Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn’t just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between two star-crossed lovers, but he’d also framed his story with a tale of high-tech, modern-day treasure hunters. Cameron’s fictionalized account mirrored the true-life story Kinder had just spent the last 10 years scrupulously researching and getting down on paper. "I figured it was going to destroy everything I’d done," Kinder says.

By the time we talk in late April, Kinder seems to have accepted his agent’s assurances that the success of the movie can only add luster to Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Kinder’s book about the 1857 wreck and recent recovery of a ship carrying gold from the California Motherlode. Kinder has even been to see Titanic with his mother and his two daughters (who have seen it twice!) and loved it. But he’s not quite ready to trust the early praise for Ship of Gold, which likens it to such riveting accounts of peril and adventure as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

In Ship of Gold, Kinder interweaves two dramatic stories. The first is the story of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer that shuttled passengers and cargo between New York and Panama, taking California-bound goldseekers on the outward journey and making the nine-day journey back to New York with those who had struck it rich in the goldfields, as well as those who had struck out. Between 1853, when it was launched, and 1857 Kinder discovered, the Central America "had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama Route." Not to mention the untold millions in gold dust, nuggets, coins, and bars that had "traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets and carpetbags and money belts of her passengers."

On the fateful journey from Panama to New York in September 1857, the Central America carried its full complement of 500 passengers. Among them were newlyweds Ansel and Adeline "Addie" Easton (sister of one of the richest men in California); Judge Alonzo Monson, who was legendary for his gambling losses in the gold fields; and a disappointed young goldseeker named Oliver Manlove, who had recorded in his diary every mile of his journey west. The ship was captained by William Lewis Herndon, a legendary sailor and explorer who several years before had written a classic of 19th-century adventure, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, about his experiences in South America.

Kinder estimates that he read hundreds of contemporary accounts, interviews, diaries, and reminiscences of Central America passengers to construct an almost moment by moment account of the ship’s encounter with a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas; the heroic efforts of passengers and crew to keep the ship afloat (for hours and hours and hours, male passengers formed a bailing line to keep the rising water away from the steam boilers); the desperate transfer of some of the women passengers in storm-tossed waters to ships that had come to assist the foundering Central America; the heartrending separation of the Eastons; the steely last moments of Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship; and the horrible days adrift of the few others who ultimately survived. It is a wrenching and thrilling account, and any writer would be proud of the power of its telling.

But, as fascinating as it is, the story of the sinking of the Central America is not Kinder’s main story. Instead, it is the search for the wreck and the recovery of its treasure that make up the bulk of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And in Kinder’s hands, this story — even with all its technological and legal details about deep sea recovery efforts — is at least as riveting as his historical account of the sinking.

As Kinder tells it, after he had finished writing his previous book (a bestseller about a man who claimed to have had contact with aliens), he was looking for a project that would involve him physically. Kinder had gone to law school in Florida and learned to scuba dive there, and somehow these facts made him tegin to think about treasure hunting as a subject for his book. When he first heard about the Central America, he says, "it didn’t interest me even a little bit. I wanted something sexy. I wanted lots of jewels and gold reliquaries and the romance of the high seas in the 1600s and 1700s."

But that was before he met the team and crew of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by the extraordinary Tommy Thompson, whose personality dominates Ship of Gold just as it dominated the ultimately successful efforts to find the Central America and its cargo. Thompson was both the technological innovator, who could think his way through the awesome dangers and difficulties of working at great depths in the ocean, and the steely operator, who could stare down his competitors during tense encounters on the high seas and direct the Herculean efforts of a large recovery team of experts and crew members.

"The biggest problem I had in writing this book," Kinder says, "was trying to tell this story exactly as it happened without making Tommy seem too perfect. It was a very, very big problem, because everybody I talked to said Tommy was perfect. I began to wonder how to make this guy seem real."

Of course, Tommy has his defects. He exercised rigid control on the project, for example, not allowing certain crew members to even see the gold and artifacts as they were being brought to the surface. That engendered some deep anger, Kinder says.

Thompson eventually allowed Kinder unprecedented access to the project records and personnel, and Kinder has put that access to good use. His account is informative, dramatic, and even funny. It didn’t come without effort and a big dose of frustration. The book was scheduled to be published for the last three or four years, but publication had to be delayed while competitors’ lawsuits against Thompson and Columbus-America wound through the courts. Kinder used the time to rework the book. "As things turned out, it ended up being a much better manuscript," he says with characteristic grin-and-bear-it good humor.

As Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea at last arrives in bookstores all across the country this month, Gary Kinder sits in Seattle (where he runs a business teaching lawyers to write) waiting for his ship to come in.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Mike Wright rounds up and rounds out the Wild West “I sometimes find myself,” Mike Wright says over the phone from his home in Chicago, “writing for the ear instead of the eye.” After a lifetime in radio and television, Wright talks with the precise enunciation and measured tone of a professional speaker, and he writes with the voice of the teacher you wish you’d had in school knowledgeable, enthusiastic, full of wonderful stories about the real people behind the dates. This is one reason why Wright’s “What They Didn’t Teach You” series is proving so popular. Since the first one appeared only a few years ago, the books have explored the lives and times of those who lived through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. The latest book in the series is What They Didn’t Teach You About the Wild West. Many of the characters are familiar to us, but Wright gives them a new slant, a witty, level-headed shakedown that reveals the individual behind the persona. He focuses his searchlight on Lewis and Clark, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and Doc Holliday. Wright documents the still often overlooked contributions of women women of all sorts, from farmers to prostitutes to mothers (sometimes, of course, one and the same). He devotes a fascinating chapter to the roles of blacks in the Old West, including the surprising tidbit that perhaps as many as 25 percent of the cowboys were of African descent. One of Wright’s most fascinating stories is a reconstruction of Santa Anna’s attack on the Alamo, and the wildly differing accounts of Davy Crockett’s death which may have been an execution following a last-minute surrender.

Mike Wright was born in 1938 and grew up in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia. During World War II, at the tender age of five, he began a public career as a singer, performing at nearby military bases. Frequently he was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit, complete with pasted-on cotton goatee. “Regretfully,” he sighs, “I have no pictures of that. Now, of course, I’m a little older. I don’t have the Uncle Sam suit, but I still have a white goatee.” Young Mike’s singing had its career pitfalls. “It’s hard to be a boy soprano when your voice changes to a bass or baritone. I did some acting stage, a couple of very minor movies.” Wright began working in radio while enrolled at William and Mary in Virginia, where he found the classes less than entrancing. While working as a disc jockey, he began to write. In time he moved into television news, from which he finally retired in 1991. “I was a reporter, anchor, producer from small cities to large. I spent the last 17 years as a producer with NBC in Chicago.” When Wright left TV news, he wrote a documentary on Route 66 for a Chicago station. “Then I got into writing full-time, and I haven’t looked back.” Wright’s first book, What They Didn’t Teach You About the Civil War, was published in the 1996. He has been zooming along ever since. “From my days in radio and television,” he admits, “I can write pretty fast. I can sometimes churn out 20 pages a day. I get it all in mind; I get my notes; I get the books I work from and I just start writing from there. Of course, these 20 pages or sometimes it’s only two or whatever aren’t the final version.

“I write on the computer,” he adds. “At the end of the day I print everything out in hard copy, and after dinner I read it to my wife, every night. She reads she hears everything I’ve written in that one day. She says she enjoys it.” He laughs. “When I read it aloud, I get a feeling for it myself. I make corrections, she makes corrections, I rewrite. And she gets to listen to my rewrite as well.” Understandably, Wright’s wife seldom gets around to reading his finished books.

Wright attributes his writing speed to his days in television news. “I remember when Elvis Presley died. I was writing copy for NBC. This was back in the days of typewriters, and they wouldn’t let me finish a piece of paper, of copy. It was going directly from my typewriter to on the air. I would type about half a page and they would pull it out and I would finish the sentence and keep on going for another half page and they would pull it out. I kept that up for several hours.” Wright’s account of the first book’s genesis explains the appeal of the series an individual slant on history told with infectious enthusiasm. “I had done an earlier book on the Civil War, about Richmond, City Under Siege. I had done some work for a television producer on a Civil War documentary. And I had a lot of material that I had gathered over the years. I don’t throw away anything, as my wife says.

“So I started putting it together and then realized that I didn’t want to tell a story from point A to point B, from one year to the next. I wanted to tell it so that people can pick up one chapter, read it, put it down, pick up another chapter, and they aren’t really losing the train of thought.” Presidio is primarily known as a military publisher, but Wright points out that his books “aren’t really that war-based. There are other books devoted to the battles or whatever. I try to tell readers what the guy was doing at home. There was so much more going on during World War II, for instance, than just the fighting. There was a lot going on in the East when people were going out West.” Obviously Wright loves history. However, like most of us he has complaints about how it’s usually taught. “You know, in History 101 in college, we all get the same things thrown at us. We get dates, names. We may get facts, but we don’t get the why. This is what I’m more interested in: What makes people do this?” What Wright manages to do is place the so-called Wild West in the context of the history before and after it. We learn a good bit about the history of North and Central America that determined the nature of the immigrant European culture that would soon be imposed on so many areas. For example, Wright explains the role smallpox played in the Spanish overthrow of the Aztecs. He examines the ways in which inflated and outright false stories of the land of milk and honey out west drew innocent settlers who were unprepared to find life so dreary and difficult. He looks at the result of a million or so cattle wandering untended in Texas after so many farmers turned soldier during the Civil War.

Wright is telling us the stories no one bothered to mention in school, and he’s also reminding us of the characters that never make it into the TV movies. How did the Chinese happen to become the primary workers who were laying the new railroad tracks? How did the whites celebrate their attacks against Indians? What did Jesse James like to do in his spare time? Wright knows the answers. This isn’t just the history we’ve not been told. It’s history about real people living real lives lives full of pain and humor and joy and disappointment and grief, just like all our lives today.

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.

"There was a time when I didn't know where my next husband was coming from," Mae West once said. This firecracker of a quote, one of many in her famously inflammatory arsenal, was more than just a show of verbal bravado. The shapely blonde from Brooklyn had a romantic life that would've exhausted most mortals, and she kept at it with a man less than half her age until well into her 70s.

Few women could quip like West without eating their words. Over the years, her white-hot sound bytes, not to mention her movies, have become touchstones of seduction. How did she do it? What separated West from the rest? (In 1935, with a salary of about $480,000, she was the highest-paid woman in America.) The starlet's secrets, and those of her sister temptresses, are revealed in Betsey Prioleau's Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love.

An exuberant tribute to female physical, intellectual and spiritual power, Prioleau's book is a feast of language and ideas that spans centuries, drawing on mythology, history and religion to capture the classic seductress in all her varied incarnations, from the goddesses of ancient Greece to modern-day deities of glam. Seductress unzips these mistresses of amour in brief, sizzling biographies, but the volume is more than just a retrospective of history's hottest heroines. Filled with advice on how to stoke the fire of desire, it's also a guide for women who want to jump-start their own romantic lives.

Chronicling the conquests of Cleopatra and Colette, Lola Montez and Elizabeth I, Seductress is a provocative (and instructive) catalog of formidable femmes women with the kind of come-hither command that could make a compliant lap dog of the roughest puppy. Contrary to popular belief, according to Prioleau, this near-infallible ability to win men wasn't a matter of biology, chemistry or voodoo. It was simply a studied, practiced mastery of the field of eros an expertise that's within the grasp of every woman. "Inspiring and sustaining passion is a high art form that requires imagination and psychological savvy," says the author, who believes that "four-star character is the strongest aphrodisiac."

Prioleau was drawn to this piping-hot topic during graduate school. The daughter of a Southern belle, she grew up in Richmond, Virginia, becoming well-acquainted with the prissier traditions of Dixie. "Girls in those days without real career options had to seduce for their supper," she says. Disillusioned by the feminist movement's devaluation of women's sexuality, she began researching the stories of females who succeeded in both their personal and their working lives. Discovering that the classic enchantress someone who thrived on physical desire and professional achievement was a frequent figure in history, a recurring archetype who couldn't be kept down, but whose story was often misinterpreted or ignored, she decided to set the record straight with Seductress.

"Most of us have the wrong idea about the seductress," says Prioleau. "We automatically imagine brainless beach babes, servile man pleasers, or shark-hearted vamps with deep cleavages and dark wiles." True femme fatales, she explains, "demolish all of these cheap stereotypes. They're actually models of full empowerment women of clout and worth who succeeded in love and life."

Seductress provides ample evidence of this. Chapters like "Homely Sirens" and "Silver Foxes" feature unconventional females who can't be measured by the usual standards of beauty and youth. The seductresses here don't rely on physical wiles to bewitch, yet they are sexy, strong and accomplished women like George Sand, Edith Piaf and Prioleau's favorite, Pauline Viardot, a 19th-century opera star with a hypnotic voice and distinctly unlovely features, who netted Hector Berlioz and Ivan Turgenev, among others.

"They teach women they don't have to cave into traditional femininity," the author says of these legendary ladies. "Better still, they don't have to be beautiful or young, hold their tongues, play tricks, or teeter on Manolo Blahniks to captivate men." In her quest to feature inspiring, positive role models for readers, Prioleau found it necessary to eliminate history's more notorious man-killers from her narrative, and that's why some of the book's likeliest candidates for inclusion didn't make the cut. A few of the names you won't find listed in Seductress' index: Marilyn Monroe, Mata Hari and Jennifer Lopez, women whose private lives make the tabloids seem tame. "To qualify," Prioleau explains, "a seductress had to be a powerful woman who won across the board erotically, personally and vocationally and chose marvelous men. No blackguards, louts and losers allowed."

These days, according to the author, "we're witnessing a seductress revival," as screen queens Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon captivate audiences while flourishing, not just as actors, but as wives and mothers. "Business and political potentates are no longer lonely spinsters in pin stripes," Prioleau adds. "They radiate feminine charisma and romantic happiness. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, Georgette Mosbacher. The list goes on." Make no mistake about it, Prioleau's book accentuates the positive, encouraging women to take command of and find liberation in their love lives, to view seduction as a form of self-expression. "The seductress's biggest lesson is the importance of cerebral lures," says the author. "The most powerful mental charm was, and is, the allure of a big, forever-interesting person. That's the best news for 21st century women."

Military historian Maj. Charles R. Bowery Jr. explores the leadership exhibited by two of history’s greatest generals in Lee ∧ Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. A former instructor at West Point, Maj. Bowery traces the progress of Lee and Grant from their early days as young officers to the last great campaign of the Civil War, exploring the styles each brought to the task of leading their armies. From both their successes and failures, Bowery gleans significant lessons for leaders in all walks of life.

BookPage interviewed Bowery via e-mail from Tikrit, Iraq, where he serves as the Operations Officer for the Gunfighters, a U.S. Army AH-64A Apache attack helicopter battalion.

BookPage: Your book, Lee ∧ Grant, ties the generals’ experiences into lessons on leadership and business management. What inspired you to pair military history with business advice? Charles Bowery: When I began this project, I viewed it as a challenge to write a book that combined military history, leadership and management topics into one narrative. I have studied the Civil War my entire life, so this was a golden opportunity to share my love of the subject with a wider audience. Plus, my military career has placed me in a variety of leadership positions, giving me an additional insight. I find a great deal to admire in both Lee and Grant, and I think their successes and failures have much to offer a leader in any endeavor.

Military and business activities have very different goals, methods and measures of success. Where do the military and business arenas differ, and where do they align? The greatest difference is the cost of failure. In the military, daily decisions literally have life-and-death consequences. Moreover, the drastic consequences of military failure tend to make military leaders more risk-averse, less willing to take drastic measures. If a business deal falls through, the sun rises the next day and life goes on.

The greatest similarities between the business and military worlds are their results-based philosophies and their hierarchical structures. A CEO or manager commands or leads employees in similar ways to a military officer. A business or military leader must apply the right mix of leadership styles and methods to get the most out of his or her team in any given situation.

How are you applying the leadership lessons from your book in your own experience as a military leader? One of the personal joys I had in writing Lee ∧ Grant was the time I was able to spend reflecting on my own abilities and shortcomings as a leader. From Robert E. Lee, I gained a much greater appreciation for the value of interpersonal skills to leadership. Many situations, especially in the military, require very direct, do this because I say so types of leadership, but Lee’s interaction with his subordinates shows that even in wartime, the Golden Rule can apply both to leaders and led.

Grant has shown me the value of persistence in all things, and the value of a calm, collected leader in desperate situations. The best example of Grant’s calming influence over his subordinates comes from the Battle of the Wilderness. As the battle wore on, some of his generals became increasingly worried that they would soon be on the receiving end of one of Lee’s famous crushing counterattacks. This worry, combined with the raw savagery of the fighting in the Wilderness, left the entire army on edge. Through it all, observers noted that Grant took the time to effect any necessary changes or enact orders, but otherwise sat on a stump near his headquarters and whittled a stick as reports came in. Worry and paranoia can become infectious, but so can rock-steady leadership. You present Lee and Grant as making both positive leadership decisions and equally significant errors. How have you seen similar decisions, both good and bad, emerge in leaders today, or even in your own efforts? The biggest leadership shortcoming I see is micromanagement, especially when time is short or in pressure situations. Even capable leaders often feel that the only way to get something done quickly or well is to do it themselves. Micromanagement stifles initiative, eliminates the possibility of outside the box ideas, and can increase the pressure on a superior to unmanageable levels. Grant encountered this problem in the Overland Campaign, as he exerted growing control over the minute tactical movements of General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In doing so, Grant created rifts in the Union Army’s high command that never healed. At times, both Lee and Grant demonstrated an overconfidence that left them open to disaster.

Near the end of the book you write, If one could combine the leadership qualities of [Lee and Grant] into one entity, the organization that that person led would simply be unstoppable. Who today combines these leadership qualities, and how? Since the millennium, two figures stand out to me as examples of transformational leadership: Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Gen. (Ret.) Eric Shinseki. Over the past decade, Jobs has transformed the Apple brand into a trendsetter in every area of personal productivity and information technology. When my wife and I bought our first Apple in 1996, the company was floundering. The introduction of the iMac¨ in the late 1990s started the regeneration of the brand, and Jobs determined to keep Apple in both the hardware and software businesses. From there, Jobs kept improving and innovating, and the iPod¨ became the vehicle that propelled Apple to the top of the technology heap. It would have been easy for Jobs to scale back or get out of the business altogether, but he stuck with his vision and proved that it could work.

As the 34th Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1999 to 2003, General Shinseki overcame decades of institutional inertia and initiated a much-needed transformation of United States Army operations and training. During preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom, Shinseki spoke with absolute candor about troop requirements and stood by his beliefs in the face of great pressure to renounce them. Subsequent events have shown that his argument had merit.