Means’ historical novel follows a group of Civil War POWs.

Corporal George Ethridge is a Union soldier who winds up spending nearly the last two years of the Civil War in an Alabama prison camp. Conditions in the camp, called Cahaba, are dire: The grounds are prone to flooding, rations are meager, and the prison guards will shoot anyone who ventures into the wrong area. At least George has some company in his suffering—he and some others from the Indiana 66th Volunteer Infantry, including his uncle and little brother, manage to stick together. They call themselves the Muncie men, and though they make it to the end of the war, that hardly means an end to their struggle; they still have to get home. George has pledged to ensure that they do. Along the way, they must grapple with hostile Southerners and an infrastructure that’s been battered by four years of conflict (“nothing would be safe for months and months to come”). By the time the group arrives in Vicksburg in April of 1865, they have a new problem: The vessel that’s supposed to transport them up the Mississippi is the Sultana, a steamboat that will be remembered for its tragic end. The narrative effectively brings to life aspects of the Civil War that occurred off the battlefield—for instance, Sherman’s March to the Sea includes sabotaging rail lines by bending them in a certain way (“Sherman had marched with 10,000 men specially trained to do just that”). Means ably dramatizes how the act of simply getting prisoners of war repatriated was no simple or safe task, as evidenced by the horrors George and company encounter when they see men being transported from the infamous Andersonville Prison. The resolute Muncie men and the foreboding task that lies before them will keep readers eagerly turning the pages.

A gritty, memorable look at lesser-known struggles that followed the end of the Civil War.

A nimble social history of humans at play in water.

Swimming is a sport, an art, a form of meditation—and, by former University of Virginia swimming champion Means’ account, very nearly a biological imperative, an expression of our kinship to critters that crawled out of the sea to make their homes on land. Those “fish-human comparisons” are intriguing: Put a human in water that’s heated to 90 degrees, and you relax their heart; “knock the temperature down 10 percent or more,” and you’re in territory that brings relief from ailments such as asthma and rheumatism, to say nothing of bliss. “No wonder whales often seem more at peace with themselves than we humans do,” writes the author. Given the antique connection with the sea, it’s intriguing that a cave in desert Egypt, central to Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, delivers the first documentation of humans afloat on the sea. Means delivers a lovely portrait of the zaftig Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman, “the woman who first liberated swimwear from the tyranny of Victorian morality”—but then, years later, sniffed of the newly invented bikini that “only two women in a million can wear it.” The author also incorporates bits and pieces of cultural and sports history, such as early long-distance competitions and the rules of Olympic swimming. But some of the best parts of his book are memoir, as when he recounts a personal best of underwater swimming that took in 75 meters, surfacing only for fear that he’d pass out: “Water is the wrong medium for fainting.” It’s surprising that two pop-history books on swimming appear within two months of each other—the other is Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim—but neither crowds out the other.

Devoted swimmers will want to splash about in this entertaining narrative.

A lively biography of an elusive character who manages to sustain reader interest and teach us something about the early-19th-century American pull toward the West.

Journalist Means (The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation, 2006, etc.) finds the lack of hard evidence about the life of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) a liberating way to tell the story of early American migrations. Born in 1774 in Massachusetts, Chapman left home as a young man and headed steadily west, arming himself with apple seeds from cider presses and following waterways and Indian paths into virgin land that he would then clear and border with the seedlings. This constituted the marking of new settlements, and though Chapman speculated in land, he never stayed anywhere long enough to make a profit, but embraced a peripatetic, vegetarian life: “Chapman had the eye of a speculator, the heart of [a] philanthropist, the courage of a frontiersman, and the wandering instincts of a Bedouin nomad. His nature was almost self-canceling.” He was also a zealous evangelical, fond of sitting with an audience to spread the Gospel as shaped by Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Compulsively restless, Chapman kept moving, employing elaborate buying-leasing schemes and often paying in apple trees. Means estimates that during his life, Chapman (who died in 1845) purchased 1,200 acres of “often prime bottom land, plus an assortment of city, town, and village lots.” Why did he do it? Maybe it was to “find the exact seam between past and future, between encroaching civilization and resistant wilderness.” The author examines the making of the Appleseed myth—from the 1871 article by W.D. Haley in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine to Walt Disney’s 1948 cartoon classic Melody Time—as fodder for a country desperate for a model of, as Disney Story Department manager Hal Adelquist wrote, “brotherly love and unselfishness.”

A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.

A portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor over six crucial weeks that preserved a nation but brought an administration to ruin.

Means, a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine, zeroes in on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 to track Andrew Johnson as he completed a seemingly fated transition from promising patriot to bull in his own china shop. So ultimately eclipsed was his promise, in fact, that most readers may have little awareness of the once-acclaimed virtues that propelled the former congressman, senator and governor into his leadership role. The author questions whether any person other than Lincoln himself could have sealed the victory and healed the wounds of our Civil War, then amply shows how Johnson, determined as he was to faithfully implement Lincoln’s legacy as he saw it, was far less than the man for the job. Not that the deck wasn’t stacked against him: A Tennessee Democrat, he was never accepted by key Republicans in the administration—some, including Lincoln’s widow, Mary, actually suspected the 17th president to be a conspirator in the assassination plot—and he was vehemently hated by the Southern plantocracy. To make matters worse, Johnson had delivered an embarrassingly rambling vice-presidential inaugural address stone drunk—an ironic misstep for someone with a reputation as a mesmerizing “stump” speaker built over countless campaigns. His persistent stubbornness and inability to find common ground with Congress on an effective Reconstruction policy left the South in an economic shambles with four million refugees (a hundred times the number created by Katrina, Means points out). And with full enfranchisement of freed slaves ultimately left to the states that had originally enslaved them, a civil-rights gap emerged and dragged tragically on for a century.

Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.