"We must forget the past," Nelson Mandela once said, hoping that a new South Africa would emerge vengeance-free from its crippling history of apartheid. Eric Foner, a distinguished historian at Columbia University, hears that and cringes. Though he praises Mr. Mandela for his forgiving spirit, Mr. Foner insists that "we can forget the past, but the past, most assuredly, will not forget us." He reminds us of Marx's gloomy assessment-that the past "weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"-and warns that unless history is dealt with conscientiously, as something "literally present in all we do" (as James Baldwin once wrote), the meaning of contemporary events gets flattened out, decontextualized and dangerously subject to whatever forces might profit by its manipulation. This danger looms especially large in the United States, where history seems increasingly silent or invisible-not just because of our vaunted tendency to "look forward" and "move on," but because our educational system hasn't figured out how to animate history for the new generation (which slanged the word "history" into a synonym for irrelevance), and because the saturations of mass media crowd the past right out of consciousness.

In Who Owns History?, a book of nine essays, most of which originated as lectures delivered to various audiences from 1983 till 2001, Mr. Foner finds himself embattled on many fronts. As a public historian-he's emerged in the last decade from his position as a greatly respected scholar on slavery and Reconstruction to speak to a broader audience about notions of liberty and equality-his job has been to infuse public discourse with a historical awareness that does more than boost patriotic fervor or serve up the past as exciting adventure drained of ideological content. Hence his painstaking critique, in this volume, of Ken Burns' Civil War TV series, which wowed the public but essentially cast the war, Mr. Foner says, as "a family quarrel among white Americans, and [celebrated] the road to reunion without considering the price paid for national reconciliation-the abandonment of the ideal of racial justice." As a leftist, Mr. Foner has had to fight off the wave of conservative revisionism that crested with Reagan and has soaked and besotted American thinking ever since with, among other things, anti-immigrant legislation, canon-war cheerleading that hails America and Western Civ über alles, and federal judges bent on implementing the Constitution's "original intent." (Mr. Foner recalls Thurgood Marshall's saying that given its slavery provisions-e.g., Article I, Section II and Article IV, Section II-not all Americans think the Constitution's "original intent" particularly benign.) And as a historian coming out of the old left-his father, also a historian, was blacklisted in the late 40's, and W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson were family friends-Mr. Foner has had to position himself carefully vis-à-vis the new postmodern history, negotiating between the old-left desire for a unified narrative and the new "social history" which, while giving voice to previously suppressed groups and honoring their differences, tends to atomize their stories and render the past a historical Tower of Babel.

The essays range wide, beginning with "My Life as a Historian," a personal narrative that presents a vivid picture of the influences that shaped Mr. Foner as a historian, including his mother, who stormed into his grade-school classroom to complain to the teacher about the sugar-coated way slavery was being taught. "What difference does it make," the teacher rejoined, "what we teach them about slavery?" A seminal moment: Mr. Foner has devoted his life to making an engagement with the history of slavery a "difference" that matters in our conceptions of American identity. The essay goes on to show how Mr. Foner's early activism in the civil-rights movement dovetailed with his scholarly interests in the Reconstruction, and how the blacklisting of family members (his mother and uncle were also targeted) in the 1940's prepared him for the social revolution of the coming decades. "I did not have to wait until the 1960's to discover the yawning gap that separated America's professed ideals, and its self-confident claim to be a land of liberty, from its social and political reality."

Other essays explore Mr. Foner's relationship with his mentor, Richard Hofstadter, or pose the question "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" (Short answer: Ask not for a viable socialist party in the U.S., which won't happen here, but for an egalitarian social-democratic movement that doesn't require revolution.) A pair of essays investigate the ways that post-Soviet Russia and post-apartheid South Africa, in the midst of forging new national identities, are forced to rethink their pasts. Russia, Mr. Foner finds, is in danger of embracing a nostalgic view of the czarist past as a way to distance itself from its 20th-century totalitarian legacy, while South Africa seems all too eager to forget history in its drive toward national reconciliation.

It is this concern with the nexus between past and present, between our interpretations of history and our contemporary notions of national identity, that animates the book's three strongest essays. Here Mr. Foner is on familiar ground, examining how American ideals of liberty and equality remain inextricably tangled with the enduring legacy of slavery, the Civil War and the betrayals that came at the end of the Reconstruction era. In "Who Is an American?", Mr. Foner frustrates the conservative demand in the 1990's for a patriotic definition of American identity by showing how supposed universal principles of liberty and equality "have been historically constructed on the basis of difference and exclusion." He reminds us that Crevecouer answered his famous question "What then is the American, the new man?" this way: "He is either a European, or the descendant of a European"-odd, Mr. Foner notes, since at the time "fully one fifth of the population … consisted of Africans and their descendants." In "Blacks and the U.S. Constitution," Mr. Foner summarizes the "long, complex constitutional history of African Americans," showing that that history, far from moving inevitably toward the golden telos of equality, is filled with crises and backsliding, especially in our own era, when the Supreme Court seems to "have entered a second Redemption-as the restoration of white supremacy was called in the late nineteenth-century South." We now have a court, Mr. Foner says, with an "undisguised lack of sympathy for efforts to undo the effects of racism." And in "American Freedom in a Global Age," Mr. Foner shows how "the relationship between globalization and freedom may be the most pressing political and social problem of the twenty-first century"-not because of terrorism (the essay was written pre-9/11), but because emerging global institutions like the World Bank, the I.M.F. and the NAFTA tribunals are quietly stripping nation-states and their citizens of their sovereignty while encouraging the equation of freedom with "the free market," personal liberty with the ability to pick out anything one wants at Wal-Mart.

Historians, Eric Hobsbawm once said, "are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow citizens wish to forget." Mr. Foner takes this vocation seriously, repeatedly challenging the complacencies that allow the "yawning gap" between American ideals and American reality.

Cornel Bonca is the books editor for OC Weekly and teaches literature at California State University, Fullerton.

Cameron Dougan set himself a daunting task when he put at the center of his first novel a gorgeous kept woman who runs around Manhattan trailing clouds of perfume from Bloomie's. It's not impossible to pull off, of course: Truman Capote did just fine with Breakfast at Tiffany's, but Capote's tone is brisk and campy, which leavens things when Holly Golightly's fate darkens and our sympathies are summoned. But Kim Reilly, Mr. Dougan's heroine in Because She Is Beautiful, is Holly Goheavily from the get-go.

We are never allowed the readerly room to be playful or ironic about Kim Reilly. As she gets her heels buffed or has models parade the latest designer clothes before her, Mr. Dougan keeps to a passionately dignified tone, and we are meant to sense Kim's moral struggle and her desire to grow past her violent, death-plagued beginnings. The general emotional register throughout is straight-faced, sincere and finally-philosophically-sad. Kim's first moneybags lover introduces himself by taking hold of her hands and declaring, "Sad … Darling, I can tell. They're fragile and need looking after. Are these sad hands?" Why yes, yes they are, and not just the hands. Later, a friend of hers tells her, "Some people die without ever knowing tragedy …. Others pass their lives in catastrophe's shadows. Yet we live in the same world ….You and I …. We live in the shadows."

Sad, if you haven't noticed, is pretty big with lots of our younger novelists. It's a post-everything, neo-romantic, free-floating melancholy, issuing as much from the new generation's distanced, mediated sense of the unfairness of things (not Growing Up Absurd, but Growing Up "Absurd") as it does from that old emotional workhorse of artists everywhere, the narcissistic wound. It also helps that it's a short, stubby word any 2-year-old can say, thus connecting it, subconsciously at least, with the vulnerabilities and possibilities of innocence. Study the key moments in Douglas Coupland, the sentiment beneath the sickness in Bret Easton Ellis, the entire oeuvre of Jay McInerney, and even David Foster Wallace in those brief moments when he wearies of the infinite complexity of everything and succumbs, in relief, to wholesale reductionism-for them, life is sad and life is lonely, and to say so, beautifully and sadly, is one of fiction's great responsibilities.

There's a pedigree for this. The most edifying forebear, in the case of Cameron Dougan, is F. Scott Fitzgerald and all his Sad Young Men-edifying because Mr. Dougan shares with Fitzgerald an earnest moralism (the direct issue of a certain attenuated and nostalgic Irish Catholicism), as well as a fascination with the trappings of the rich. If only Mr. Dougan possessed Fitzgerald's gimlet eye, if only he could see how the mess the very, very moneyed can make of things is not so much swooningly poignant as carelessly wasteful.

Because She Is Beautiful begins with 40 pages of Kim's girlhood as a military brat, and Mr. Dougan works valiantly through them, the travails of families moving from base to base and the alcohol-laden domestic battles between Mom and Dad being not exactly the author's cup of tea. He makes his point, though: Kim grows up vowing never to allow herself to be abused, as her mother did, and to marry rich. After her mother dies, she escapes home and father by becoming a stewardess. To Mr. Dougan's evident relief, Kim finally comes in contact with the world of financially solvent men.

Mr. Dougan's descriptive prowess expands noticeably here. Whereas in the first section, he manages to set a number of pages in West Germany without a single detail to remind us that we're in Europe, now he lays on the splendor of Upper East Side restaurants, hotels and charity balls with confidence and relish. This is the world to which the man who admired Kim's sad, fragile hands introduces her, and which puts her in the sights of a more sophisticated chap named Robert Sanders, who is the George Peppard of the piece. (I'm not thinking of Breakfast at Tiffany's now so much as late, TV-movie Peppard, all those mild, suave, white-haired art appreciators who were forever having waiters decant the wine-cf. the 1979 edition in Torn Between Two Lovers). Robert Sanders falls head over heels in love with Kim's beauty and goodness, pays for her apartment, sets up a trust fund and bottomless credit at Bergdorf's, and we're treated to Pretty Woman–ish scenes of Kim trying on clothes, learning to say "It's a gorgeous linen, but not for dinner" as Robert looks on Pygmalionishly ("his eyes would sparkle"), and whisking off, via helicopter, to exclusive restaurants, where she is greeted upon her arrival by the "Bravos!" of complete strangers. (Why are they applauding? Evidently because she's bagged a sugar daddy with a helicopter.) She also befriends a, yes, gay interior decorator named Michael who supplies the novel with bitchy one-liners and sad lover stories, and satisfies the seemingly unquenchable thirst in recent books, movies and TV for a Supporting Fag.

It's all quite glittery and exciting, but Mr. Dougan never lets us forget that Kim is vaguely displeased with the decision she's made to, well, prostitute herself, and so we wait for her to realize that it's not really a good idea to prostitute yourself out if you ever want to grow up.

The waiting takes about 200 pages. That's a long time-several days worth of reading, say, and more than 15 years of narrative time. While we wait, Kim gets older, more bejeweled and sophisticated. She endures, with nearly saintly patience, Robert's family problems: He's married, of course, to a woman he can't leave, a suicidal alcoholic who times her crises so that they always seem to occur on the night of Kim's birthday party. We also have plenty of time to notice that, for all the plot schmaltz, Mr. Dougan's sentences are quite precise and shapely, and occasionally bloom into the restrained fervor that characterizes a book like Tender Is the Night. His dialogue is interestingly dense, with several strands of conversation usually going on at once and people talking past and across rather than to one another. He's also particularly good at leaving scenes open-ended, emotionally ambiguous, "neutral."

If only Mr. Dougan applied his A-list prose to something other than B-movie material. On her way to enlightenment, Kim starts volunteering in a hospital ward for sick babies and ultimately takes off, alone, for Paris, where she spends entirely too much time shopping and hitting on a young artist-"Kim, stop shopping and hitting on young artists," readers will cry, "and confront the meaning of your freedom!"-before she confronts the meaning of her freedom. When she does, it is sad, it is beautiful and it is bogus. The novel's title comes from one of those light-as-air love lyrics by E.E. Cummings, but all I could think of after reading this was that Cameron Dougan has cut Kim Reilly an awful lot of slack, not because her character's complex or her story interesting, but because he is enchanted-because she is beautiful. It's an enchantment most readers will be unlikely to share.

Cornel Bonca is books editor for OC Weekly and teaches literature at California State University, Fullerton.