Nancy Mitford is not so much a historian as a gossip. She loves using words like delicious or delightful that more scholarly types would eschew. But her histories are delicious, full of little details of dress and deportment, disapproving profiles of people who weren't much fun. She forgives the extravagant Sun King for and his heirs for bankrupting France because they did it with exquisite style and taste. Although I want to disapprove of Nancy's chats on the basis of their casualness and fawning over the rich and lovely, I just cannot help loving them. As she so often said, "Oh, admit!" I do.

This is a truly heartbreaking work, despite its self-conscious unself-consciousness. Eggers is a truly gifted storyteller, and he does try (and often suceeds) to make his heartbreak both real and funny and sad. Unfortunately, he is just a little too pleased with himself and comes across as being rather immature and smug. The genuine pathos of his story is captivating, and his honesty about what he and his family "deserve" for their suffering is spot on. The last half of the book falls flat, he loses his narrative and gets a lot too Zen about beach frisbee and the like, losing focus and clarity. This is a courageous book, however, and it nearly works on all the levels Eggers is trying to plumb. But its true hero is Toph. I want to read his book. That would be staggering.

Mr. Fields seems not so much a revisionist Richardian, as a foe of noted biographer Alison Weir. He really picks on her recent book in which she "proves" that Richard III was the evil uncle. Fields's legal background does bring an interesting approach to the fate of Richard's nephews, but he is a bit sloppy, contradicting himself and really not sticking to his analytical guns. To be honest, I will read just about anything about Richard III: he is a fascinating character, for good or bad, crooked or even shouldered. Still and all, nothing beats out Josephine Tey's "Daughter of Time" for sheer pleasure. I don't care if she wrote bad history. It was that novel that awakened me to the great joys of historical research and the need to look at all sides of an issue. I am not convinced by Fields or Weir, but I am willing to consider anything a dedicated, even obsessive, historian writes about Richard III, just for the fun of comparing and contrasting these heart-felt views. May the debate rage on!

It is refreshing to read a work of scientific history told, by virtue of the extant documents, from the viewpoint of a woman. "Gallileo's Daughter," welcomes us to make assumptions about the actual role Sister Marie Celeste played in the fascinating intellectual world in which her father lived. If nothing else, this book made me realize that I don't know spit about astronomy, and I am looking for a good general text to start making up for this failing. To my mind, any book that piques my curiosity and leads to new lessons is a very good book indeed.

Maybe it is because I'm from Kansas that Ian Frazier has stolen my heart, first with "Great Plains" and now with "On the Rez." It is his straightfordward, unembarrassed approach to the lives Native Americans and his own unaplogetic yearning to belong, that makes this book so compelling. Frazier's love of America's past and fervid admiration of its near mythic heroes in no way keeps him from giving us an unsparing, unsentimental account of life on an Indian reservation today. Still Frazier reignights in us the pride we felt when as children we said the Pledge of Alligence and meant it or sang "from sea to shining sea" and imagined those vast fields of gold. The American West, its people, its history and its physical enormity, its joys and losses are summed up in one story in "On the Rez." It is one hell of a story, all about a real American hero, a young Native American girl who played basketball like a prayer, and Frazier makes us see how she was able to use her whole being to redeem the pristine America that Frazier still sees. The people he meets on the rez, their stories, fact and fiction, make him see that America is still a good place to find heroes, and he makes you see it too.

Carolly Erickson's Tudor and Stuart biographies are all splendid affairs. "Great Harry" attacks the personality of this man and the issues with which he graplled in a compelling and well-researched fashion without ever losing the reader's attention. Henry VIII was as big and grand as the Tudor age and this book captures both well. I also recommend Erickson's other biographies, especially "The First Elizabeth," about Henry and Anne Boylen's (she was the second wife, the first to lose her head) daughter. Truly one of the best popular historians writing about this period.

Just like everything this extraordinary writer has published, "An Embarrassment of Riches" is an astonishingly brilliant, insightful and thought-provoking cultural history. I wait with hunger for his books; fortunately they tend to be five-course dinners with dessert, brandy and cigars afterwards. "An Embarrassment" is just such a literary and historical feast. I cannot recommend Mr. Schama's books enough.

The triple threat of Elizabeth Longford, Antonia Fraser and Flora Fraser (Mother, Daughter & Grandaughter)have been providing us with readable yet fairly scholarly biographies for decades. All of them are well researched and certainly admired by historians and non-academics alike. This particular book is a handy all-in-one guide to Henry VIII and his six wives. It is by necessity, rather shallow, as his marital woes had and have very important ramifications, and this volume cannot begin to address these issues in depth. Overall, a great read about a fascinating man at a fascinating time. In truth, the women are not nearly as well fleshed out, with the notable exception of Katherine of Aragon, largely because their stories just were not as important as that of their husband to contemporary writers, so their lives are not as well documented. The extent 16th c. materials have been mined for individuals biographies of each woman, and they do each deserve their own book. (Many such have been written, even about poor Catherine Howard.) This is a good book for a first look at Tudor England. I like Lady Antonia and all her biographies, and those of her mother and daughter. I just wish she would stop writing those shabby mysteries.