Gore Vidal has been called America's premier living man of letters. Novels (historical and fashionable), essays, screenplays, teleplays, stageplays, even acting appearances have won him honour and distinction. In playful moments he has insisted, based upon historical novels ranging from the Revolutionary "Burr" to the Rooseveltian "Washington, DC", that he is "biographer" of the United States, a national moniker parodied in his award-winning (and not-a-bit-too-long at a thousand pages) collection of essays of the same title. An authentic, though hardly representative, veteran of Tom Brokaw's "greatest generation," Pacific division, Vidal, nearly seventy-five, has upstaged, if not pre-empted biographers in his "Palimpsest", a jettisoning of a long-held resolution not to write a memoir.

The death of the original Vidal biographer has left further biographical elucidation to Fred Kaplan, Professor of English Literature at Queens College and biographer of James, Carlyle, Dickens and, after this project, Twain. Kaplan is no stranger to Vidal or Vidal's work, having edited "The Essential Gore Vidal" and gained cooperation and access for this project. Kaplan approaches his subject horizontally, as part of his continuing series of essays in the biographical art, eschewing a vertical approach that might have produced an entire reading of his subject and oeuvre of the sort that Michael Holroyd long ago provided in detachable form in his biography of Lytton Strachey. Nineteen chapters recount, usually with terse grace, the reality that Vidal, unlike Holroyd's Strachey, is very much alive to his biographer and thus capable of disabling rejoinder. No wonder that Kaplan, as he explicitly avers, prefers his subjects dead.

Extended attention to ancestry in the opening chapter makes one wonder if Kaplan's brief is to establish Vidal not as "the cosmopolitan man" but as a Southern author of Mississippi and Oklahoma heritage and romantically European associations. Gore's grandfather, the blind (sic) Senator from Oklahoma figures prominently in the story. Early Gore was a reader and political initiate full of a bad/good family epitomised by the exciting, charming and ear-drum puncturing airplane flights that resulted from his father's commitment to air commerce and Amelia Earhart. But, despite Vidal's own sexual precocity and publication of a novel at barely the other side of twenty, he emerges, rather curiously, as a slow-blooming intellect.

Vidal was fiercely but vulnerably independent of family, of college education (no "scholar-squirrel" he) of labelling, pigeonholing. Radical/reactionary, lover/loather, ancient/modern, historian/novelist, he doubles and redoubles in almost frustrating variety. It may be allowed that what Talleyrand was to French governments Vidal is to elite socializing, but Kaplan's biography at times reads like a parodic entry from an imaginary court circular of the literary set. A reminder of how sinuously effective Vidal's own prose is when addressing the subject of his social camaraderie, this habit of Kaplan's pen or processor seems mere name-dropping at first, as the cavalcade of the sobering and less-than-sober pass in review. But eventually the informed Vidalian will want to talk back to the book, in humble imitation of its masterful subject. It is court culture, one might protest, with the culture left out. Vidal, meanwhile, is dangerously and indeed almost laughably (and the joke is not on him) close to someone who merely writes when he is not socializing. He is smart, but mostly in the social sense. One can only believe that Kaplan deliberately wrote with the educated Vidalian, who can supply some memory of the literature, in mind. In other words, in an age when Vidal has complained that reading has been replaced by TV and movies, Kaplan's textual strategy relies upon a more optimistic view of human propensities.

A number of insights emerge. For all of Vidal's talk of invention, this biography suggests that his novels are drawn as much from experience as imagination. It is perhaps not too trite to say that he lived his art and left behind enough clues of the experience, mined extensively in printed and manuscript sources by Kaplan, for readers to enjoy biographical confirmation of literary recollection.

Vidal's work is so interconnected, so suggestive that the list of implications/explications ignored or underplayed here includes personages such as Edward Gibbon (analogies are legion) and Henry Adams, not to mention Henry James; controversies, such as that generated by Vidal's entertainment of the possibility, based upon a single source, that Abraham Lincoln had congenital syphilis; and what of all those contemporaries? Little hint of a critical estimate or comparison? One longs for a proportioned and comprehensive appraisal, a braving of the Vidalian riposte. What we have here is the Vidalian body in its social, ancestral and even domestic setting, but not the mind, and only suggestions of that delightfully mischievous soul, which is as much that of the moralist (after its own way, of course) as sceptic and observer.

Vidal aficionados must, of course, own this book, but their knowledge of Vidal gleaned from widely-available sources will render much of this biography redundant.

Vidal once lamented that contemporary readers should prefer literary biography to literature. Only those who believe, as an adjunct instructor once told a student of my acquaintance, that "literature is good only for conversation at dinner parties" will make that mistake in this case. If used judiciously, this biography may serve as a very effective reference work and guide to further reading, but it will not serve as a guide to the perplexed.

Who is Richard Keller Simon and why is he saying such outrageous things about teaching literature? A recent column in the Chronicle of Higher Education repeats the argument of this book: popular culture is "a potentially powerful teaching tool," especially since the study of popular culture has been gaining acceptance in the academy for the past three decades and the future of literary study is now "up for grabs." Simon's solution?

Teach the tv show, Friends, as well as Much Ago about Nothing-or The Jerry Springer Show and Euripides, Cosmopolitan as well as Jane Austen! The one is "almost the same" as the other, and the benefit for the student-pleasure as well as profit, the great tradition everywhere alive and well-is inarguable. Of course the benefit is not inarguable, and in Trash Culture Simon demonstrates that he knows it. Trouble is-no more than his students, presumably--he's not very interested in arguments. What about the nature of art? Well, Immanuel Kant wrote a long time ago; the new ways are just the old ways writ differently, according to the script of popular entertainment.

Language? There are gains as well as loses; the Iliad lacks the spectacular visual images and flashy soundtrack of Rambo. Complexity? The Star Wars films are no less complicated than The Faerie Queen. For the most part, Simon's strategy consists in simply ignoring whatever might be "incommensurable" (to use a non-trash word) between the classic and the popular example, and instead to make them aesthetically as well as structurally equivalent.

The result is a short, stimulating series of chapters, comparing (say) the daytime soap, Days of Our Lives, with the Elizabethan revenge tragedy by John Webster, The White Devil, discussing media advertising within the context of More's Utopia, or matching various episodes of Star Trek against the four books of Gulliver's Travels. Sometimes the results are genuinely stimulating, such as when Simon concludes a "case study" on "Tragedy, the Enquirer, and the Critics," as follows: "We have moved full circle, from the tragedy that sympathises with the individual in his struggle with society, to the tragedy that sympathises with society." Sometimes the result is just banal, such as when Simon concludes a comparison between the Renaissance garden and the modern shopping wall with the following comment about the latter: "What we see are both the promises and the problems of commodified life. It is only a matter of learning how to read the meanings of the space."

Well, we might want to object, what else ultimately is a stake then between the difference between garden and mall? The Decline of Western Civilisation? The commodification of the ludic? Both? Neither? Progress? Or just Postmodernism? Simon really doesn't care. The problem with Trash Culture is that it just cheerfully accepts all its various contrasts as merely so many parts of some great narrative tradition. As our author puts the matter at the end: "Literature is transformed but not destroyed by popular culture. Matthew Arnold and Godzilla are fellow travelers in the long and diverse history of storytelling." With a vision of history this commodious you hardly need a history at all. "Trash Culture" may be highly recommended for both the spirit and the wit of its individual chapters. Page-by-page, this is a most enjoyable book to read. But an examination of history that repeatedly sees nothing lost and everything found is awfully superficial, while a study of popular culture that grants no tension or division between the terms "popular" and "culture" is simply without an idea of history at all.

One more thing. As his more recent Chronicle piece makes clearer, Simon has a notion of popular culture inseparable from the classroom. Because the kids need something-the argument goes-it needs to be taught. "Trash Culture" shows what follows: because it needs to be taught, the subject will be defined in a pedagogy-driven manner, audience-friendly, context-free, and in-your-face. If Simon actually thinks he can teach sitcoms as well as Shakespeare to the detriment of neither, as far as his students are concerned, good luck to him; "Trash Culture" also demonstrates that a conviction can go a lot farther than one might have supposed. To me, though, this one is as fanciful as imagining an episode of Friends built around the fact that one of the cast has been reading Much Ado about Nothing. Or, even better, Trash Culture.

Civil War battle books come in all shapes, sizes and persuasions. Many are exercises in lousy research and bad writing; others are examples of American history at its very best. Battle books represent at once the best and the worst of Civil War history. Stephen Cushman's "Bloody Promenade" makes yet another--albeit unusual--contribution to this vast literature.

The book focuses on the Wilderness campaign, during which Ulysses S Grant's Army of the Potomac fought Robert E Lee's legendary Army of Northern Virginia in a series of harrowing battles through a long stretch of Virginia forest. This was perhaps the nastiest campaign of that entire nasty war, with scattered clumps of men firing blindly into each other through tangled underbrush, setting the forest ablaze and burning to death thousands of wounded men on both sides who could not get out of the fire's path.

There are several fine scholarly studies of the Wilderness campaign, written mostly by professional historians. Bloody Promenade has an unusual pedigree in that it was written not by a historian or a military history buff, but an English professor who possessed no particular love for the Civil War. Cushman was inspired to write about the Wilderness campaign by the roadside signs identifying battlefield sites that he passed everyday to and from work in his home in northern Virginia. He followed the signs, so to speak, and began an intensive investigation; not so much about the Wilderness battles themselves, but rather of the "verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War (p. xiii)".

Cushman analyses how the Wilderness campaign has been represented and remembered by participants, civilian spectators, newspaper reporters, novelists, filmmakers, artists, historians, re-enactors and Civil War buffs. Along the way he deliberately blurs distinctions between his present and the war's past, and one of his primary themes is the unavoidable effect of one on the other. In his chapter on contemporary newspaper accounts of the Wilderness campaign, for example, he suggests that for one to understand the painful anxiety of Civil War-era civilians as they awaited news from the battlefield, one must draw parallels between now and then. "I think I prepare myself best for the wartime papers by trying to remember what it felt like to read the news of, say, 1968....When I can recall what it felt like to reel from the news of one day and wince in anticipation of the next, I'm ready for the Wilderness," he writes (p. 89).

Cushman believes that, because of the vicissitudes of historical evidence and memory, it is nearly impossible to grasp what the battle of the Wilderness was really like. This he proves time and again with extensive forays into the shortcomings of combat diaries, spectator accounts, contemporary prints and professional histories. He suggests that it is actually less important and less interesting to study the Wilderness campaign itself than it is to study the many ways Americans have remembered and distorted the campaign and the war as a whole.

Readers who know little about the Wilderness will probably find this deep excursion into historical memory maddening in its meandering style and tone. The book is as much about Cushman himself as the Civil War, following the author through his journey into memory and the past. At its best, this gives the book an appealing, quietly self-reflective tone. But at times Cushman's introspection seems more like self-indulgence. He sometimes makes rather ordinary observations--the difficulty in using soldier's diaries as evidence, for example, or the relative silence of African-American participants in the battles-- sound more important than they really are by dressing them up in the language of a profound personal odyssey.

Cushman should be congratulated for breathing new life into a tired genre, for this is unlike any other Civil War battle book. Nevertheless, it is hard to see who will ultimately benefit. His thesis that memories of the past are tricky things will come as no surprise to serious students of the Civil War, while readers who possess only a casual familiarity with the war will doubtless find this book difficult and confusing. "Bloody Promenade" is an entertaining but rather curious foray into Civil War history.

Readers in the United States who patronise Barnes & Noble or Borders may notice that their history sections are strangely proportioned: world, Asian, African, European and ancient history combined account for about a quarter of the books, another fourth are American history, and all the rest, fully half the titles, are military. But they will search this vast selection for quite a while before finding any work there as intelligent as Murray and Millett's new operational history of World War II.

A War to Be Won offers analysis and passes judgment, on the war's causes, effects, leaders, campaigns, soldiers and even weapons. Although it sketches out the fighting in every major theater--Europe, North Africa, the Pacific and Asia--it does not attempt to provide a chronicle or comprehensive narrative of the battles and developments in each. Millett and Murray assume, correctly, that anyone who wants a history of the Battle of the Bulge or the bombing of Japan can find several, or even dozens of books focussing on narrative, first-person accounts or the technology employed. Instead they provide what all those books, and even most comprehensive histories, leave out: an overview of the entire war and an analysis of why things happened as they did.

For example, they look hard at how and why Hitler went to war in 1939. Though the German decision may look like cold-blooded planning for war compared to the disarray that France and England found themselves in, Millett and Murray describe the economic and political forces that pushed the Germans into war while its air force and navy, especially, were not yet prepared to fight. And they continue to follow such political and economic factors through the war: the Germans' desperate lack of oil led to the push into the Southern USSR in 1942 which culminated in the disaster at Stalingrad; Hitler had no business sending an army to North Africa, but had to rescue his ally Mussolini.

This same clearheaded realism enables them to evaluate campaigns and weapons that other military historians have been content to describe. Although the German U-boats seemingly almost won the Battle of the Atlantic, and the sortie by the battleship Bismarck has always enjoyed a high profile, Millett and Murray conclude that the Germans would have been better off to have had no navy at all: concentrating their limited manpower and industry on Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe forces would, they judge, have improved their chances of winning. And they are scathing about the vaunted German superweapons, concluding that the V-2 missile, though a fantastic technological achievement, was the most cost-ineffective weapon used by anyone in World War II. Another controversial judgment that may disturb some readers is their evaluation of resistance to Nazi rule. They conclude that although Western resistance forces and Soviet partisans inconvenienced the German forces, they achieved relatively little at a horrendous cost to themselves.

Not that the Germans are their only targets; every nation and its leaders come in for criticism, and perhaps the Americans get the lion's share. Dim-witted, pigheaded and egotistical admirals and generals are named, and their mistakes--swept under the rug in much traditional military history--are explained, and their cost in lives calculated. Douglas MacArthur and Omar Bradley are treated with especial severity, but such popular figures as Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz are criticised as well. But their evenhandedness does not cause them to miss the what was most important: Churchill and Roosevelt, and even Stalin, had a much clearer picture of what needed to be done than Hitler, not to mention the hopelessly inept Mussolini and the blind leadership of Japan.

Any overall history of a conflict as long and large as World War II has to be organised according to some system. Millett and Murray begin with three chapters on the origins of the war in Europe, followed by three more on German successes early in the war. They then switch to the Pacific theatre and the Japanese decision to go to war, and initial fighting there. The rest of the book switches back and forth between theatres, following events in each chronologically.

"A War to Be Won" concludes with two summary chapters on the war's impact on peoples and nations, followed by appendices on weapons, order of battle, and sources. Such important elements as the intelligence and cryptographic side of war, and the Holocaust and Japan's human rights record throughout Asia are dealt with during the general history.

Millett and Murray's decision not to provide a blow-by-blow account of fighting leads to some peculiar choices. While they furnish a good narrative of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1994, and the fighting that followed, the Battle of Midway, arguably the turning point of the Pacific War, is merely summarised in less than two pages: the important ships sunk there are not even named. It seems that the authors are simply more interested in some things than others: ground warfare and the bombing of Germany are well described, while naval actions, except for the Battle of the Atlantic, are slighted. In addition, Millett and Murray appear to have concluded that American readers have ample access to books on Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Bulge, while they may be ignorant of the war fought in Burma.

Their choices of what to highlight and what to summarise has some benefits: the poorly run American campaign to recapture the Philippines usually gets less attention than Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal, for example, but the fighting in Leyte, Luzon, and especially in Manila itself led to huge American and Japanese losses--and massive civilian deaths among the poor Filipinos. Millett and Murray devote several pages to a careful description of this campaign and MacArthur's role in it. But readers accustomed to the music and prose swelling when the Marines are about to hit the beach will be disappointed: when a battle or campaign is routine and the outcome unsurprising, they do no more than mention it.

Readers unfamiliar with World War II will get a good overview of the conflict from A War to Be Won. Military history buffs who have read dozens of books on the war will almost certainly be introduced to campaigns or issues they had never considered--and any reader should be struck by Millett and Murray's clear writing and trenchant opinions.