<B>You’ve come a long way, baby</B> Single women of America take note life is good. Parents and friends may nag you about getting hitched, but no one questions your right to go to college and have an interesting job, a house, a car even a live-in boyfriend. Most women under 50 take for granted the idea that they can be smart, sexy, successful and respectable without men in their lives. But journalist Betsy Israel’s insightful new book, <B>Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century</B>, takes a revealing look at just how far the single woman has come.

Drawing on private journals, newspaper articles and personal interviews, Israel pieces together a fascinating history of single women in America, from 19th-century spinsters to today’s <I>Sex and the City </I>icons. She takes readers into the factories of 1870s New York, where some single working girls took up part-time prostitution to supplement their $2-a-week salary. And she conveys the dismay of 1940s-era women who worked in factories and white-collar professions during World War II only to be sent back home after the war or viewed as job stealers if they stayed on.

Israel packs more than a century’s worth of information into a detailed and entertaining overview of the bachelor girl’s evolution. She also presents snapshots of women’s lives against a backdrop of society’s changing attitudes as depicted in the media. While single women have more opportunities than ever before, the pressure to marry and follow traditional paths is still prevalent.

By and large, however, today’s society accepts that a single woman can live life on her own terms. For those girls and the country’s women in general, Israel’s <B>Bachelor Girl</B> serves as a reminder, as well as a yardstick: You may have come a long way, but don’t forget the countless hardy souls who made it possible. <I>Rebecca Denton is an editor and writer in Nashville.</I>

Take the uncertainty of the past year and extend it over a decade, and you have an approximation of what the 1960s were like. The tumultuous era is captured in Daniel Ellsberg’s fascinating new book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, $29.95, 480 pages, ISBN 0670030309). Ellsberg, a Harvard graduate, U.S. Marine and during the ’60s hardcore advocate of America’s fight against Communism, was enlisted by Lyndon B. Johnson to serve in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. As an insider in the Defense Department, Ellsberg had access to information that convinced him of the futility of Johnson’s war policies, and in 1969 certain that he would be jailed for his actions he leaked to The New York Times a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page document on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that helped to end the conflict. Spanning the years between his entry into the Pentagon and Nixon’s withdrawal from the presidency, Secrets is ultimately a memoir about Ellsberg’s crisis of conscience. His struggles to tell the truth to power evolved into his momentous decision to take matters into his own hands. In telling his unforgettable story, he skims over much of his personal life. (He does, however, admit to taking his 12-year-old son along when he copied the Pentagon Papers.) A compelling look into the workings of power, Secrets is the story of a hero and a patriot.

If you ever chuckled when you heard the phrase battle of the sexes,” thinking to yourself, that’s no battle, child,” Francine Prose’s book might make you reconsider. In The Lives of the Muses, Prose explores nine of the most tortured, devious relationships known to art and science. But instead of focusing on the famed artist in each couple, she looks at his lover, spouse or eroticized friend the artist/thinker’s muse, in other words.

People who saw Sharon Stone in the screen hit The Muse may scoff at the idea of a woman who can channel brilliant ideas to a genius. But, for Prose, there’s no getting around the role that women have played in bringing to fruition some of the world’s great masterpieces, from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary to the surrealist fantasies of Salvador Dali to the song lyrics of John Lennon.

Contemporary readers may find Prose’s chapter on Yoko Ono the most interesting. Was she the bloodsucker so many Beatle fans painted her to be, or did she inspire Lennon to think outside the rock and roll box? The truth lies somewhere in the gray area between those two extremes, Prose thinks. She wonders out loud how much of the contempt for Ono was racial prejudice and misogyny masquerading as compassion for John.

Lou Andreas-Salome will be less well-known to Prose’s readers, but she is arguably the most interesting and eclectic of Prose’s subjects. Andreas-Salome was a serial muse whose life intersected meaningfully with Frederick Nietszche, poet Rainer Rilke and Sigmund Freud. She liked to juggle two men at a time, while steadfastly refusing to have sex with anybody, including her husband, until her mid-30s when she entered into an extramarital affair with Rilke, who was 10 or so years her junior.

Prose’s fascinating book sheds light on a group of extraordinary women who filled a variety of roles some were lovers; some just friends. Some sought money and recognition, while others went after the ephemeral something akin to spiritual insight. In the end, what they all seemed to share was a deep, abiding hunger to be more than ordinary. And so they were. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

In A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, author Carol Berkin recalls the period following the end of the Revolutionary War when the Articles of Confederation were in force as the governing code for the new United States. Designed with an eye toward decentralizing power, the Articles worked so well that the young nation soon found itself without any significant power. Its army was small and inconsequential; its credit was ruined; and the 13 states tended to conduct themselves as wholly independent political units.

Against this backdrop, Berkin, conveys the desperation and passion of the men who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to design America’s new constitution. They were men of wealth and comfort,” she says, landowners, slaveholders, lawyers, merchants, land and securities speculators, and an occasional doctor or clergyman,” who were crafty enough to know that premature leaks could scuttle their proposed ship of state. Consequently, they agreed to keep the details of their discussions secret from the public.

Although the universally revered George Washington and Ben Franklin were both active in the convention, they were less assertive than such younger colleagues as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. From May 25, when the ground rules were laid down, until September 17, the day the document was signed, the debates surged this way and that, often creating the least expected of political allies. Relying on first-hand accounts and doling out the events as they actually occurred, Berkin adds drama and color to what might have been little more than an annotated set of minutes.

The author, a professor of American history at the City University of New York, rounds out her story with an account of the document’s ratification and of Washington’s inauguration as president. Appended to her engaging narrative are copies of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution as initially approved, as well as thumbnail biographies of all the representatives to the convention.

In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, writer/historian T.J. Stiles has produced what must be considered the definitive James biography of this generation. Unlike previous authors who emphasized James as the daring train and bank robber, Stiles seeks to understand the world of rural western Missouri, into which Jesse Woodson James was born in 1847. His family lived in a section of the state later dubbed Little Dixie” where slaves constituted fully 25 percent of the population. At age three Jesse suffered the loss of his father, a Baptist preacher who died in California during the Gold Rush. Jesse’s widowed mother, the six-foot-tall Zerelda Cole James, imbued in her sons, Jesse and his brother Frank, a passionate devotion to slavery, the Southern cause and, eventually, secession.

When war came in 1861, Frank James, 18 years of age, volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. Because he was only 15, Jesse was prevented from joining his brother. As Stiles makes clear, a turning point in the life of the James family occurred in 1863, when pro-Union state militiamen, in search of Frank, stormed the family farm, took Zerelda into custody and forced her to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States. An enraged Jesse immediately joined other Confederate bushwhackers in guerrilla actions against their pro-Union neighbors. In short order they looted stores, killed an abolitionist minister and wreaked terror and mayhem in Clay County and beyond.

Outraged by such Union atrocities” as the Emancipation Proclamation, James and his comrades refused to surrender and acknowledge Confederate defeat in 1865. Chaos continued to ravage Missouri in the postwar years, when retribution hung in the air,” and neighbors persisted in settling scores with neighbors. War had torn apart the state’s political landscape, and new factions and parties sought favor. As Stiles demonstrates, Jesse James was among those who attempted to influence the course of state politics. Although ever the outlaw, robbing banks and railroads from Iowa to Kentucky, James was motivated by politics, as well as plunder. He sent intensely partisan and articulate letters to newspapers in which he condemned Republicans and deplored the Radical Reconstruction of the South. All the while, the American public devoured stories of James’ narrow escapes and epic adventures. By 1882, when he was gunned down in St. Joseph, Missouri, he was a figure as publicized as the president.” As gracefully written as a novel, and convincingly argued throughout, this is biography at its finest. Dr. Thomas Appleton is professor of history and associate director of the Center for Kentucky History and Politics at Eastern Kentucky University.