President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and England’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a few disagreements about fighting the Axis powers during World War II. And their personalities differed, as well. For instance, Churchill frequently and unashamedly cried in public, while Roosevelt struck Vice President Harry S. Truman as “the coldest man I ever met.” However, their differences were outweighed by their similarities. They both loved politics, history, strong liquor, and neither outdid the other in confidence and courage.

In Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, author Jon Meacham tells the remarkable story of the two men who mapped the strategy that saved the world from the Axis war machines. From the beginning of the war until Roosevelt’s death, the two exchanged nearly 2,000 messages and spent parts of 131 days together to forge a united Allied stance. FDR’s schedule was so docketed with heavy matters that when his sons needed to talk with him they had to make appointments.

There were some light moments. Once, when FDR rapped on Churchill’s bedroom door in the White House, Churchill shouted, “Come in.” On seeing a nude Churchill dictating to an aide, FDR apologized and retreated. Churchill stopped him and said, “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide from you.” The book details FDR’s hidden romance with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and Eleanor’s stoicism. No evidence links Churchill to extramarital dalliance, but in a rare moment of anger his wife Clementine hurled a plate of spinach at him. (It missed.) Meacham, Newsweek’s managing editor, examines the strain between Churchill and FDR at the crucial Tehran and Yalta summits, and he explores the perplexing question of why Churchill decided not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral. Refraining from second-guessing, as some historians are wont to do, Meacham makes clear that if Churchill and FDR’s compatibility and mutual affection had not allowed them to do what they did, we all would be living in a very different world.

Echoes of classical Greece are all around us. A short list of influences would include our vocabulary; the roots of sciences and mathematics; culture and the arts; and even the role of the military. American democracy did not derive directly from Greece, but Athenian political ideals, had a significant impact on Enlightenment thought. Using a wide range of sources, Thomas Cahill gives us a sophisticated, gracefully written introduction to this subject in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. The latest in the author’s internationally best-selling Hinges of History series skillfully combines history and carefully chosen excerpts from the works of Homer, Plato, Sappho, Pericles and others with insightful commentary. The underlying question for the Presocratics (the philosophers before Socrates and Plato) was “what is the nature of reality?” Their quest for an answer helped create such disciplines as philosophy, theology, the physical sciences, psychology, political science and ethics. The author is keenly aware of the negative and contradictory aspects of life that lay behind such achievements. “One needn’t sail the wine-dark sea for long before realizing that the classical Greeks were classically classist, sexist and racist.” At its height, the population of Athens was probably not more than 250,000. It is likely that slaves made up 40 percent of that number and that metics (resident aliens in Athens for trading purposes) were also close to 40 percent, leaving a citizen population of just over 20 percent. For those citizens, Cahill argues, “Athens, the world’s first attempt at democracy, still stands out as the most wildly participatory government in history.” Cahill’s enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. His discussion leaves no doubt that “whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on the way back.” Readers will find Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea both satisfying and enjoyable.