Contrary to what grade-school legends would have us believe, the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated in late November; most likely it occurred at the end of September or in very early October. And, with the arrival of the Indian leader Massasoit and hundreds of his followers "bearing five freshly killed deer," the event "soon became an overwhelming Native celebration," rather than the pious English festival we commemorate today.

This is one of many choice tidbits in Nathaniel Philbrick's absorbing and exceedingly well researched history of the Plymouth Colony. In fact, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is so interesting in so many ways that readers will come away from it with a profoundly different understanding – and deeper appreciation – of the people (Native Americans and colonists, alike) and events that have been flattened over the course of almost three centuries into a lifeless national mythology.

"I think it's really important that we see the past as a lived past rather than something that was fated to be," Philbrick says during a call to Providence, Rhode Island. Philbrick is on his way home to Nantucket Island, where he and his wife, a third-generation Cape Codder, and their two children have lived for almost 20 years. "We look at this story as if the outcome had been determined from the very beginning, but that is not how they saw it. So with this book I was really trying to recreate the sense of how precarious it was."

Philbrick won the National Book Award in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, his harrowing account of the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex and the struggle of its crew to survive. Ever since, he says, he has "been writing survival stories in one way another. What fascinated me about this story was that this was a survival story in three layers."

After many delays and a horrible sea journey, the Pilgrims arrived at the wrong time of year on a coast where three years before a thriving, populous Native community had been decimated by a plague brought to the Americas by European fisherman. The first year after the Mayflower landed was a physical and psychological struggle for survival for both Natives and Pilgrims alike, as Philbrick shows in riveting detail. The shrewd political calculations of Chief Massasoit and his remarkable relationship with Edward Winslow eventually laid the groundwork for a half-century of amazing – if hard-won – accommodation between settlers and Natives, the second layer of Philbrick's survival tale. But the succeeding generations of Pilgrims and Natives, grown greedy and comfortable on one side and resentful and hard-pressed on the other, moved inexorably toward the largely forgotten and incredibly brutal "King Philip's War," which, Philbrick argues convincingly, announced the tragic, archetypal pattern of conflict that continental expansion would follow for the next two centuries.

As guides through this lesser-known but fascinating era, Philbrick follows two dominant, articulate personalities: William Bradford, the leader of the first generation of Pilgrims, and William Church, a prescient and "gleefully impious" representative of the third generation of colonists. Philbrick is equally good at illuminating the character of the other major players in this history – Miles Standish, Edward and Josiah Winslow, Mary Rowlandson, Squanto, Chief Massasoit and his son, King Philip – none of whom is quite the paragon or villain portrayed in the standard national mythologies.

"My education as an elementary and high school student was that the Pilgrims were the example of everything that was good about America. Then I went to college and the story was that the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans," Philbrick says. "But as I delved into this on my own, I saw that this was a tragedy in terms of the overarching dynamic. They all were people who were struggling heroically (or in a cowardly fashion) and who had a lot to say about what was happening to them, rather than being powerless victims."

Philbrick developed his informative, eminently readable, person-centered approach to writing history in several earlier books about the history of Nantucket and of seafaring. An English major at Brown, Philbrick learned to write during a stint at the magazine Sailing World. He had been a competitive sailboat racer as a teenager and in college, a passion he says he developed on a manmade lake near "that most nautical of places, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," where his father was a university professor. Philbrick met his wife when both were teaching sailing on Cape Cod.

While it took him three years to compose Mayflower, Philbrick says he actually worked on the book for almost 13 years. "When I was writing my first history of Nantucket, I realized that if I was going to understand its origins as an English settlement I would have to go back to the Pilgrims and the Indians," he says. He found that the English side was well documented. But to understand the Native side he had to "look at oral traditions, archeology, folklore. I realized that exploring the Native American past requires a whole different side of the brain almost, a whole different discipline. I took a couple of years just coming up to speed in that way."

The result of this lengthy inquiry is a history that reads like tragedy, that is populated by fallible humans on all sides and that resounds with what-if moments. Philbrick does not see as inevitable this first major war between Indians and the English (in which the English lost eight percent of their male population and Native Americans of southern New England lost 60 to 80 percent of its people, including those sold into slavery by the Puritans). But once it did happen, King Philip's War set the pattern of conflict for centuries to come.

"If Josiah Winslow and Philip had only decided to just talk, as their fathers had, we would have had a profoundly different New England history. But it didn't happen," Philbrick says. "The Pilgrims didn't come here on the Mayflower to empire build or to remove a population, but in the wake of that war, that's exactly what they did."

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War is one of the best histories of unintended consequences you're ever likely to read.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

America’s Founding Fathers tackled many thorny questions from the pursuit of happiness to the separation of powers but they never had to confront such controversial issues as stem cell research, Social Security or campaign finance reform. With the Founders held in high esteem, and modern politicians viewed with considerable contempt, it’s not surprising that many Americans wonder how the men who formed our nation’s government might handle today’s most difficult problems.

Journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser offers a witty and thought-provoking response in What Would the Founders Do? Their Questions, Our Answers. Plumbing the Founders’ recorded musings, Brookhiser speculates on such matters as how Alexander Hamilton would react to Hurricane Katrina (he would expect city, state and federal executives to demonstrate energy in their response) and what Thomas Jefferson might think of assisted suicide (he would support it). It quickly becomes apparent that Brookhiser, while respectful of the Founders, is no sacred textualist. He is clearly more interested in spotlighting provocative ideas than he is in presenting correct ones.

Speaking from his home in New York, Brookhiser says his inspiration for the book came from people asking him WWFD questions every time he spoke about the Founders. When he told his wife that one of his lectures on Alexander Hamilton, his historical specialty, had sparked four such inquiries, she suggested that they should be the subject of his next book. (His earlier books include Rules of Civility, Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton and The Adamses.) I tried to find as realistic answers as I could, he explains. I think the only time I’m close to being totally tongue-in-cheek is [with] the one on campaign finance reform where I say it’s a wonder that James Madison and Gouverneur Morris ever got elected to anything. I’ve been a political journalist for almost 30 years for National Review, Brookhiser explains. The way I generated the questions [was that] I just thought, What am I writing about with my National Review hat on? All the editorials that I and my colleagues write, what are they all about? . . . So I said, OK, pitch all these balls to the Founders and see how they swing at them. It was like writing 60 articles. Brookhiser rejects the notion that the Founders were all over the map philosophically and thus unlikely to be of a single mind about anything. I would say that were often all over the map politically, but I wouldn’t say [they were] philosophically. There were certain core principles that they all agreed on. It’s very interesting that the Continental Congress made lots of changes in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration [of Independence]. But they did not touch what we regard as the most famous parts of it the opening. Hardly anything was done to that. People look to the Founders for guidance, Brookhiser thinks, because America is still a young country. They’re not that far away, he says. They’re closer than Charlemagne. And yet we have old institutions. The presidency goes back to 1789; Congress goes back to 1774. You compare that to five French republics and two empires and two kingdoms, and we have lots of continuity. Maybe the most important thing is that the Founders were politicians, and they were recognizably like modern politicians. They had to run for office. They had to say what they thought. They debated with each other. Another strand of relevance, Brookhiser notes, was that the Founders were future-oriented. They were very mindful of working for posterity and of the world watching them as examples. This was a little country, on the edge of things. But when they’re at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry said, If we fail, we will disappoint the world.’ In an appendix, Brookhiser has some fun with the Founders when he imagines them as modern-day bloggers. The industrious Ben Franklin has three blogs Dirtyoldman, Keytech and YouSucceed to present his sides as a sensualist, scientist and self-help guru. Sam Adams blogs under BeerandLiberty. If these guys were alive now, he says, of course they’d be blogging. . . . The Patriot Act forbids me from telling you how I’m in contact with the Founders, but be assured that I am. If the author can fathom what the Founders would think about intelligent design, then it seems fair to ask him how they’d view this book about them. I think none of them would quarrel with [me] trying to do it in a popular way, he says. Almost all of them wrote journalism. Franklin would like it to the extent that it’s humorous and pulling people’s legs. In terms of what I’m saying about their thoughts, I’m sure I’d get a lot of quarrels because I’m bluntly presenting quarrels that they had. Jefferson would say, Why are you presenting Hamilton’s argument so well? I mean, really, come on!‘ And vice versa. So I’m sure I’d get a lot of that. In a way, I’m glad they’re dead. I’m sure I’d be fielding a lot of correspondence. Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

During war, there are no holidays. But historian Stanley Weintraub knows well that holidays can affect the way war is waged, from the celebrated Christmas Truce of World War I to Hitler’s brutal attack during the final winter of World War II.

In his new book, 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, Weintraub shows how Hitler took advantage of the Allies’ Yuletide cheer to launch the 1944 surprise attack that became known as the Battle of the Bulge, one of the bloodiest clashes of the war.

So imminent was an Allied victory in those waning weeks of the European theater that some troops had already taken leave from the front to enjoy the holiday in Paris. Hitler was counting on just such a seasonal lapse as he secretly amassed his remaining ragtag divisions in the Ardennes Forest for one last offensive. The Nazis, short on strategy, were helped by 10 days of driving snow and rain that prompted Gen. George Patton’s famous plea to God, "Sir, whose side are you on?"

The weather cleared as Patton requested, Allied air strikes commenced, and ground troops converged to take Bastogne on Dec. 26, effectively ending Hitler’s conquest. As Weintraub illustrated in his two previous books, General Washington’s Christmas Farewell and Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914, Christmas and other religious observances often play pivotal roles in military history.

"The Japanese, for example, planned the Pearl Harbor attack for Sunday. Very often, major offensive surprise attacks occur on a Sunday because it is assumed that, in a largely Christian West, Sunday will be a time when people are less alert and will be doing other things," says Weintraub, the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State.

The Germans were equally aware that, with the war in its 11th hour, Allied troops were less inclined to take risks. " The Germans would broadcast over loudspeakers, ‘How would you like to die for Christmas?’" he says. "They counted on a relaxation at Christmas, and they were quite right." The Allied commanders couldn’t have been more different in style or temperament. British Field Marshal Montgomery, whose troops had suffered most in the early years of the war, was a national hero and cautious to a fault. Omar Bradley, pulled from the Pacific theater, was a fish out of water. George Patton, a born warrior and deeply religious man, saw no contradiction in asking God for good killing weather.

"The real hero was George Patton. He was a fighting general and the troops loved him," says Weintraub. "He was certainly the most aggressive general, but he was off-the-wall; there was no one like him. When he was killed in an automobile crash at the end of the war, I think it might have been the best end for him because he was not a civilian. He was not the kind of person who could sit at a desk." Weintraub leavens his military history with celebrity cameos. Sultry Marlene Dietrich receives frostbite and lice in return for her Christmas goodwill tour to the front, where she exchanged intimate holiday greetings with several officers including Patton. David Niven, then an unknown British intelligence officer, tries to keep Allied codes current to thwart German spies. Even Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is spotted en route to Dresden his experiences there inspired Slaughterhouse-Five.

Weintraub saw two Christmases on the front lines first-hand as a soldier in the 8th Army Division in Korea. "Because the cultures were so different, we could not have a Christmas in which the enemy across the line celebrated, too," he says. The same holds true today in Iraq. Barring a sudden outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Canada, he sees little opportunity for Christmas to play a major role in wars to come.

"I don’t think it could happen today. The idea of a common Western culture in which Christmas is both a secular and a religious holiday shared by the enemy as well just can’t happen anymore."

Jay MacDonald will celebrate the holidays at his new home in Austin, Texas.

Jay Winik doesn't prowl through the raw materials of history to prove a point or to bask vicariously in a time more congenial or exciting than his own. Instead, he looks for great, socially relevant stories lived out by towering figures. He found these elements in profusion in the accounts that became April 1865: The Month That Saved America, his 2001 bestseller. In his new book, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800, Winik's cast and canvas are immeasurably larger and even more earth-shaking.

Noting that the successful but initially fragile American Revolution set off reverberations felt around the world, Winik concentrates his jeweler's eye on the political machinations of the Founding Fathers, the barbarities and expansionism of the French Revolution and the attempts of Russia's tireless and formidable Catherine the Great to extend and consolidate her vast empire. Each of these theaters of action directly affected the others and, to varying degrees, the rest of the world. Common to the leaders of all three nations, Winik argues, was an attraction to the reforming zeal trumpeted by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. The crux of this belief eschewed an order based on the direct will of God and the fixed nature of the universe, writes the author. Instead, it focused a bright light on man-made laws and man-made authority. Speaking to BookPage from his home in Maryland, Winik first explains how he came up with the idea for the book. What I was hoping to do was search around and find something that was monumental, something that had narrative power, something where I could really make a fresh contribution and something that would play to my strengths as a writer. It took a while probably about two months of researching, reading and thinking about it. It was a little bit daring for me to take on something so extensive and so new, for which there was no model or template. . . . It just seemed to me that this was something that cried out for a book, he says. Once he had settled on the subject, it took him another six years to research and write it.

A senior scholar at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, as well as a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, Winik is a master at character depiction and dramatic narration. The book has the cliff-hanging pacing of a fictional adventure. Under the rubrics The Promise of a New Age, Turmoil, Terror and A World Transformed, he alternates chapters that are titled simply America, Russia and France. Within these divisions, characters emerge, engage our sympathies or contempt and are then taken to a crisis point before a new chapter intervenes to carry on narratives that were previously seeded. It is particularly heartbreaking to watch the stories of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette play out and we are more than halfway into the book when those calamities happen.

While Winik does not play favorites he is meticulous in documenting flaws as well as virtues it is obvious that he has particular respect for Catherine the Great and George Washington as national leaders. If you were at a dinner party, Winik muses, and you got the chance of being next to Washington or Jefferson or Hamilton or Robespierre or Louis XVI or Catherine, she might be your most fascinating dinner partner. Even though she presided over a political system very different from ours, you can see that she felt as deeply and intently about [social and political] issues as the American founders did. What's so fascinating and what I really tried to bring out as it came to light for me is that whereas our founders, who had a highly different set of circumstances, drew one set of conclusions, say, from Montesquieu, [Catherine drew another]. They took from Montesquieu that we should have a separation of organs of government and a balance of power between the different organs. But Catherine, reading Montesquieu, took an entirely different set of ideas, which was that republics could not last over a large land mass and that a large land mass needs an autocratic-style government. Of all the titans Winik profiles, he concedes that Washington was the least charismatic of the group. He was not the most brilliant, not the greatest orator, not the deepest thinker and he certainly wasn't the most exciting. What he had was a vision and a sense of when to move the country fast and when to move it slow. I think it's fair to say that without Washington, we probably would not have survived that perilous first decade which really set the tone for America. Winik is at a loss, however, to explain the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. It was one of the great puzzles, he muses. On the one hand, the French Revolution, having been inspired in great part by the revolution that took place in America, gave us some of the loftiest words and ideas that mankind has ever received. By the same token, it gave us one of the most savage, totalitarian regimes history has ever witnessed, to the point where they were not only beheading in the most savage way the political opposition but often their own colleagues. . . . I guess if you were to reach for a larger viewpoint as to why, [it would be that] absent the rule of law and having a sense of such absolute true belief, they descended into barbarism. He likens the French bloodbath to Pol Pot's massacres of his fellow Cambodians.

Whatever their methods, Winik ultimately concludes, these national leaders were all fighting desperately for the world they believed in. And, in the end, he argues, humanity benefited. Within essentially a single generation, he writes, arguably greater progress had been made politically than in all the millennia since the beginning of time. Currently immersed in the relatively tranquil chores of promoting the new book, Winik confesses that he hasn't a clue as to what his next project will be other than monumental.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

When David Maraniss finished his much-praised biography of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero), he was "determined not to write another sports book anytime soon." He had previously written a highly regarded biography of perhaps the greatest football coach of all time, Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered), so his feeling was: been there, done that.

Besides, during a 30-year career at the Washington Post, Maraniss had developed a reputation as a great observer of the American political scene. In 1993, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his series on the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. (He also shared in the 2008 Pulitzer given to the Washington Post team that covered the Virginia Tech shooting.) He published an astonishing account of the 1960s (They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967). He wrote a seminal biography of Bill Clinton (First in His Class). And, as Maraniss finished his work on the Clemente biography, the preliminary jockeying for position in that other great American contact sport — the run for the presidency — was already beginning.

Unfortunately for Maraniss — but not, it turns out, for readers — Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates were on their way to the World Series at the same time that the world was traveling to Rome for the 1960 Olympics.

"I was doing research on August and September 1960 and I kept seeing these names in the sports section – Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, Abebe Bikila, Cassius Clay," Maraniss says during a call to his home in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, D.C., where from his third-floor office he can see the spires of the National Cathedral. Maraniss and his wife, Linda, the "quirky saint" to whom he dedicates Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, now divide their time between Washington and Madison, Wisconsin, where they grew up. "Those are pretty intriguing names. That’s what first struck me. But I kept saying I really don’t want to do a sports book."

As he read on, however, Maraniss noticed that this was the time when Nikita Khrushchev was about to make his first visit to the United Nations in New York as the Cold War turned serious. "Black Africa was gaining its independence that summer, so that was another layer. Then I read that a doping death had taken place that year and that it was the first televised summer Olympics. And that was enough." From these strands and additional stories turned up through the prodigious research and reporting that is typical of his books, Maraniss fashions a completely captivating and frequently surprising narrative of the 17 days of athletic competition and political intrigue in Rome during August and September 1960.

First of course, there are the athletes. This was the Olympics when a brash, unknown 18-year-old boxer from Louisville named Cassius Clay burst on the scene. But in that moment, the future Muhammad Ali could not hold a candle to the immensely respected decathalon winner Rafer Johnson, who was the first black athlete to lead the American team and carry the United States flag during the opening ceremonies. It is one of the wonders of Maraniss’ storytelling that he can present a charmingly callow Cassius Clay, bragging his way through his fear of flying, without succumbing to the huge temptation to make Clay’s the dominant story of these Olympics.

"The one thing people know about the 1960 Olympics is Cassius Clay," Maraniss says. "But that’s not where Rome 1960 focuses. The other story that I downplayed, but for different reasons, was the basketball team. I love Oscar Robinson and Jerry West. I think that backcourt is for the ages. But I have never thought that basketball represents the Olympics, so I didn’t want to get sidetracked on that."

Instead Maraniss writes marvelous, suspenseful accounts of competitors from around the world. Among the most fascinating of these is the story of the eccentric Joe Faust, an American high jumper who didn’t come close to winning and yet remained so obsessed with the sport that he continued to jump with almost religious fervor into his 70s. "What an interesting life and mind," Maraniss says of the hours he spent interviewing Faust. "He’s the kind of character that as a reporter you’re always looking for."

Just as important to Rome 1960 are the intense political battles that were being waged behind the scenes. This was a time when Cold War antagonisms were nearing their height, and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. vied mightily to win the Olympic propaganda war. Among his many discoveries, Maraniss uncovers the story of the American’s ham-fisted attempt to get Soviet athlete Igor Ter-Ovanesyan to defect. Maraniss also offers a ground-breaking account of the fierce political competition between China and Taiwan that played out during the summer of 1960.

"In Rome 1960 you see the roots of what exists today," Maraniss says. "The Chinese are using the Olympics for political purposes just as the U.S. and the Soviets did during the Cold War. You can’t take politics out of the Olympics no matter how hard you try. So you probably shouldn’t try. I don’t think anybody should boycott the Olympics, but the athletes and countries that go should say whatever the hell they want to say about China."

Then, ever the consummate journalist, Maraniss adds, "The Chinese have never experienced the world press the way they will during the Olympics. I don’t know what will happen but it will be fascinating. But I’m not going. I have asthma and I don’t want to be in all that air pollution."

That’s too bad. Imagine the stories he would tell.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

As the current administration sputters to an end and a new leader is elected, Americans may find it instructive to look back at the controversial presidency of Andrew Jackson. The man known as Old Hickory developed a sometimes inspirational, sometimes dictatorial style of leadership, in which the legislative and judicial branches were regarded as meddlesome impediments to the executive's grand designs.

"It would be both glib and wrong to say that the Age of Jackson is a mirror of our own time," Jon Meacham writes. "Still, there is much about him and about his America that readers in the early twenty-first century may recognize."

In American Lion, Meacham concentrates on Jackson's two terms in Washington, from 1829 to 1837. During that period, the president from Tennessee shattered the economic power and political influence of the Second Bank of the United States, prevented South Carolina from breaking with the Union, reined in federal expenditures on roads, bridges, canals and other infrastructure (electing instead to pay down the national debt), approved the brutal removal of Indian tribes from the South, practiced political patronage as a natural right and a sensible process, halted efforts to insinuate more religion into government and demanded that other nations treat America with the respect he thought it deserved. In short, he made friends ecstatic and opponents livid.

Meacham, who's the editor of Newsweek, discusses his search for Jackson's presidential soul as he walks to his office in New York, after having dropped off his four-year-old daughter at preschool. "The White House years were so tumultuous," he says. "I found them at once distant and incredibly familiar. It's somewhat depressing, actually, to be a journalist who writes history because you realize that everything has happened before."

This is Meacham's third book-length foray into American history. His other works are the critically acclaimed Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.

Around 2003, Meacham recalls, he noticed there was a flurry of popular histories about America's founders, notably Ben Franklin, John Adams and George Washington. This set him to thinking about exploring Jackson's legacy. "One of the things that occurred to me as I read those wonderful books," he says, "was that Jackson had—oddly for such a dominant figure—receded from the popular imagination. I thought he was a character worth spending five years with, and I've never been disappointed in that."

Although he had not systematically studied Jackson up to that point, Meacham says he "knew the basic outline" from having read Robert V. Remini's and Arthur Schlesinger's classic works on America's seventh president. "So he was a familiar figure," Meacham says, "but not someone with whom I was obsessed."

It took some adroit scheduling on Meacham's part to work on the Jackson book while simultaneously carrying out his duties for Newsweek. "I'm able to read during the week," he says, "but I can't write during the week." That being the case, he did his writing during the summer at his house in remote Sewanee, Tennessee. (A native of Chattanooga, Meacham earned his degree in English literature from the University of the South at Sewanee.)

"I take a month each summer and go to Sewanee," he says. "I'm very rigorous. I sit down [to write] and won't get up for 10 hours. I'm able to get a working draft out of that." When he returns to New York, he edits and fine-tunes his manuscript. That's how American Lion was wrought.

"It seemed to me that trying to figure out how the modern presidency came into being was a useful exercise," he ventures. "I tried to think of new ways to tell the story." One approach was to focus a lot of attention on the White House roles of Andrew and Emily Donelson, Jackson's married nephew and niece (who were first cousins to one another). Because Jackson's beloved wife, Rachel, died between the time he was elected president and the time he was sworn in, he chose the artful and ambitious Emily to be his official White House hostess and Andrew as his private secretary.

Emily's sense of propriety—some might say prissiness—put her at odds with the flamboyant and allegedly adulterous Margaret Eaton, the wife of Jackson's secretary of war and close adviser, John Eaton. This clash vexed and diverted Jackson through much of his tenure. "The Donelson family [of Nashville] became increasingly interesting, and I was able to find new letters that I think added detail and insight into how Jackson operated."

Meacham found the new letters through meeting with the Donelsons and other Jackson descendants during the course of his research. In writing his book on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Meacham says he discovered that "presidential families often have things they don't think are that important but which can be. What I learned from that was always ask the question. So I simply said, 'Are there any scrapbooks? Are there any boxes? Is there anything at all that you just think is something you have to move around the garage from time to time that's of any conceivable interest?'Ê" Many of those he spoke with did have such material and gave him free access to it.

"I've yet to do one of these projects where, if you look hard enough, you won't find something," he says. "It may not be paradigm-shifting, but every little bit helps."

Jackson, who never knew his father and lost his mother at the age of 14, cherished the notion of family. Once he became president, Meacham concludes, he tended to look upon those who elected him as an extension of family. Consequently, he was zealous in their defense and convinced he knew what was best for them. The upshot, the author asserts, was that Jackson became "a permanently divisive figure" who "loved the fight."

Meacham says his next book will probably be on James and Dolley Madison. "I'm reading up on them," he reports. "He is truly the forgotten founder. He doesn't have a statue at Epcot. Is writing the Constitution not enough to get you a statue?"

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Nobody else does anything quite like what Joe Sacco does, which can make his work difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Cartoon journalism? Too dismissive: Sacco's books are weighty and important, crammed with research and reporting. But they're also fun to read, full of great characters and humor and incredible stories. He visits war-torn lands and reports on them in graphic-novel format; Safe Area Gorazde, his awesome 2000 book about Bosnia,won an Eisner Award, the premier awards of the American comic book industry.

His latest, Footnotes in Gaza, is a massive, exhaustive study of an incident from 1956 in the Gaza Strip in which 111 Palestinians were shot to death by Israeli soldiers. What could've been a long-lost historical footnote becomes, in Sacco's hands, a vivid and immediately relevant story about the heart of the Middle Eastern conflict.

Sacco works more like a traditional newspaper reporter than one might suppose. ("I'm a newspaperman at heart," he writes at one point in the book.) "Mostly what I'm doing when I'm in the field, so to speak, is getting interviews," he explained in a phone interview from his home in Portland, Oregon. "I do very little sketching when I'm there. I'm often taking photographs for visual references." He also asks a lot of "visual questions—certain questions that might seem out of place for a prose journalist." There's a scene in which a group is locked up in a school, for example: "A prose writer could just say, they were held in a school behind barbed wire. When you're going to draw it you have to ask for more details. You really have to think in terms of what you will be drawing later."

The book required extensive research—two long trips to Gaza, once for two weeks and once for two months—and lots of digging around for reference material. He found photographs of the refugee camps in the UN archives in Gaza City, for example. "When I'm there, I'm behaving basically as a journalist," Sacco says. "Then when I'm back I write a script from my notes and tapes." Then the hard part begins.

Footnotes in Gaza took close to seven years: "Two and a half to three months of in-the-field research," he says, "and then the writing took some months and the drawing took some years." Sacco estimates that four years of "very intense drawing" went into the book. Typically, he says, being in the field isn't the bulk of the work: "I spend a lot more time at the desk drawing."

"You have to choose a project that you feel is going to sustain your interest," he says. "I chained myself to the desk and tried not to move from it," he said, "knowing that it would take years."

Spending so much time working in and writing about places defined by bloody conflict can try even the most optimistic soul. It's important, Sacco says, to know when to stop. "You don’t want to start feeling cynical about things. I’ve spent 20 years doing this. . . . It sort of wears on you." But, he says, “I'm not a depressive person. I have a personal life that doesn't rely on my experiences abroad, a rich personal life with good friends and that sort of thing. That helps.”

It also helps that Sacco tends to focus on the big, eternal mysteries of human nature, regardless of where he happens to be working. One of the fascinating elements of Footnotes in Gaza is the way in which he raises the question of the knowability of truth. What really happened in the towns of Rafah and Khan Younis in 1956? Sacco interviews as many people as he can find, sketching each of their earnest, first-hand accounts as they tell it—and then he begins to pick the whole thing apart. Many of the stories don't match up; many of the memories people share with him simply can't be accurate.

"I'm not sure if you end up reconciling it completely," he says. "These are memories that are very old. People can get mixed up even about very recent events." Somehow, seeing each story unfold visually, rather than simply reading about them, makes each one seem unquestionably true, which makes the later corrections profoundly effective: the pillars on which the story stands, as Sacco puts it, crumble beneath you.

"I want the reader to get a taste of how difficult it is to get this information," he says. "I also want the reader to get a sense of how, despite the inconsistencies, the overall arc of the story is the same. I think sometimes there's more veracity in a story that has some kinks in it."

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

Author photo credit: Michael Tierney

Erik Larson, author of the nonfiction bestsellers The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm, believes he has the “tiniest office in the world.” He’s never actually measured it, he admits. But he says the teeny room—a sort of foyer to the master bedroom’s closet—once served as the makeup room for a previous owner who was a prominent local newscaster.

“It is very small, but it’s cozy,” Larson says during a call to the home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that he shares with his wife, Dr. Christine Gleason, who heads the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. “It’s probably the best office I’ve ever had.”

“No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon."

One of its saving graces, Larson says, is that “a good chunk of it has windows. I’ve got what you call territorial views to the north. I see a hilltop, then a valley, then the next hilltop and the next hilltop, then a little lake. It’s very, very nice.”

And that captivating perspective—along with his “addiction to tennis”—seems to have provided at least a partial antidote to the gloom Larson experienced while researching and writing his riveting new book about the first year of Nazi rule, In the Garden of Beasts.

“When you get immersed in this era there’s something so repulsive about it that it can really drag you down,” Larson explains. “No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon.

“What I found was that when you’re writing a book like this, in territory that has been pretty heavily mined in other ways, you have to read the basics. And there are a lot of basics to read. You just have to read and read and read. That’s what starts to infect you,” he says. “It’s the accumulation of these little bits and pieces of horror. It began to drag me down. And you feel this immense frustration: Why didn’t anybody do anything?”

That is one of the needling moral questions that haunts a reader throughout In the Garden of Beasts. To bring that and other questions vividly to life, Larson presents the experiences of an American family who were there and witnessed the almost-overnight changes in Germany. Charles E. Dodd, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to be U.S. ambassador to Germany, arrived in Berlin in 1933 with his wife, his son and his daughter Martha.

“Dodd and his daughter were probably ideal characters to follow because they came from very different perspectives,” Larson says. “Martha’s life in Berlin really does follow an almost novelistic arc. She begins utterly enthralled with the Nazis, becomes less so, and is finally so disgusted that she goes over—as many did—to seeing the salvation of the world in Communism. She became a very mediocre, more or less useless agent, and it destroyed her life.”

Martha is, frankly, a piece of work. She has affairs with highly placed Germans and a long-term affair with a Russian agent. She is out and about provoking grumbling, if not consternation, among consular staff. How did this not exasperate her rather strait-laced father?

“My sense is that this is a time when people gave their children a lot more independence at a younger age,” Larson says. “I’m a father of three daughters [they are 22, 20 and 17 years old] and we’re close, but I can’t pretend, at this moment, to know what goes on in their REAL lives. They could be dancing on a table in a bar right now. I think there is a sort of wishful blindness that all fathers engage in.”

Ambassador Dodd, on the other hand, is an almost Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character. A history professor with a dry sense of humor and a strong belief in Jeffersonian principles, he was friends with Carl Sandburg and President Woodrow Wilson. He shipped his unprepossessing Chevy to Berlin, raising eyebrows among both scornful U.S. State Department elites and the Nazi leadership, which prized symbols of wealth and brute power. Many in the foreign service thought he was out of his depth.

“To his credit I actually think he did exactly what he should have done in that era,” Larson says. “He wasn’t kowtowing to the Nazis. He had his own prejudices about the Jews and so forth, but they were sort of an ambient background prejudice, they weren’t going to get in his way. I think in some weird way he was the right man, in that place at the right time, because he drew a line, a moral line. Especially after the events of June 30, 1934, he reacted appropriately, with horror. If the world had done the same thing, who knows how things would have turned out. The conventional wisdom is to criticize him. But there are those who refer to him as Cassandra, because he knew before everyone else what was happening. I think that’s accurate.”

In Larson’s telling, what happens in Berlin unfolds in chilling detail. “Getting the detail right is a very important part of my mission,” Larson says. “I want to present, to the extent I can, what something smelled like, what the weather was like.”

Yet despite his love of discovering historical detail, Larson doesn’t think of himself as a historian. “Partly that’s because there are multiple layers of dust that accumulate in one’s mind when one says the word historian,” he says, laughing. “I think of myself more as an animator of history. Now I’m not talking at all about making stuff up. I mean finding enough details to put into the narrative that readers will connect the dots and the story will come alive. So my goal is to bring the past alive and to create a historical experience.

“Ideally, I want somebody to jump into the book at the beginning and in one night or two or three or four read all the way through it and at the end come out of that book feeling as though they had experienced a past time in almost a physical way,” Larson says.

By that measure in particular, In the Garden of Beasts is a resounding success. It will keep you up late at night, turning the pages.