American History: 5 best books

An eclectic list

1. The Journals of Lewis and Clark: 1803-05 917.3 (also 978.02)

There are hundreds of books on the Lewis and Clark expedition— scholarly treatises, narratives, biographies, collections of maps. Engrossing reading, sure, but why choose them when the original journals by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exist? Even if the prose is rough, the journals are an American treasure, a first-hand account of the discovery of a nation. There is a hypnotic, galvanizing power in the daily descriptions of rivers forged, buffaloes seen, Indians met, meals eaten, illnesses suffered, plants examined, rainstorms weathered and dangers overcome. No matter the hardship experienced over the more than two years they spent in the wilds, the two explorers always managed to update their journals, as Lewis did one winter day: “The ink f[r]iezes in my pen,” he complained, before continuing with his account. When Clark writes on Nov. 7, 1805, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” your heart, too, will leap.

2. The Great Bridge, David McCullough 624.55 M

No other structure better represents American industriousness and ingenuity than the Brooklyn Bridge. In this magisterial account, David McCullough describes its design and construction with all the drama of an epic battle. John A. Roebling, the original engineer of what would be the longest suspension bridge in the world upon its opening in 1883, dies after being injured in a dockside accident as he scouted the construction site. His eldest son, ­Washington Roebling, takes up the cause, but frequent journeys below the murky East River waters to set the foundations of the bridge’s two massive stone towers leave him crippled with decompression sickness, or “the bends.” His wife, Emily, all but assumes command of the ­endeavor and sees the project through to its glorious completion.

3. Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer 973.331 F

David Hackett Fischer offers a bracing corrective to the ­traditional view of the lone silversmith named Revere on horseback alerting Massachusetts ­patriots with the cry: “The British are coming!” Paul Revere, the author ­observes, would never have warned of the “British” approach; the colonists still considered themselves British, even if on the cusp of revolution. A minor point, perhaps, but evidence of how legend becomes accepted fact. More important, Fischer shows that though Revere—a “gregarious man, a great joiner”—might have led the alarm-sounding effort, he was far from alone. Dozens of other brave riders set about the countryside on the night of April 18, 1775.

4. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe 629.45 W

In Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of Project Mercury and America’s first manned space flight in the early 1960s, we have the perfect marriage of writer and story. With his unblinking eye, Wolfe reveals what constituted the “right stuff”—for test pilots like Chuck Yeager, and, despite the skepticism of some of those flyboys, the seven Mercury ­astronauts who vied for the chance to perch atop a rocket filled with liquid ­oxygen and go where no man had gone before. “It was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life,” Wolfe writes, because “any fool could do that.” No, “a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the ­experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.”

5. The Children, David Halberstam 323.1196 H

In a Montgomery bus station on May 20, 1961, a young man got down on his knees and prayed for the strength to love the racist mob closing in on him. “When he tried to get up, someone kicked him violently in the back, so viciously that three vertebrae on his spine were cracked.” This is one ­visceral scene among scores of others in David Halberstam’s “The Children,” a sweeping portrait of Nashville activists, most of them students, who brought courageous nonviolent protest to the civil-rights struggle in the Deep South. Halberstam covered the movement as a young reporter for the ­Tennessean, and when he wrote this book four decades later, the memory of those students clearly still burned in his heart.

Mr. Bascomb’s latest book is ­“Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most ­Notorious Nazi” (Houghton Mifflin).