, chortling amongst themselves, cigarettes clenched between their teeth, their eyes focused on Billy Ferrell in the center, who appears to be demonstrating the proper way to swing a riot club. Ostensibly, the men had arrived in Oxford to assist in preventing Meredith from entering the university.

"The picture stopped me in my tracks," says Hendrickson, speaking from Philadelphia, where he now teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. "These men are not terrifying. They're not dressed as Klansmen. Take away the bat and the malevolent grins, and these are men who have risen above their families' blue-collar factory backgrounds."

Hendrickson, a white man born in California and raised in Illinois, had also spent some time as a young man in the late 1950s and '60s in Alabama, where he was studying at a seminary and considering a vocation to the priesthood. "I saw segregation. I saw apartheid. That never left me." Without question, the faces of the men in Moore's photograph transmit an eerie energy, conjuring fearful notions of white supremacist, redneck-style law enforcement in the Deep South, with all its attendant paranoia, provincialism and brutality. The photo became the springboard not only for Hendrickson's powerful history of civil rights but also for his investigation into what happened to these archetypal Southern good ol' boys and their families. So the author went to Mississippi.

"No sense going to the South if you don't go to Mississippi," says Hendrickson. "I get excited about Mississippi the grace, the manners, the food, the beauty of the landscape. It gave us both Faulkner and appalling racism. It is the most literate and the most illiterate state." Hendrickson followed the small-town trails of his subjects, most of whom were dead. He interviewed contemporaries and family members. He combed through newspaper archives and government reports. On a firsthand basis, he was able to speak to Ferrell (who has since died) and John Ed Cothran, who as a deputy sheriff played a role in the case of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old black Emmett Till, a signature event in the history of the civil rights movement.

As it turns out, being a sheriff was only a sometime thing for most of the seven. They moved on to other businesses, married and remarried, battled alcoholism, died young or from debilitating cancers in short, lived apparently unremarkable lives. All of them, however, were presumed to have had some involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, though gathering direct evidence often proved elusive.

"You humanize each individual life," says Hendrickson, "and each seems to be a mixture of all of our own lives. Underneath the bad beliefs, there's a kind of ordinary normalcy." Besides focusing on the sheriffs and their families, Hendrickson also offers profiles of photographer Moore (now almost 70 and living in northwest Alabama) and James Meredith (also near 70, living in Jackson).

And what of the Mississippi legacy? Is it hopeless? Is the bigotry still there? Hendrickson speaks with cautious optimism. "What I found are blades of hope. I found changes, but they are like tender shoots of grass in the spring susceptive to quick trampling or reversal." Previously a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Hendrickson should be headed for more acclaim with this amazing book, which is characterized by historical scope, sociocultural depth, journalistic integrity and an astonishing ability to reveal universal truths via very particular people and events.

In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley chronicled the lives of the six soldiers his father among them who famously raised the flag on Iwo Jima. With his new book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, he returns to the same war and the same region of the South Pacific to tell how a group of desperate, formidable Japanese troops defending a communications center on the island of Chichi Jima exacted a bloody toll on eight captured American fighter pilots. A ninth flyer, who was shot down but escaped, was future president George Bush.

To give these atrocities a context, Bradley sketches in America’s often high-handed dealings with Japan from 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry’s warships entered Tokyo Bay, to the outbreak of the war. He also presents an account of how the airplane rose rapidly from being a novelty to become the biggest gun in the U.S. arsenal. Along the way, he outlines the character and military importance of the far-sighted Billy Mitchell, the flamboyant Jimmy Doolittle and the ruthlessly pragmatic Curtis LeMay.

But surely the most unsettling part of his story and a thread that runs throughout is the gratuitous cruelty that war unleashes: rapes, mutilations, exquisitely imaginative forms of torture, even cannibalism. In this regard, Bradley points out, America has not been blameless.

Bradley tells BookPage that the idea for Flyboys basically fell into his lap. "I’m home just sitting around," he says, "still reading about World War II, wanting to do another book about it but not having any idea. Then in February 2001, Iris Chang [author of The Rape of Nanking] says, ‘Call Bill Doran.’" Doran, as it turns out, is a World War II veteran and retired lawyer who witnessed secret war-crime trials against Japanese officers on Guam in 1946. Testimony given at these trials told in gruesome detail how the eight downed flyers actually died. When the transcripts were declassified in 1977, Doran obtained a copy. The secret had been so well kept that not only did the flyers’ families not know what happened, neither did former President Bush.

"My dad was a funeral director, and I’ve seen a lot of deaths," Bradley says. "But these guys got their heads cut off, and they got their livers eaten. And I thought, You know what? Everyone wants to turn away from that. It’s too icky. I want to memorialize these guys, and I want to give them the funeral they never had.’ They got thrown in the pit, and most of them are just names. They don’t even have any body parts. I wanted to reconstruct these guys. They were handsome, good, American boys."

To fathom the actions of the Japanese, Bradley says, he first had to understand the warrior culture they sprang from and how they must have felt in a battle they knew they were losing.

"It occurred to me," he observes, "[that they were] isolated, doomed, knowing they were going to die. One atrocity out on an island, people would take out of context."

During his research, Bradley fortuitously encountered former flyboy George Bush, who soon involved himself in the project. "I met him at a speaking engagement," Bradley explains. "We were both down in Texas and, along with a lot of other people, I got to stand and shake his hand. I knew he was a flyboy, and I said, I’ve got the story on these guys. My dad raised the flag. I’m not full of baloney.’ I thought that was the last time I’d ever see George Bush. Two weeks later he called me. We chatted a couple of times. And then I arranged a trip for him to go back to Chichi Jima [with me] and remember his boys." Bush’s trip with Bradley will be covered in a CNN documentary to air on October 18.

Bradley says that all the survivors he spoke to still had vivid memories of the brothers or friends they had lost in the war. It became his lot to reveal to them the disturbing facts that their government had for so long concealed. "I’m talking to people from 75 years on up," he relates. "They have known for 60 years how their brother died. ‘He was lost.’ ‘He died in a crash.’ And a guy calls them up that they’ve never heard of, ‘I’m James Bradley. My dad raised the flag on Iwo Jima.’ They should have hung up right there. It sounds like a looney, right? I would tell them: I know how he died in detail. You don’t have to listen. It’s horrible. I’m just telling you I’m going to write it in a book. You can hang up right now, or I can tell you. It’s your choice." Everyone, he says, wanted to know.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.