Auschwitz is peripheral to this academic but often horrific account of a Polish county, Bedzin, and its German administrator, Udo Klausa, during WWII. Thanks to family connections (he himself knew Klausa for years), Fulbrook, professor of German history at University College, London, was granted access to the Klausa family archive. Using this material, especially the letters of Klausa’s wife, and other newly discovered archival materials, Fulbrook explores how a mid-level Nazi bureaucrat went about his duties as unspeakable events occurred under his nose. Klausa arrived at his post in February 1940, five months after invading Nazis had herded hundreds of Jews into the town of Bedzin’s synagogue before burning it down. Although not directly responsible, Klausa witnessed public hanging, starvation, expulsion of Jews from jobs and homes, and repeated deportation. He and his wife often expressed discomfort but mostly got on with their lives. Despite Fulbrook’s personal motivations for embarking on this project, it remains scholarly: dense with citations, analyses of evidence and motivation, and long summaries of ongoing historical controversies. If general readers don’t mind the heaviness of the text, what they will find regarding a man’s capacity to dissociate himself from the evil to which he contributes will both captivate and disturb. 15 b&w halftones, 4 maps. (Nov.)

With many period-specific references to modern German culture, most explained in useful identifying endnotes (presumably supplied by supple translator Winston), this memoir, covering 13 months of the key period of German unification, knowingly re-creates an era of doubts and hopes. Grass, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Tin Drum, finds himself engaged and coming to grips with well-known themes, such as the legacy of the Holocaust, as well as with contemporary events, such as the Persian Gulf War. Grass sensitively yet realistically contemplates the fate of the GDR citizen, this time set up to be duped by the instruments of West German capitalism. Election day (December 2, 1990), happens to be the first day of Advent, a time for sober reflection—a capper on a guilt-swept century. Drawings by the author are help to ground him, as does verbal creation. As Grass writes, “I am positively itching for the imponderable process of writing, a process with laws all its own that I am glad to submit to, though not without anxiety.” Drawings. (Nov.)

Detail obsessed, easily distracted, and a notorious deadline-buster, Leonardo da Vinci was able to complete one of his two best works in just three years—all against a backdrop of war and occupation of Milan. King’s (Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling) detailed accounting of the political situation in 15th-century Italy and how it informs our understanding of The Last Supper is interspersed with analysis of history’s many interpretations of the painting, including the “typical crackpottery that follows Leonardo.” The book addresses such topics as the groupings of the apostles and their hand placement; readings of the painting as glorifying faith; and whether the figure next to Jesus depicts the apostle John or Mary Magdalene. King provides a fascinating look at the artist’s life, including his reputation among his patrons as unreliable, and his relationships with those he worked with and for—including a young boy named Giacomo, who “held a great physical attraction for Leonardo.” However, King’s speculations are never salacious; rather, they help place Leonardo’s life into the context of Florence’s history of sexual tolerance and subsequent religious crackdowns. Though some of King’s political explorations and discussions of symbolism can drag, the book proves most lively when tackling common misconceptions about the painting, with The Da Vinci Code coming in for special criticism. 16-page color insert and b&w reproductions. Agent: Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson. (Nov.)

Humanities editor Skinner, who is on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by G. & C. Merriam. The dictionary, assembled at a cost of $3.5 million, included a press release from Merriam’s president Gordon J. Gallan, which said the work contained “an avalanche of bewildering new verbal concepts.” The new dictionary embraced informal English in 450,000 total entries, including 100,000 new words, including clunk (from Mickey Spillane), cool (from jazz), and snafu (from WWII). Editor Philip Gove’s break with tradition, the refusal to distinguish between good language and bad, outraged academics and editorial writers, setting in motion what Skinner calls “the single greatest language controversy in American history.” A Chicago Tribune headline announced “Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong.” Life labeled Webster’s Third “a non-word deluge,” and it was vilified as “literary anarchy.” To probe why it triggered such volcanic eruptions, Skinner shows how Gove sought to construct a modern, linguistically rigorous dictionary and details how Dwight Macdonald and other critics sought to destroy it. The result is a rich and absorbing exploration of the changing standards in American language and culture. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn Agency. (Oct.)

This authoritative biography of an obscure failure and occasional drunkard who became a Civil War generalissimo and the 18th U. S. president is a study in two kinds of moral courage. The first infused Grant’s military leadership with decisiveness, confidence in his own judgment, and a usually well-calculated willingness to gamble men’s lives on risky maneuvers. The second inspired his presidency to a principled and effective support of the rights of freedmen in the South (sometimes at bayonet point) that politically consolidated the war’s fragile verdict. Unfortunately, Grant’s judgment failed him on business matters, from bad horse trades in his youth to the loss of his fortune in old age to a Wall Street ponzi scheme—and failed the nation’s economy when his tight money policies exacerbated the depression of the 1870s. This new biography by University of Texas–Austin history professor Brands (Traitor to His Class) is comprehensive but well-paced and vividly readable; his narrative of Grant’s military campaigns in particular is lucid, colorful, and focused on telling moments of decision. His Grant emerges as an immensely appealing figure—though except for a wartime outburst of anti-Semitism, later repented, which the author relates—with a keen mind, stout character, and unpretentious manner. The result is a fine portrait of the quintessential American hero. Photos. Agent: req. (Oct. 12)

Mandelbrot changed the way we look at a wide range of random phenomena from commodity prices to the shapes of mountains, rivers, and coastlines. An “outlier” long before the word became popular, he was born in 1924 to Jewish parents and grew up in Warsaw, Poland, and then Paris, with “a high level of self-confidence” that grounded him throughout his peripatetic life during and after the chaos of WWII. After the war he pursued his scientific dreams at the École Polytechnique in Paris, later at MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere. But the work that led to his great innovation began with his 1958 arrival at the intellectually expansive IBM facility in Yorktown, N.Y. Over the next couple of decades, Mandelbrot discovered patterns in a wide range of phenomena such as price variation and the distribution of galaxies and irregularly shaped objects like clouds that could not be mathematically described. He called his mathematical innovation “fractal geometry.” The memoir captures the enthusiasm as well as the memories of a visionary who loved nothing better than studying complex multidisciplinary concepts. (Mandelbrot died in 2010, after completing this book.) Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Oct.)

English majors and medical students alike, not to mention laypeople of all stripes, will enjoy Ross’s first book, a speculative journey through the medical histories of 11 famed authors. The project originated with individual articles, first published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, on the two titular authors, who now bookend eight other, chronologically arranged chapters (Emily and Charlotte Brontë share one). Examining the evidence available, Ross (a physician at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School) theorizes, in informed but accessible language, about what may have ailed these writers. The authors’ personalities, as well as their maladies, are placed under Ross’s microscope—Nathaniel Hawthorne may have struggled with social phobia, and William Butler Yeats with Asperger syndrome. His theories, such as the notion that Jonathan Swift’s uninhibited satire was abetted by dementia, can go only so far, however, before coming up against the wildly different medical ideas of past eras. These differences do throw up such fascinating tidbits as the use of mercury to treat syphilis in Elizabethans like Shakespeare, or of “mummy,” a medicine made from the dried corpses of executed felons, in John Milton’s time. Ross’s ability, moreover, to make the likes of Jack London, Herman Melville, and James Joyce come alive anew makes up for the inability to definitively anatomize them. Agent: Mary Beth Chappell, Zachary Shuster Hamsworth. (Oct.)

Many readers will be acquainted with William Henry Seward from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Stahr gives us a first-rate biography of that team’s major figure, Lincoln’s secretary of state. It’s the first full one in decades and, if over-stuffed, by far the best. Stahr, whose biographic skills were in full display in his study of John Jay, has his hands full: Seward was New York governor and senator, then a rival for Lincoln’s place on the 1860 presidential ticket, finally senior cabinet officer—a long, complex life and career. Seward proved among the most accomplished secretaries of state in American history. Among other things, he kept Britain out of the Civil War, then negotiated the acquisition of Alaska for the U.S. Stahr struggles, mostly successfully, to keep the details of all this under control. While calling Seward “the foremost American statesman of the nineteenth century” (though most historians would agree that John Quincy Adams surpasses Seward even among secretaries of state), Stahr’s biography is no whitewash. He records the man’s shortcomings and the enmities he made among other notable people. But there’s no doubting that this formidable figure has finally gained the biographer he’s long deserved. 16 pages of b&w photos, 3 maps. Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Literary Agency. (Sept.)

In this exposé of European immigration policy and its devastating effects, British journalist Carr (Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain) investigates the “contradictory character” of the 1985 Schengen Agreement, which opened borders between 25 European states with the idealistic aim of transforming the European Union into a common “‘area of freedom, security, and justice.’” However, according to Carr, Schengen required countries on the outer edge to seal their borders against unwanted visitors and enforce the E.U.’s immigration restrictions to address concerns about national security. The grimly ironic result for undocumented immigrants, refugees, and victims of human trafficking has been people “drowning in the Mediterranean, shot trying to cross border fences, mutilating themselves in detention centers, or reduced to destitution.” Carr travels to remote borderlands of Poland, Spain, Greece, and Malta; Schengen-bordering countries like Turkey and Morocco that collaborate in enforcement; and the heart of western Europe and Britain to meet immigrants stuck in remote detention centers or “living rough” on city streets for years, as well as temporary workers and sex slaves abused by their handlers and abandoned by governments. But Carr also depicts ordinary Europeans who have gone to great lengths to help these stranded travelers. This disturbing but hopeful book humanizes the face of 21st-century immigration. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Sept.)

Genocide studies experts Rittner and Roth (co-editors of Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust) have assembled a tool kit for activists and an informative alarm for general readers with this collection of original essays by distinguished genocide scholars. An effective and affecting immediacy is achieved as each writer uses a particular document (interview, personal letter, trial transcript, formal report) as a point of departure, and many chapters include thought-provoking discussion questions and pertinent suggested readings. From various professional perspectives, the writers reveal that “rape-as-policy—intentional and systematic uses of rape as a weapon of war and genocide—has loomed larger and larger.” Essays convey the horrors experienced by Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, victims of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian War, Guatemalan victims of femicide, and Tutsi victims of all three. Others analyze rape as a tool of “othering” (“the obliteration of a common ground between perpetrators and victims”), assess films treating war and genocide, and consider the development of laws that have the power to protect and to punish. “Rape,” as one writer observes, in this grim book, “is a sadly effective weapon of war.” That this is a painful book to read should not prevent it from being read. (Sept.)