RUTHFULLY YOURS

In March 1932, Communist Party officials in Ukraine’s Odessa province heard rumors of hunger in outlying villages and sent a medical team to investigate. The doctors found empty cottages, corpses lying in the lanes, and the surviving inhabitants gnawing on carrion, boiled bones and horsehide. Local apparatchiks, the horrified medics reported, were doing their best “not to notice the incidence of starvation, and . . . not to speak about it.”

The dead were early victims of the “Holodomor”—literally translated as “hunger-extermination”—an artificial famine inflicted on the Ukrainian peasantry by Stalin in the years 1932-34. The best estimate of the death toll is 3.9 million, or 13% of Ukraine’s population. Up to an additional 2.5 million died in famines elsewhere in the Soviet Union at the same time.

Denied by the Soviet authorities almost until communism’s fall, the Holodomor was first documented by the British historian Robert Conquest in his ground-breaking 1986 book, “The Harvest of Sorrow.” Compiling census data and émigré memoirs and interviews, he demonstrated both the scale of the famine and the fact that it was not the result of drought or economic upheaval but of food confiscation, deliberately and violently enforced. Since then, a mass of new evidence has become available, on which Anne Applebaum draws—with generous acknowledgments to Ukrainian historians—for “Red Famine,” a lucid, judicious and powerful book.

The Holodomor was created in three overlapping stages. First, in the winter of 1929-30, came “collectivization.” Teams of activists were dispatched to the countryside to persuade peasants to hand over land and livestock to state-controlled farms, where they would work as day laborers for payment in kind. Villagers remembered how out of place the visitors looked, tiptoeing through the mud in polished shoes. One even mistook a calf for a colt, brushing aside correction with the declaration that “the world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.”

Unsurprisingly, the anticipated wave of volunteerism failed to materialize, and the activists fell back on violence and intimidation, supported by local thugs and the police. Primed by years of indoctrination, even the more idealistic participants had no difficulty rationalizing their methods. “I firmly believed,” remembered one, “that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism.’ ”

A few months later, the Kremlin launched a parallel drive to evict and deport “kulaks”—a term that in theory referred to wealthy peasants but in practice meant community leaders and anyone, rich or poor, who resisted collectivization. Targeted were teachers, clerks, store keepers, millers and tanners, as well peasants who owned two cows rather than one or whose huts were roofed with tin rather than thatch. Vicious propaganda, Ms. Applebaum notes, equated peasant farming with treachery and criminality: “Kulak-White-Guard-bandits” were said to be hoarding grain, sabotaging the collectives or plotting with the Poles to overturn the Revolution.

Not everyone submitted quietly. Police files reveal thousands of riots, shootings, raids on food stores and arson attacks on government buildings. One report, covering unrest in 16 Ukrainian districts, records 35 police and activists killed and an additional 314 beaten. Peasants’ most immediate form of protest was to slaughter their animals before they were confiscated. But though widespread, resistance was not organized enough to force the regime to backtrack. Instead, the regime hardened its position, fearing a repeat of the anti-Bolshevik risings of the Civil War. In the Soviet Union as a whole, more than two million peasants were deported between 1930 and 1933, mostly to Central Asia or the far north. Many died during the journey (in closed cattle cars, without food or water) or during their first winter in exile. At least another 100,000 went straight to the Gulag.

On their own, Ms. Applebaum argues, collectivization and “dekulakization” would not have led to outright famine. What tipped Ukraine from hunger into mass death was food requisitioning. Launched in the summer of 1930 in a drive to raise grain exports, it descended over the next two years into a sadistic pogrom, with no economic rationale at all. Tasked with fulfilling impossible quotas, search teams raided homes at night, smashing chests and cupboards and probing cellars and wall spaces with pointed metal rods. Cautiously, Ukrainian Party officials warned Moscow of growing hunger. “We have greatly overdone it,” reported one investigator. Face to face with desperate villagers, he had felt “like a carp squirming on a frying pan.”

But the Kremlin pressed on. In August 1932, food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years’ imprisonment, sweeping thousands more into the Gulag. Requisitioning brigades snatched fruit from trees, seedlings from gardens, soup from cooking pots. They killed dogs and smashed millstones. Children were shot at by mounted guards as they crept into the fields to glean fallen grain.

By New Year’s 1933 there was no food left, and full-scale famine took hold. Firsthand accounts are not as rich as those in Ms. Applebaum’s superb “Gulag: A History” (2003)—peasants were less likely to record their experiences than the middle-class professionals who filled the prison camps. But they are vivid enough: the eating of bark and weeds; children’s bird-like necks and wizened faces; ubiquitous, unremarked corpses; cannibalism. By the time Stalin finally called a halt in 1934, millions lay dead and thousands of villages stood empty.

At the time and for more than 50 years afterward, the Soviet authorities denied that the atrocity had ever happened. Doctors falsified death certificates. Students and soldiers sent to gather what there was of the harvest were told not to speak of what they saw. Not a whisper of it appeared in the press. In the cities—overflowing, despite roadblocks, with emaciated refugees—the dead were buried at night in unmarked mass graves. Notoriously, the Moscow-based Western press corps colluded in the coverup. Ms. Applebaum retells the shameful story of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who privately acknowledged the famine but publicly denied it so as to stay in with the regime. The American and British governments knew the truth from their embassies but, given trade requirements and Hitler’s rise, preferred to turn a blind eye.

Though far from complete—a few journalists reported honestly at the time, and eyewitnesses washed up in the West at the close of World War II—the coverup worked, in the sense that it sowed doubt. The Holodomor’s sheer wastefulness (why deport your best farmers and kill the rest?) made the Ukrainian diaspora’s claims “seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible,” Ms. Applebaum writes. The authors of slightly amateurish émigré publications “were easily dismissed as ‘Cold Warriors,’ telling tales.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Ulysses S. Grant was a modest man, famously magnanimous toward his defeated enemies, but the myth of the Lost Cause irritated him. “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor,” he once complained, while “our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse. . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. [Robert E.] Lee was a demigod, [Stonewall] Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.”

Grant’s annoyance was understandable—and prescient. In the century that followed, no one’s reputation would suffer more at the hands of historians sympathetic to the defeated South than his. He was caricatured as a callous, plodding, sometimes drunken commander whose victories were due exclusively to Union advantages in men and materiel, a lucky general who became a politically clueless president, blind to corruption and bent on exacting revenge against the white citizens of the former Confederacy.

Over the past 20 years or so, scholars have done a great deal to rehabilitate Grant’s standing. A year ago, Ronald C. White, the author of the widely praised “A. Lincoln: A Biography” (2009), published his “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” hailed in these pages by Harold Holzer as “like Grant himself” likely to “have staying power.” It demonstrated that Grant was not only the architect of Union victory but a two-term president with substantive achievements—among them, the virtual destruction of the Ku Klux Klan, restored relations with Great Britain, and soldiers sent south to protect the rights of at least some of the African-Americans he had helped to free. Too often, these have been overshadowed by the scandals that beset his second term.

If Mr. White’s book is Large, at 826 pages, Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is Extra Large, at well over 1,000. Not one of those pages is boring. As readers of Mr. Chernow’s best-selling lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and others know, he is a compelling storyteller. Much of the story he sets out to tell here may by now seem familiar, but he adds rich detail and brings to vivid life the reticent, unprepossessing but resolute man whom Walt Whitman called “nothing heroic . . . and yet the greatest hero.”

Every biographer has had to deal with the question of Grant’s drinking. Did he really drink too much? If so, did it interfere with his duties as soldier or statesman? Mr. Chernow is unequivocal: “Grant was an alcoholic,” he writes. For him, “alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. . . . The drinking issue . . . so permeated Grant’s career that a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter.” Mr. Chernow does his best to provide one.

There is no question that drinking helped destroy Grant’s early career. Trained at West Point, calm and courageous in combat during the Mexican War, he drank only after the fighting ended, establishing the pattern he would follow for years.

He was a binge drinker. He could go for months without a drink, but as he himself once confessed to a friend who tried to fill his champagne glass: “If I begin to drink I must keep on drinking.” He actually consumed less alcohol than many of his fellow soldiers, but thanks to what one remembered as his “peculiar organization”: “a little did the fatal [work] of a great deal. . . . He had very poor brains for drinking.”

He knew he did and tried to stop, even joining the Sons of Temperance in 1851. But within a year he was drinking again. Three years later, stationed at a remote garrison on the California coast—bored, depressed and longing for his wife, Julia, and the children whom he hadn’t seen in two years—he suddenly resigned from the Army. No contemporaneous document survives to explain his reason, but Mr. Chernow makes a convincing case, based on a wealth of testimony elicited by biographers in later years, that his commanding officer had confronted him with a stark choice: resign or face the humiliation of a trial for drunkenness.

In that era, when excessive drinking was seen as evidence of moral failure rather than chronic disease, once the word “drunkard” was attached to a man’s name it was almost impossible to shake. When Grant rejoined the Army in 1861, whispers about his drinking haunted every step of his astonishing climb from captain of a company of Illinois volunteers to lieutenant general in command of all the Northern armies in just four years.

A Yale tour group visits a Havana restaurant in “The Cuban Affair,” the new novel by Nelson DeMille. As the Cuban handler expounds on the blessings of socialism, several of the Yalies nod in thoughtful agreement. “If they spent an hour in a kennel, they’d probably come out barking,” quips Mr. DeMille’s narrator. “So much for an Ivy League education.”

The point is made and the scene moves on—but during a conversation over coffee at Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel, where Mr. DeMille is staying during a nationwide book tour, the author muses on the root of the problem. His mind turns to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident, who died in 2008. “Intellectuals said socialism is good if you do it right. Solzhenitsyn said: No, it’s coercive by its nature. There are millions of people in the world and in this country who don’t know that. They can even visit Cuba and not change their thinking one iota,” Mr. DeMille says. “They are intellectually or emotionally tied to some kind of ideal.”

They’re also easy to lampoon—and Mr. DeMille’s wit is on full display in “The Cuban Affair,” his 20th major suspense novel, following the likes of “Plum Island” (1997) and “The General’s Daughter” (1992), the latter adapted as a 1999 movie starring John Travolta. The new book came out Sept. 19 and is on the fiction best-seller lists. Mr. DeMille calls it “an old-fashioned chase-and-escape action adventure.” Its Cold War theme echoes “The Charm School” (1988), perhaps Mr. DeMille’s best-known novel.

Mr. DeMille, 74, was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island, where he still lives. In 1966 he was a student at Hofstra University: “I was kind of bored at school and didn’t sign up for the spring semester.” He received a draft notice, enlisted in the Army, and attended officer candidate school. Then he shipped off to Vietnam, where he saw combat as a platoon leader during the Tet Offensive. After three years in uniform, he returned home, finished his degree, and tried to write what he calls “the Great American war novel.”

A book editor told him nobody wanted to read about Vietnam. So Mr. DeMille switched to police procedurals, pumping out six cheap paperbacks. He didn’t make much money, but he sensed he was in the right place: “If you’re a painter and you’re living in Paris in the 1920s, you’re where you need to be. If you’re a writer, you need to be in New York. I don’t care if anybody else says, ‘Yes, you can do it from your farmhouse in Dubuque.’ Being in New York helped.” Under pen names, he wrote a biography of Barbara Walters (as Ellen Kay ) and a fictionalized book on sharks (as Brad Matthews ). “That’s when ‘Jaws’ was out,” he explains. “It was on-the-job training. I was learning my craft.”

When a talent-spotting publisher advanced him a five-figure check, he began to draft “By the Rivers of Babylon,” the 1978 novel that became his first hardcover book—and also one of the first thrillers to take on Middle Eastern terrorism. Since then, Mr. DeMille has written a novel roughly every other year, selling tens of millions of copies. He’s in talks to turn the tales of one character—a New York police detective called John Corey, the hero of seven books—into a television show.

“I’ve been offered bonuses to write faster,” says Mr. DeMille. Many big-name novelists publish annually, encouraging fans to mark release dates on their calendars as if celebrating a birthday. Not Mr. DeMille. “To do a book a year every year is just incomprehensible to me,” he says. “The quality would suffer. Stephen King can do it. He’s a brilliant storyteller. Other writers aren’t doing their best because they’re rushing it.”

Mr. DeMille likes to tell a joke—I heard it twice, during our afternoon conversation and then during an on-stage interview at an evening event in Arlington Heights, Ill. It involves James Patterson, a friend of Mr. DeMille’s who is famous for his commercial success, aided by co-authors who help him publish at a dizzying clip: “I called James the other day and his wife picked up. She said her husband couldn’t come to the phone because he was working on a book. I said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll hold.’ ”

Contributing to Mr. DeMille’s slow pace is his aversion to technology. He composes his books with a pencil in longhand; assistants decipher his handwriting and type it up for him. He makes revisions by marking on the printed pages. He owns a flip phone and says he doesn’t use the internet much.

For a man so set in his ways, “The Cuban Affair” represents quite a change. After his last book, “Radiant Angel,” came out in 2015, Mr. DeMille thought about calling it quits. “My sales had flattened at a high plateau,” he says. “That’s a reason to stay in the business—and also a reason to get out. I was vacillating.” He changed agents, left his longtime publisher, and signed a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. “I felt a lot of the old enthusiasm again,” he says.

He also invented a new character, Daniel Graham “Mac” MacCormick, a wisecracking veteran of the war in Afghanistan who runs a charter-boat business in Key West, Fla. “A lot of characters from my past books are approaching Social Security age,” Mr. DeMille says. “The magic number in Hollywood and popular fiction seems to be about 35 years old.” For insights into the mind of a character less than half his age, Mr. DeMille consulted his son, a 37-year-old screenwriter.