Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks That Saved the Nationby Steve VogelRandom House, 2013 The War of 1812, despite a ravishment of recent attention from historians, continues to be called “neglected” by those same historians, because nothing aids in the sale of books quite like the discovery of hidden treasure (in a reductio ad absurdum example, there’s an actual treasure map encoded in the cover of Dan Brown’s latest aphasic thriller). Books – including some very good ones like Walter Lord’s The Dawn’s Early Light and Donald Hickey’s The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (sigh) – have appeared regularly in the marketplace ever since England’s cruel attempt to annex the fledgling United States (and the fledgling United States’ heroic attempt to enfold backward Canada into a more perfect Union). That steady trickle of titles became a deluge as the war’s centenary in 2012 approached.The tide is subsiding a bit as the history-publishing world girds itself for the centenary of the First World War (a conflict which even headline-desperate publicists have seldom dared to call forgotten), and renowned Washington Post journalist Steve Vogel’s new book Through the Perilous Fight saves itself from much of the slop of superfluity in any case by choosing a comparatively narrow focus. “The War of 1812,” he tells us, “was an outgrowth of the titanic struggle that had raged between England and France almost continuously since 1793, when the French Revolutionary government declared war on Great Britain.” But he veers almost immediately from the general to the specific: the British Chesapeake campaign of 1814, the burning of the White House, and the British defeat at the Battle of Baltimore a couple of weeks later.Bostonians among Vogel’s readers will notice right away that his chosen focus precludes much possibility of hearing again the incredible exploits of their city’s most illustrious resident, the great frigate Constitution. But even Yankees won’t squawk for long once they settle into this hugely absorbing narrative; Vogel takes all the skills he honed in journalism and here puts them marvelously to use in the service of popular history.Foremost of those skills is truism of journalism too often forgotten by its sister discipline: that history is about people. Through the Perilous Fight is a bustling gallery of energetic character portraits, from lawyer and United States national anthem-author Francis Scott Key (somewhat unwisely used as a major focal point) to British Rear Admiral George Cockburn, “the most hated man in America, and the most feared.” We get fighting captains like David Hazard Perry and David Porter, but it’s the great British men of war who seem most to fascinate Vogel, and he brings them to life in all their passions and foibles, from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the North American station, whose older brother had been beheaded by a cannonball at Yorktown in the last American war:

Heavyset, with an oversize nose and curly hair, Cochrane was part of a Scottish clan with a long and noble line of military service, and carried himself with the dignified bearing of a man used to the privileges of rank. He was accused of being greedy and callous, and some in England considered the entire family untrustworthy - "all mad, money-getting, and not truth-telling," as the naval hero Lord St. Vincent put it.

… to Lieutenant George De Lacy Evans, a “hard-knit and sinewy Irishman” who was descended from “an old Norman family that had arrived in the British Isles in the footsteps of William the Conqueror” and who will inevitably startle most readers by appearing in one of the book’s many portraits in a photograph, taken while he was serving in the Crimean War in 1855.And despite all of Vogel’s palavering about Francis Scott Key and the origin of that horrid national anthem, the book’s most memorable character portrait is the valiant British Major General Robert Ross, “a blue-eyed, forty-seven-year-old Irishman with a handsome nose and cleft chin.” Ross, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, was shot by an American sniper in September of 1814 and managed to work in some Nelsonian theatrics before exiting stage left:

Recognizing his wound was mortal, Ross asked to be taken to the ships. A rocket wagon, the only vehicle available, was brought up, but the general waved it off. “Go on, you are more wanting at the front,” he told the artillery driver. “He positively refused [transport] in a rocket wagon, declaring he would rather die on the spot than deprive his brave troops,” according to an army report.

His body was preserved in a big barrel of Jamaican rum until it could be entombed in the Old Burying Ground of Halifax’s St. Paul’s Church.Vogel makes the case that these men and the hundreds of others with them in the Chesapeake theater were present at the key turning point in the war, although readers who remain aware of the fact that elsewhere, in another theater, Old Ironsides was sinking British warships as fast as she could close to firing distance, may wonder if Vogel really means the Key turning point. In either case, Through the Perilous Fight is well-researched (there's a good deal of leaning on Lord, but since his book is durably excellent, there's no harm done) and raffishly, colorfully told It throws a bright spotlight on what Charles Muller (another old-school journalist to turned to writing history) back in 1963 called "the darkest hour" of a war that's never really been all that neglected.Meanwhile, the Korean War continues to mutter into its beer, at the back of the bar.