5 Inviting Trips To The Past

By Lev Grossman, Richard Lacayo

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS

ROSS KING King has made a career of elucidating crucial episodes in the history of art and architecture (Brunelleschi's Dome, Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling). This time he's at play in the fields of French art and society from 1863 to 1874, years when France preferred academic painters, with their lusty goddesses and uplifting battle scenes. But what France preferred was under challenge by a rising (and sometimes backbiting) new group of artists. At the same time, the vainglorious Emperor Louis-Napoleon was stumbling into the calamities of war and revolution. Eventually art would imitate life; all the old orders would come crashing down; and Manet, Monet and Cezanne would emerge from the wreckage. King's account of that all-important crack-up is full of smart pleasures.

LIGHTING THE WAY

Karenna Gore Schiff Some people live the lives they've been given, and some--in the words of Southern belle turned civil-rights activist Virginia Durr--"step outside the magic circle" of the world they were born into and make it better. It's the latter group that interests Schiff (who is Al Gore's daughter). She vividly profiles nine women, some well known, like labor firebrand Mother Jones, some less so, like Alice Hamilton, one of the first doctors to fight for industrial safety, who asked, "Is it sensible to assume that what is American is necessarily wisest and best, or even that it is unchangeable?"

CURRY LIZZIE COLLINGHAM There were no chili peppers in India before the year 1500. So how, you ask, did they make vindaloo, that searingly, deliciously lavalike dish? They didn't. First the chili pepper had to make its way to India from the New World--kind of like long-distance takeout--catching a lift with Portuguese traders. In fact, the quintessentially Indian vindaloo is actually an adaptation of a Portuguese dish--the name is an Indianization of the Portuguese vinho e alhos (wine vinegar and garlic). Vindaloo is just one of the dishes examined in Curry. Part world map, part menu, this book is entirely delicious.

THE RIVER OF DOUBT CANDICE MILLARD When he felt a little down, nothing picked Theodore Roosevelt up like a near suicidal adventure. In 1914, smarting from having lost the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, he undertook the descent of the scarily named Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, an unmapped tributary of the Amazon. Millard charts the trip Roosevelt called his "last chance to be a boy," which was a calamity. The travelers were beset by piranhas; starvation; rapids; malaria; mutiny; Indians with poison-tipped arrows; and tiny Amazonian fish that attack the, um, loins. In the dark of the jungle, delirious with fever, threatening suicide, the indomitable ex-President transforms into an existential hero straight out of Joseph Conrad.

THE COLONY JOHN TAYMAN For more than 100 years, well into the 20th century, Hawaii had a policy of involuntarily and permanently exiling anybody who had leprosy to a tiny peninsula on the island of Molokai, walled off from civilization by the world's tallest sea cliff. The Colony is the story of the tiny, tortured community the lepers created, fighting prejudice, starvation, the elements, one another and their disease--which, we now know, was never particularly contagious.