HISTORY

Editor’s Note: The following reviews represent the best books of 1997 in the judgment of our contributors. Their original reviews have been edited and condensed for reasons of space.

ESMOND WRIGHT

AMERICAN AURORA: A Democratic-Republican Returns The Suppressed History of Our Nation’s Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It. By Richard N. Rosenfeld . St. Martin’s Press: 990 pp., $39.95

Richard Rosenfeld’s story, which reads almost like fiction, is about the nation’s leading opposition newspaper from 1790 to 1800, when parties and partisanship were, if not new, certainly very vigorous. Rosenfeld’s “American Aurora” is revisionist history, fresh from its thorough grounding in the sources, brilliantly conceived and written. It is a remarkable retelling of the early years of the United States. This is an original work of history and told by a master storyteller. It is not, however, just a tale for the chimney corner. It is the story of a newspaper that tried to report the nation’s origins, and it has a message for our own times.

GEORGE C. HERRING

A TIME FOR WAR: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. By Robert D. Schulzinger . Oxford University Press: 398 pp., $35

More than 20 years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam continues to haunt Americans. It is the war that never seems to go away, yet we still understand it poorly, if at all. Our memory is, at best, fuzzy; at worst, distorted. Many have embraced the myths that the defeat was self-inflicted; that the civilians would not let the military win; that we could have won if we had just fought differently; and that the national will was subverted by a hostile media and the antiwar movement. Robert Schulzinger’s admirable synthesis, “A Time for War,” persuasively challenges these and other myths. A professor of history at the University of Colorado, Schulzinger surveys American involvement in Vietnam from the beginning of World War II to the collapse of South Vietnam. He has mastered the vast literature on the war. “A Time for War” is a valuable survey of the defining event in recent American history. Thoroughly researched, well-written and persuasive in its conclusions, it deserves a wide readership.

ERIC FONER

INTRUDERS IN PARADISE. By John Sanford . University of Illinois Press: 232 pp., $26.95

Poet, novelist, screenwriter and law school graduate John Sanford defies conventional classification. He is a prolific though neglected writer whose 20-odd books include a remarkable series of meditations on the American past. A self-taught historian, Sanford possesses qualities unusual even among professionals: an eye for the telling detail or incident that opens up an entire world of meaning, an ability to plumb the inner thoughts and emotions of figures in the past and a genuine concern for society’s outcasts and underdogs. Most of all, from his first book, published in 1933, to his latest, which appears in his 94th year, his writing is energized by that rare commodity nowadays: a capacity for indignation. One hopes that “Intruders in Paradise,” the fifth volume of his ongoing ruminations on history, will bring Sanford the attention he so richly deserves.

SAUL LANDAU

MEXICO: BIOGRAPHY OF POWER: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996. By Enrique Krauze . HarperCollins: 896 pp., $35

Here is a Tolstoy-sized book that explores Mexico’s past to understand the country’s present predicament and likely future. Much in the manner of Richard Hofstadter’s tour de force, “The American Political Tradition,” Enrique Krauze has sought to tell the remarkable history of Mexico through the men who made it. Relying on the accounts of Mexico’s great historians, Krauze gives us fascinating portraits of the dozens of characters who make up the vast and sprawling canvas of Mexico’s history, including Cortes, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Gen. Emiliano Zapata, to name only a few. It would be a mistake, especially for Americans, to somehow regard Mexico’s recent history of assassinations, financial scandals, narcotics trafficking, massive corruption, human-rights abuses and seemingly intractable poverty and pollution as merely the history of another benighted Third World nation. Mexico also is inextricably and intimately a part of the history of the United States. There are about 25 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States, plus millions more seeking jobs here. Yet how many can name the last five Mexican presidents? The antidote to such widespread ignorance--but not to national peace--is contained in Krauze’s richly informative book. He offers an appealing voyage that will familiarize readers with the key names and events in the exciting and bloody past of our neighbor to the south. With luck, readers will join with Krauze, who hopes that knowledge of the past will bring about a truly democratic and prosperous Mexico.

GEOFFREY COWAN

BIG TROUBLE: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. By J. Anthony Lukas . Simon & Schuster: 592 pp., $32.50

The late J. Anthony Lukas, who committed suicide in the spring, was one of America’s best and most respected journalists. He won one Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting and a second for his book “Common Ground,” a remarkable study of families affected by court-ordered busing in Boston. He was drawn to the subject of his last book because it represented a moment when America was almost torn apart by class warfare. His book, mammoth in size and meticulous in detail, is a painstaking dissection of that pivotal moment. By unearthing long-lost documents and studying events with his celebrated devotion to fairness and truth, free of the assumptions, prejudices and passions of another era, Lukas found that the miners’ union and William (Big Bill) Haywood, whatever their other strengths and whatever the legitimacy of their cause, were almost certainly coldblooded killers. One cannot but wonder whether those caught up in the political wars of other eras, including our own, are equally myopic. Tragically, Lukas is no longer with us to examine the myriad questions that emerge from this seminal study of one of America’s greatest trials.

JAMES G. BLIGHT

ONE HELL OF A GAMBLE: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964. By Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali . W.W. Norton: 420 pp., $27.50

With the publication of “One Hell of a Gamble,” we learn--in mortifying detail, chiefly from Russian archives--how close we came to nuclear disaster in October 1962. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, the first to gain access to a treasure trove of Soviet-era Russian documents on the crisis, have written the book that all students of the Cuban missile crisis will wish they had written: It is learned, exciting and exquisitely well-documented. Until such a history is possible, however, “One Hell of a Gamble” will remain a magnificent achievement. It is scholarly without being pedantic, full of revelations and frightening, but in a way that leads to reflective thought rather than to panic.

OLWEN HUFTON

THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. By John Brewer . Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 688 pp., $35

The 18th century was a time of dynamic cultural transformation in England, and London was its crucible. “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” John Brewer’s delightful and weighty study, seeks to demonstrate how English “high culture” reinvented itself during this fascinating period. “The Pleasures of the Imagination” is not an exhaustive study (with a subject ranging over so many areas, how could it be so?), but it is immensely rich and vividly and eloquently conveyed.

FRED ANDERSON

BENEDICT ARNOLD REVOLUTIONARY HERO: An American Warrior Reconsidered. By James Kirby Martin . New York University Press: 540 pp., $34.95

Of all the obelisks, tablets, plaques and statues that commemorate the Revolutionary War, none has greater power to puzzle modern Americans than a monument on the battlefield of Saratoga, north of Albany, N.Y. On its front, a tablet bears only a bas-relief sculpture of a left boot, surmounted by a laurel wreath. An inscription explains that the memorial stands “In memory of the most brilliant soldier in the Continental Army, who was desperately wounded on this spot . . . 7th October 1777.” Nowhere does that brilliant soldier’s name appear. This stone, erected in 1887, represents the closest Americans could come, 110 years after the fact, to recognizing Gen. Benedict Arnold’s contributions to the winning of independence. Now, after another 110 years, historian James Kirby Martin has come to terms with Arnold’s legacy in an altogether more satisfying way. His book, both a biography and an extended meditation on the ironies of the Revolution, is in many ways a remarkable example of the historian’s craft. More than two centuries after independence, we may at last be ready to look at the whole man. If so, Martin’s book will be our indispensable guide.

ROBERT SCHEER

ABUSE OF POWER: The New Nixon Tapes. Edited and with an introduction and commentary by Stanley I. Kutler . The Free Press: 676 pp., $30

Love him or hate him, there was a grandeur to the Richard Milhous Nixon he permitted the public to know. Awkward perhaps, but still masterful at defining the historical moment and placing himself at the center of it. That is the Nixon honored by five presidents and most of the world’s top leaders at the time of his death. But it is a Nixon in whom it is no longer possible to believe, having read this astonishing and revealing book made up of transcripts of 200 hours of secretly recorded White House tapes. Nixon has been the subject of countless portraits, but none is more compelling than the one that emerges from these grotesque and riveting pages: Nixon raw, in his own words, a president unmasked.

HERBERT GOLD

THE DREAM ENDURES: California Enters the 1940s. By Kevin Starr . Oxford University Press: 480 pp., $35

Up and down the state, in his various roles as a professor, lecturer, library official and occasional political aspirant, Kevin Starr is known for his passionate discourses on everything to do with California, from its history to its ecology, its turbulence, its continual promise and the dream of California as a far reach of American dreaming. Fluency of discourse causes impatience in some, but Starr’s great ease is matched by a rarer gift: He makes sense. The information is processed; it marches forward. He has engaged a passionate five-volume (and growing) labor of love. The current book, “The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s,” is an avid account of times we can almost remember. Stendahl described the novel as a mirror passing along the roadway, suggesting that the novelist’s gift is limited by how he aims his reflecting glass. A great historian combines this relentless appetite for the world as he finds it with a plausible evaluation of its meaning. In his monumental continuing study of California, Starr belongs in the company of the best.

JOSEPH RYKWERT

THE FORUM OF TRAJAN IN ROME: A Study of the Monuments. By James E. Packer . University of California Press: Volume I: 528 pp., 18 color plates . Volume II: 128 pp., microfiche . Volume III: 35 folded sheets . $650

The achievements of Trajan and his architect, Apollodorus of Damascus, have at last been worthily commemorated. James E. Packer’s sumptuous “The Forum of Trajan in Rome” has the scope and bulk appropriate to a definitive study of this vast and stately monumental complex, and no student of Roman architecture will be able to do without it from now on. The publishers also deserve credit: The generosity of the layout, the quality of the printing and production match the enthusiasm of the author. This account of imperial munificence is a powerful witness to the way the central government of a wealthy country once considered it appropriate to spend its riches.

JIM SQUIRES

RISING TIDE: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. By John M. Barry . Simon & Schuster: 524 pp., $27.50

In “Rising Tide,” an ambitious history of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, John M. Barry takes on the river once more from the muddy and treacherous ground of social and political commentary. And he ends up awash in the same raging waters of race that have kept Mark Twain controversial for more than a century. Not only does Barry provide a marvelous chronicle of the world’s greatest flood since Noah, he also meticulously mines the residue of its wake for both the relics of a society washed away and the roots of a new one spawned. The story that emerges is the unavoidable truth of the South--that throughout its history, both the great Mississippi and the issue of racial inequality have been an inseparable and insuperable divide.

FRED ANDERSON

GEORGE WASHINGTON: Writings. Edited by John H. Rhodehamel . Library of America: 1,150 pages, $40

George Washington remains both the most familiar and the least understandable of our presidents. To make Washington’s acquaintance requires a certain amount of effort. The 446 letters and other documents that John Rhodehamel has chosen and annotated for “George Washington: Writings” do a good deal more to make the father of our country an accessible figure than can either a TV miniseries or another biography. Readers will encounter Washington as consumer, creditor, debtor; kinsman, adversary, friend; confidant, schemer, supplicant; planter, slaveholder and--finally--emancipator. Above all, they will meet the fallible, anxious, remarkable man without whom the United States as we know it could not exist. To read more than 1,000 pages of his writings is not too steep a price to pay for the privilege of making his acquaintance.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

KURDISTAN: In the Shadow of History. By Susan Meiselas with chapter commentaries by Martin van Bruinessen . Random House: 390 pp., $100

The Kurds may indeed, as this title suggests, have lived in the shadow of history. But they have also formed an indissoluble part of the narrative that we call historic. The account of their orphan history can be rendered in a number of ways, by historians, sociologists, anthropologists or journalists. “Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History” marks the first time that the task has been attempted by an artist. Susan Meiselas has, with infinite labor and tenderness, composed a collage, framed a composition, designed a frame, confected a design and, by means of a deft balance between text and camera, brought off a thing of beauty as well as of instruction. I have spent a scribbling life in the service of the disputed proposition that one well-chosen word is worth 1,000 pictures, but I have to concede, in the face of Meiselas, that my words can do no more than point you to her photographs.