ADAM ZAMOYSKI
Rites of Peace

If you could choose to be a fly on the wall at any event in history, you could do worse than to pick the ball that inaugurated the Congress of Vienna, on October 2, 1814. Adam Zamoyski’s fascinating new book “Rites of Peace” (HarperCollins, 634 pages, $29.95) is a history of the spectacle as well as the substance of the Congress, whose guests included Emperor Francis of Austria, King Frederick William of Prussia, Tsar Alexander of Russia, Metternich, Hardenberg, Talleyrand, and Castlereagh, and dozens of lesser kings, princes, and grand dukes. Combining impressive scholarship — “Rites of Peace” cites sources in English, French, Russian, and German — and a gift for clear narrative, Mr. Zamoyski unravels the tangle of motives and propaganda to show just what was at stake for each participant in the Congress.

Mr. Zamoyski expertly leads the reader through this incredibly complicated diplomatic dance, which began well before the Congress formally opened. At the same time, he devotes plenty of space to the holiday side of the Congress.

The diplomats at Vienna were in charge of the destiny of nations, but they were not public servants, as are the appointees of a democratic, or even a communist, government. They were aristocrats, entitled to the best of everything, and they were always willing to combine business with the most florid and exotic kinds of pleasure. Out of this mixture of luxury and power and appetite, Mr. Zamoyski has produced a completely engrossing book. Anyone who enjoys reading history should read it.

Adam Kirsch (July 18)

GINO SEGRÈ
Faust in Copenhagen

Niels Bohr is a giant of 20th century physics. He effectively built the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Denmark that opened in 1921 and, like the Lord of the Manor, presided over everything. “Faust in Copenhagen” (Viking, 320 pages, $25.95) is about those promising young physicists who descended on Denmark during the late 1920s and early ’30s.

Gino Segrè is wonderfully successful in exposing their characters and showing the reader how their individual approaches to physics differed. Mr. Segrè does not stop with the principals. Other illustrious physicists, Lise Meitner, Paul Ehrenfest, and Max Delbrück appear prominently. Physicists and non-physicists alike will be drawn into the aura of these great 20th-century scientists and will leave the book with a deeper appreciation of who these people were and what they did.

Mr. Segrè’s treatment of Bohr in particular will raise provocative questions. Bohr receives an uncommon intensity of veneration that begs the question, “Why?” Mr. Segrè provides part of the answer: Bohr was kind, considerate, generous, and “the most loved theoretical physicist of the twentieth century.” Many who knew Bohr exude an unusual level of admiration for the man. Bohr qua man with charm vs. Bohr qua great physicist are, however, two different things. Mr. Segrè’s treatment of the latter is mixed.

John Rigden (July 11)

ANDREW O’HAGAN
Be Near Me

At the heart of Andrew O’Hagan’s third novel, “Be Near Me” (Harcourt, 305 pages, $24), is a night of wandering and carousing that ends with a kiss and a reproof. A 15-year-old boy and a 56-year-old Catholic priest are discovered just after dawn, drunk, high, and holding hands on the rectory couch, by the housekeeper. The incident creeps to the attention of the authorities, leading to the pastor’s arrest and electrifying political and class resentments in the county of Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland.

For all the mostly-repressed sex that looms over this novel, “Be Near Me” is generously strewn with gentle ironies and not without moments of outright comedy. And despite the topicality he indulges in — the Iraq war and Vietnam; Catholicism and child abuse; ethnicity and class; not to mention cancer and environmentalism — Mr. O’Hagan is mostly concerned with human frailty, a problem at once moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical. As a convicted Anderton reflects, “Our journey will sustain many falsehoods to avoid that one truth: we wanted love, and without it only the broad universe would do, with its solid, perfumed dark.”

Christian Lorentzen (May 30)