5 History Books for the Beach

By Richard Lacayo

Admit it: you feel guilty about the lightweight stuff you read in summer. But there's a compromise between Harlequin romances and Hegel's Phenomenology: brief but thoughtful volumes of history and biography. Weighing in at fewer than 200 pages, these books are slim but not slight.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Th acidic British political commentator is a perfect biographer for the disputatious Founding Father. Eternally at war with whoever seemed inclined to pull the Republic into Britain's orbit, Jefferson could be scheming and hypocritical. Hitchens is not blind to the man's shortcomings, especially his readiness to tolerate slavery for the sake of domestic political advantage. But he credits Jefferson as a chief engineer of "the only revolution that still retains any power to inspire."

AMERICAN GOTHIC

STEVEN BIEL

What is it exactly that we see in Grant Wood's stern old farmer and the woman at his side with her strange, sidelong glance? Is this an image of enduring Midwestern probity or a satire of small-town small-mindedness? Wood, who recruited his 30-year-old sister and his 62-year-old dentist to pose for him, preferred to insist that his interest was just painterly. This book traces the impact and changing meaning of the iconic image through its 75-year history.

ROGER WILLIAMS

EDWIN S. GAUSTAD

Our notions of the separation of church and state owe a lot to Williams, a deeply pious Puritan clergyman who believed that civil authorities had no business enforcing religious views. (He also thought the British Crown had no power to grant to settlers land that belonged to Indians.) After his views got him banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams founded Rhode Island as a haven of toleration and freethinking. Gaustad's timely little book reminds us that those are the enduring foundations of American civilization.

WATERLOO

ANDREW ROBERTS

It was a small site for so large a role in history--just 3 miles wide and 1 1/2 miles long. But at Waterloo, where at least 140,000 men would clash, the ferocious ambitions of Napoleon were brought to ground at last. Roberts, a British historian, focuses closely and thrillingly on the main day of fighting, a muddy June 18 in 1815, when the savagery of battle would leave tens of thousands of men killed or wounded--and the world forever changed.

CHAUCER

PETER ACKROYD

We think of poets as private people, souls tending their own gardens. But the founding father of English literature was a man of the world. A diplomat and customs official, Chaucer was captured in battle, sued for debt and indicted for rape--a charge that was apparently dropped. In this robust account of his life, Ackroyd, a noted British novelist, points out that the author of The Canterbury Tales was not foremost a poet: "He was a government official and diplomat who, in his spare time, happened to write poetry."