Unless you're on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize, this book will either make you feel guilty or inspire you-or perhaps both. The "social entrepreneurs" David Bornstein writes about in his portentously titled book are not fat cats with the urge to have hospital wings named after them, but rather folks like you and me who have an abundance of spirit and their priorities straight; they're "social innovators" with "powerful ideas to improve people's lives" across the globe. How to Change the World reminds us that we've all got it good, and that we all have the resources within ourselves to make things better for others.

If that sounds like a telethon slogan, don't worry: How to Change the World is an affecting and bracing antidote to the creeping, cynical mind-set that insists that profound social change is impossible. Just about every social entrepreneur in the book started with limited resources and institutional resistance in countries with profoundly retrograde social attitudes, but found that, with enough energy, tenacity and business sense, the strength of their innovations gained momentum and eventually became new paradigms for social change. This is idealism wedded to hard-nosed pragmatism.

As an early example of social entrepreneurialism at work, Mr. Bornstein reminds us of the career of Florence Nightingale. A Victorian-era child of privilege who studied nursing against the wishes of her family, Nightingale in 1858 wrote a book that provided statistical analysis of the causes of sickness and death for soldiers during wartime. "Nightingale," Mr. Bornstein writes, "was a pioneer in the use of graphical tools (such as polar-area or 'pie' charts), which she employed to dramatize the need for change." The woman who saved countless British soldiers' lives during the Crimean War was a canny numbers-cruncher, a care-giving actuary.

The key to social change, as the accomplishments of the extraordinary freethinkers profiled in How to Change the World attest, is a careful commitment to systems and information flow, as well as a gift for building coalitions between government and business. It's not enough simply to have the desire; social entrepreneurs must be "relentless in the pursuit of their visions" and must "not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can." According to Mr. Bornstein, there's an explosion of such innovators all over the world, thanks to advances in technology, the gains of the women's movement and the subsequent worldwide explosion of N.G.O.'s, or nongovernmental organizations.

The leading theorist of modern social entrepreneurialism-and an economic dynamo, to boot-is Bill Drayton, a man who should be at least as well-known as, say, Ralph Nader. Mr. Drayton is a lawyer and a former E.P.A. official who now runs an organization called Ashoka (that's "active absence of sorrow" in Sanskrit), which operates in 46 countries across Asia, Africa, the Americas and Central Europe and has thus far provided over $40 million in funding. Ashoka functions as a kind of corporate head-hunting service in search of unique leaders who can implement positive change, weeding out the dreamers from the doers. But instead of economic return, Ashoka seeks advances in education, rural development, poverty alleviation, human rights and health care. Imagine that, Mr. Trump!

The journey of each social entrepreneur tends to begin with a eureka moment, which is then executed by taking cautious baby steps. In 1982 Fábio Rosa, a 22-year-old agronomic engineer, was invited by a former schoolmate to visit Palmares do Sul, a rural outpost in southern Brazil that was lousy with farmland but didn't have enough affordable water to irrigate rice, the region's biggest cash crop.Theproblem?Wealthy landowners owned all the irrigation channels and set prices too high. The solution? Artesian wells that could procure water from the ground. But wells need electricity, and Brazil's infrastructure had bypassed rural areas in favor of urban expansion. Mr. Rosa surmised that elaborate, three-phase electricity wasn't necessary to power the wells; a "monophase" current system employing a single wire running through a transformer could get the job done. Mr. Rosa established a municipal department for training and a credit mechanism so farmers could afford to sink their wells. He prepared a detailed economic analysis that determined crop yield and prices to attract investment, and soon farm incomes jumped 300 percent. Treat a socially noble undertaking like a well-executed business project, and the world will beat a path to your door.

For a handful of social entrepreneurs in How to Change the World, the great epiphany involved employing the beneficiaries of their largesse as human capital. Jeroo Billimoria mobilized abused and neglected children in India, a country whose ruling class regards the troubled underclass as a nuisance at best. Ms. Billimoria's big idea was create a simple, toll-free number that children in distress could call to report injuries, abandonment, whatever, and then receive assistance from Ms. Billimoria's organization, Childline. Mr. Billimoria's pint-size reclamation projects in turn proselytized, blanketing neighborhoods with Childline stickers bearing the number. Emboldened by her success, Ms. Billimoria took it macro, organizing the country's disparate child services under Childline's umbrella. Jeroo Billimoria is like some dream combination of Mother Teresa, Edward Bernays and Charles Bluhdorn. Her stratagems-"branding"theChildline name with the massive plastering of stickers across the country, building a child-care empire through consolidation and database management-would be the stuff of corporate legend if Wall Street were involved.

As for education-well, it's not only about hard numbers, Mr. President. J.B. Schramm, a Harvard divinity student turned grass-roots reformer, came to the conclusion that underprivileged American high-school kids who skip college don't necessarily lack motivation, but rather the knowledge and skills to tackle the application process itself. The key, as he viewed it, was shoring up mediocre transcripts and test scores with ancillary material like well-written personal essays. In the early 90's, he created something called College Summit, workshops in which students hone their writing skills and self-esteem. In 2000, 81percent of College Summit participants enrolled in college. Soon, Mr. Schramm got teachers involved (human capital again), using them as tutors to help guide their students through the application labyrinth. From small things, big things one day come.

There are other, equally stunning stories in How to Change the World: Erzsébet Szekeres, who created a new model for disability care in Hungary by putting her charges to productive work, or Veronica Khosa, a South African who instituted home-based care for AIDS patients and radicalized health-care policy in her hidebound country.

At a time when hope seems a precious commodity, here's a book that offers it up in abundance.

Marc Weingarten is at work on a book about journalism in the 1960's and 70's.

Jayson Blair? A small-timer. Stephen Glass? Penny-ante punk. If you want to talk about the malfeasance of American journalists, you can start in the early 20th century, when a writer and editor of national repute named Charles E. Chapin shot and killed his wife, then turned himself in and spent the rest of his days in Ossining's notorious Sing Sing prison. Like Mr. Glass, Chapin transformed his ignominy into a morality tale and a second spin-cycle of fame. Convict Chapin was the subject of glowing magazine profiles; behind the prison walls, he entertained political dignitaries and celebrities such as Harry Houdini.

How Chapin went from newspaper potentate to gentleman killer is a fascinating story compellingly told in James McGrath Morris' The Rose Man of Sing Sing. The book also provides a widescreen look at the dawn of modern journalism. Mr. Morris suggests that the fierce turf battles among the newspaper giants of the era fostered a perilous ambition in characters like Chapin, a man whose moral reductivism-his need to shrink the world down to a splashy headline-contributed to his own demise.

"Charles Chapin's life story is so extraordinary that it could have been a novel," Mr. Morris writes in his preface. Because his career dovetailed with the rise of first-wave media, Chapin chronicled, Zelig-like, some of the most sensational stories of the age in extravagantly descriptive prose. He provided the kind of ground-level eyewitness accounts that the E!-deprived newspaper readers of the time craved. But his personal life was a melodrama fit to print as well, with all the plot twists-spurned love, fortunes gained and lost, crime and punishment-of a James T. Farrell novel.

Charles Chapin was one of the prime movers on Park Row, that fabled cluster of downtown office buildings where Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, the two biggest papers of the day, spooled out grubby accounts of upper-class perfidy and under-class depravity. Born in Oneida, N.Y., in 1858, Charles moved with his family to Atchison, Kan. At 14-professional working age for boys of the era-he opted to "earn the means with which to acquire an education" and started delivering the local paper, The Daily Champion. He taught himself shorthand and Morse code and got caught up in the national printing-press craze, self-publishing his own monthly newsletter, Our Compliments.

After a brief career as a barnstorming actor, in which he met and married fellow performer Nellie Beebe, Chapin took his first newspaper job, on the Chicago Tribune. After a few years of doggedly pursuing murder stories and other tawdry business, he became a marine reporter just when some of the most sensational maritime stories of the day were about to unfold. His first big scoop was the case of William McGarigle, a convict who had escaped from jail and jumped on a schooner called The Marsh en route to Canada. Every Chicago paper was desperate to pick up McGarigle's trail, but Chapin paid off the operator of a speedy tugboat to intercept McGarigle at sea and, using a series of tips from boat operators, found McGarigle just as he was about to touch Canadian soil. Call it Patrick O'Brian with a notepad, a beat reporter braving the elements to nail a scoop.

Such gonzo heroics were not uncommon among reporters at the time; readers came to expect newsprint drama. But Chapin, by dint of his relentless digging, managed to find himself in the vortex of many such stories. A few months after the McGarigle story, he managed to locate the sole survivor of a shipwrecked passenger boat called The Vernon aboard the tugboat that had rescued him. "His legs are swelled to three times their ordinary size, and are discolored to the hips," Chapin wrote, "while his hands are as big as boxing gloves." When Chapin returned to Chicago with his prized interview subject, the pair, according to the reporter, "were followed by reporters in cabs, who chased after the carriage in hopes of getting for nothing an interview that the Tribune had obtained by superior enterprise."

These stories made Chapin a star in Chicago. At the age of 29, he was made the city editor of the Chicago Times, then the Chicago Herald, until Joseph Pulitzer brought him to New York to work at the World. Pulitzer had perfected the fine art of sideshow reporting, using "the techniques of mass entertainment made popular on Coney Island and Broadway," writes Mr. Morris. Relative to the other papers in the city, the "front page of the World screamed." Chapin's vivid colloquial style suited perfectly, and he continued to cover human disasters and crimes of passion in graphic detail. Soon he became editor of the World's evening edition, the Evening World, and proceeded to revolutionize the way papers gathered and organized news.

Taking full advantage of a new technology-the telephone-Chapin "took the city map, drew a checkerboard pattern on it, and stationed a reporter in each of the squares, much like a police beat." A reporter could now phone in a story, and another reporter in the office would fashion it into an article. Thus, Chapin created the concept of "rewrite men."

He put together an all-star team of reporters, including Irvin Cobb and future Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Zona Gale, and the Evening World under his watch became the biggest-selling paper in the city. Chapin was fêted by New York society, and his exorbitant salary allowed him to own a yacht, an apartment in a luxury high-rise and a stable of horses. But when a few speculative ventures failed miserably and a rich great-uncle failed to leave him anything in his will, Chapin found himself suddenly broke. Despondent, he planned to kill Nellie-to spare her the humiliation of poverty-and then turn the gun on himself. A classic murder-suicide: "When you get this letter, I will be dead," he wrote by way of farewell. "My wife has been such a good pal. I cannot leave her alone in the world."

But once he'd killed Nellie, his nerve failed. "When it came to personal matters," Mr. Morris writes, "his inability to see the full complexity of life had led to the death of Nellie. He was powerless except to lash out." Chapin was convicted of murder on Jan. 16, 1919, and given 20 years to life.

At Sing Sing, he was treated like a hotel guest: He had the full run of the grounds, spent hours in the library, edited the prison newspaper and wrote his memoirs. When the prison chaplain recommended that he get some outside activity, Chapin began to cultivate a small garden, which soon grew into a massive horticultural wonderland. By soliciting donations from some of the captains of industry he had befriended during his career as a journalist, Chapin amassed thousands of flowers. For one project, Sing Sing's warden Lewis Lawes, another friend, assigned prisoners to "dig up and load … rubble into prison trucks that returned with topsoil and fertilizer from outside the walls." Chapin's garden was a cause célèbre, and he gave tours of the grounds to Houdini, author Booth Tarkington and countless reporters. It seemed a classic case of incarcerated rehabilitation, but no pardon ever came, and Chapin died a convict in 1930.

Although Chapin's curious story was a sensation at the time, he's been long forgotten. With this scrupulously researched book, Mr. Morris rescues an engaging character from historical oblivion and opens a window onto a raucous, roiling epoch that played itself out in 22-point type.

Marc Weingarten is writing a book about journalism in the 1960's and 70's.

Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World, by Steve Kemper. Harvard Business School Press, 319 pages, $27.95.

Remember Ginger? No, not the Tina Louise character on Gilligan's Island . Ginger was the code word for an invention that was going to deliver the world from pestilence and poverty, cure the common cold, do our kids' homework and give us the winning edge in the war on terrorism. Ginger was, in fact, anything we wanted it to be, because we simply no idea what it-or rather IT, Ginger's other nickname-was. And we couldn't wait to find out.

Two years ago, stirred up by a frenzy of media hype, chat rooms buzzed and water coolers sloshed with a whirlwind of idle speculation about Ginger: What in creation could brilliant inventor Dean Kamen and his engineers be cooking up in Mr. Kamen's labs? When Ginger turned out to be a motor scooter-a very sophisticated motor scooter-the world collectively shrugged its shoulders. After the epic tease, the unveiling felt like coitus interruptus .

Segway, as Mr. Kamen's invention came to be known, has underwhelmed. The world's first self-balancing, electric-powered personal-transportation device, it's for sale from Amazon or the Segway Web site for $4,950. The possibility that it may be a flop hasn't kept Steve Kemper from taking a hard look at Segway's tortured origins. A freelance journalist, Mr. Kemper followed Mr. Kamen around like some new-economy Boswell, dutifully recording every round of financing and every engineering triumph. He amassed over 5,000 pages of notes for the book-and seems to have left precious little on the cutting-room floor. That's a mixed blessing for neophytes who think a gyro is just a sandwich. But stick with this book and you're going to learn a few things about the science of transportation. You're also going to learn how not to manage a company. As Mr. Kemper tells it, Dean Kamen is the dark side of Peter Drucker.

What holds this sometimes demanding book together (despite the long passages about, say, fitting the gyro assembly into the chassis) is the strong magnetic field that is Mr. Kamen, the kind of guy you're tempted to call a genius. As a teen, he was a horrible student (Mr. Kamen told Mr. Kemper that he used to purposefully score 57's on high-school tests because getting 90's and 100's was too easy), but his febrile mind was hot-wired for science. Using Isaac Newton's Principia as his bible, Mr. Kamen plunged headlong into complex circuitry, creating a state-of-the-art light system for the Hayden Planetarium at age 16.

What young Mr. Kamen envisioned for himself was a life of scientific progress tied to noble causes. An idealist with an unshakable stubborn streak, Mr. Kamen truly believed that making the world a better place was his calling. Years before Ginger, Mr. Kamen had made his reputation by inventing revolutionary medical equipment: the first drug-infusion IV pump, the first portable insulin pump for diabetes patients and the first lightweight dialysis machine for home use.

Mr. Kamen triumphed by making bold, intuitive leaps. Where others saw pitfalls, he sensed opportunity. "Dean approached new projects the same way, as if he were heading into wide-open territory," Mr. Kemper writes. "Nothing was too wild to consider. The best ideas always seemed impossible at first, or at least improbable." Mr. Kamen called this trial-and-error process "frog-kissing," and he demanded it from everyone that worked for him.

Thanks to the millions he earned from his world-changing inventions, Mr. Kamen was free to pursue good works, no matter how whimsical. For years, he and the engineers at his Manchester, N.H., R&D company, DEKA, tried to fashion a wheelchair that would climb stairs and jump over curbs. That got Mr. Kamen thinking about the science of dynamic balance and a device that would never lose its equilibrium, regardless of speed or terrain.

Code Name Ginger traces this notion all the way to fruition, when Mr. Kamen unveiled Segway for millions of viewers on Good Morning America on Dec. 3, 2001. The terrain, over that three-year development period, was anything but smooth: He nearly crashed his own company, burned through millions of other's people's money and alienated some of the dot-com era's biggest icons.

A classic monomaniac, Mr. Kamen wanted access to big-time venture capital and the brightest engineers, but he didn't want to give anything up in return. He refused to offer stock options or large salaries to his executives, and insisted they travel coach class, while he himself tooled around in his private jets. His attitude toward outside investors verged on contempt. When heavyweights like Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr and Credit Suisse First Boston's Michael Schmertzler-men who raised the capital for Amazon, Compaq and Netscape, among others-offered Mr. Kamen tens of millions in R&D money for Ginger, Mr. Kamen gave them crumbs for their investment. Steve Jobs, another enthusiastic investor, took Mr. Kamen to task for design flaws, but Mr. Kamen just shrugged it off. He had a fatal flaw: an inability to cede control when it was advantageous to do so. He wanted to steer the gizmo at all times, even when it was badly off-balance.

He also demanded absolute secrecy on the Ginger project, for fear that the big auto companies would either appropriate it or squash it. When the now-defunct media Web site Inside.com leaked portions of Mr. Kemper's book proposal in January 2001, thus triggering the massive media orgy over Ginger, Mr. Kamen flipped out, frantically dissembled and ultimately shut out Mr. Kemper. "The investors had given Dean an order: Kill the book. 'That's dead,' said Dean. 'That's over.'" A writer's nightmare, for sure, but Mr. Kemper prevailed, and the chapter describing his efforts to resuscitate his project in the face of Mr. Kamen's intransigence is an instructive lesson on how to deflect a bully's strong-arm tactics.

Too frequently, Code Name Ginger reads like a scientific paper; the general reader has no use for much of the technical detail. What really makes the book's engine rev is the outsized personality of Dean Kamen, and the clash of titans that ensues when innovation rams straight into the bottom line.

Marc Weingarten is at work on a book about the journalism of the 1960's and 70's.

This is a book about art that has virtually nothing to do with art. It's really a primer about basic economics-supply and demand, the unassailable power of the marketplace, and greed and avarice, the twin engines that drive so much good old-fashioned American enterprise. The author, Richard Polsky, is an art-world veteran: Since 1984, he's been both a gallery owner and a private dealer. His memoir of the highly loopy and irrational culture of collectors and dealers is a dishy debunking of some of the scene's more prominent figures.

If I Bought Andy Warhol teaches us anything, it's that the art world is really high school with money. There are the popular dealers who wield cultural and economic clout, and the mid-level dealers who covet the power of their more fortunate competitors; the collectors who bandy about six-figure sums as if they're using Monopoly money and think of art as a shortcut to status and sophistication; and the artists themselves, eager participants in this silly and occasionally wildly remunerative game. Mr. Polsky is both amused and disgusted-and an active participant all the same. An Andy Warhol obsessive ("not liking at least some aspect of Warhol's work is as perverse as not liking the sun"), he puts his passion to good use: His quest for a Warhol of his own wends through the book's antic narrative like a Hitchcockian McGuffin. "I was mesmerized by Warhol himself and the life he led," Mr. Polsky writes in his introduction. Owning a Warhol, he was sure, would "confer on me all the trappings of that life. I would join the elite group of people who recognized his brilliance and owned a small but glamorous part of it."

But never forget the financial angle: After his death in 1987, the value of Warhol's art shot into the stratosphere, which made his undervalued works a sound investment. As Mr. Polsky points out, Orange Marilyn , an early Warhol silkscreen originally bought by collector Leon Kraushar for $1,800 in 1964, was sold at auction in 1988 (to S.I. Newhouse Jr., no less) for $17.3 million-"per square inch the highest price ever paid for a work of contemporary art."

Mr. Polsky's book begins in the spring of 2002. In search of a small Warhol lobster painting for an exhibit, he called on Vincent Fremont, the cagey point man responsible for disposing of unsold Warhol paintings and sculptures. Mr. Fremont, like all the dealers featured in I Bought Andy Warhol , is described as a willful, patronizing eccentric, prone to evasive tactics and erratic behavior. When Mr. Polsky expressed interest in the painting, Mr. Fremont refused to sell it. (A few years earlier, Mr. Polsky had sold two Warhols he'd promised Mr. Fremont he would keep). After countless unreturned calls, Mr. Polsky took drastic measures, scouring Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco for a cheap rubber lobster with which to get Mr. Fremont's attention. This cat-and-mouse game is typical of what Mr. Polsky had to go through to acquire art: instead of simple business transactions, juvenile courting rituals.

Most of I Bought Andy Warhol is a glittery art-world picaresque set in the go-go 80's and sober 90's. Mr. Polsky hopped frantically from San Francisco to New York to L.A. in an attempt to curry favor and maintain a healthy profit margin while the art market waxed and waned. The book's cast of characters-canny opportunists who all want to believe they're aesthetes-keep an eye on emerging trends and young artists in pursuit of the big score. The more prominent dealers, like the Warhol Factory's Fred Hughes, calibrate inventory like pork-belly futures, releasing just enough art to create demand, but not enough to flood the market and depress prices. The trick is to make an artist desirable, but not too accessible. The quality of a specific work of art isn't as crucial as the perception that it's significant. When Dan Douke, an L.A. artist and Polsky client, nearly fooled Mr. Polsky with a fake Marilyn silkscreen, the entrepreneurial instinct kicked in: Why not, Mr. Douke suggested, sell a bunch of phony Marilyns signed Dan Douke? In the art world, that's not theft, it's postmodern appropriation.

The behavior of the dealers and artists in I Bought Andy Warhol is sometimes amusing, sometimes repugnant. They all carry on like petulant children, but no one cares much-as long as they get their cut. Mr. Polsky has lots of juicy material to work with in regards to influential L.A. dealer James Corcoran, an avid surfer whose idea of fun, apparently, is throwing dice to determine who'll pick up a $300 lunch tab. A Corcoran Gallery party for Polsky client Chuck Arnoldi turned into a drunken food fight: "A chicken wing scored a direct hit on Marcia Weisman's blond bouffant. Guests intent on self-preservation began hoisting up sections of white tablecloth to protect themselves from the crossfire." Mr. Arnoldi chicken-winged an Ed Ruscha painting worth $65,000, prompting Mr. Ruscha himself to grimly warn Mr. Corcoran, "I sure hope you have insurance."

The real star of this book is money: Six-figure sums striate the story like fine marble, and an appendix lists each artwork mentioned in the book and its current valuation. (Though "current," in this company, lasts about a half a minute.)

Richard Polsky is occasionally a clunky stylist ("Like a drunken sailor waking up with a bad hangover, the art world woke up in early 1990 with a painful headache"), but his good humor and sense of sheer wonder at the lunacy of his chosen profession gives the book a lost-in-the-funhouse giddiness that will no doubt make it an essential Hamptons beach-bag accessory.

Marc Weingarten is writing a book about the journalism of the 60's and 70's.

Forget what you've read about the New South, that mythological region of racial and economic comity. To read Paul Hendrickson's remarkable Sons of Mississippi is to encounter a modern-day South rife with vexing contradictions and haunted by the ghosts of Jim Crow.

Mr. Hendrickson, a former reporter for The Washington Post , pivots his book's wide-ranging, gripping narrative around a single 1962 Life magazine photograph that crystallizes the queasy, virulent hatred of white Southerners at the dawn of the civil-rights era. In it, seven men are prepping for a healthy round of racial thuggery. The Brylcreem figure in the center of the photograph, a cigarette clamped between his teeth, is gleefully grasping a billy club as if weighing its capacity for physical harm. The man to the right of him, also dangling a smoke from his lips, is wrapping what looks like gauze around his right wrist, like a boxer getting ready to rumble. A few others are standing around laughing, or grimly staring off-camera into the middle distance.

These men are in fact sheriffs, who have come together under the catalpa trees at the University of Mississippi on Sept. 27, 1962, to prevent black student James Meredith from enrolling and besmirching the state's salient symbol of white entitlement. They have gathered, Mr. Hendrickson writes in the book's prologue, "these seven faces of Deep South apartheid, along with a swelling mob of others … along with their pridefulness and paranoia and potentially lethal rages, to do what they could to keep another American and fellow Mississippian, a black man, from forcibly integrating … the halls and grounds of their sacrosanct state university."

The picture, taken seven years after Emmett Till was murdered and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for whistling at a white woman, becomes Mr. Hendrickson's Baedeker guide to Mississippi's lingering legacy of racial intolerance. "How," the author writes, "did a gene of intolerance and racial fear mutate as it passed sinuously through time and family bloodstreams?" In tracing the lives of the seven men in the photograph, the lives of their children and other lives they touched, Sons of Mississippi offers a moving and tragic portrait of collective guilt-without moral reckoning.

Mr. Hendrickson is that rarity, a meticulous reporter and nuanced storyteller. Sons of Mississippi isn't looking to settle old scores or draw easy conclusions. Instead, Mr. Hendrickson subordinates the social critic in favor of the cultural anthropologist: His exhaustive field work traces an inexplicable animosity across four generations and complex cultural attitudes toward race.

The book's first chapter is about the man in the center of the picture, William T. (Billy) Ferrell, sheriff of Natchez, Miss., during the ugly apex of the civil-rights struggle, a violent roughneck who may or may not have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Hendrickson visits Ferrell a year before his death in 1997, and finds an infirm retiree struggling to tamp down the ignoble resentments that made him one of the most vicious racist cops of his era. "When the words 'Robert F. Kennedy' arose, Billy said … '-I couldn't stand that little snivelly-nosed sonofabitch.' He didn't like either Kennedy, but the younger brother, the attorney general, had always ticked him off royal. Bobby was a pissant feather-weight. And then he quickly apologized for saying these things. He apologized almost in a formally comic way." This is the crooked face of Southern redemption, a reluctant atonement for past sins, and Mr. Hendrickson encounters it time and again during his travels.

As he carefully pieces together the lives of the other sheriffs both living and deceased, he encounters a curious disconnect between perception and reality. This is the South of masks and subterfuge, and many layers of complexity. James Grimsley, the man with the pugilist pose, worked as a manager of a Long John Silver's franchise during the final years of his life, employing both black and white workers who speak of him as compassionate and kind. John Ed Cothran is another morally ambivalent case. The former sheriff of Greenwood, "one of the scariest and most hate-filled and race-contested sixties' Mississippi towns," Mr. Cothran also helped arrest Emmett Till's killers and testified against them. Mr. Cothran, like the others in the photo, was an informant for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a shadowy Mississippi organization whose mandate was to spy and inform on civil rights groups like SNCC and NAACP. The kind old men Mr. Hendrickson interviews were once the civic leaders of Southern racial oppression.

The most curious case of all is James Meredith, the man who ran a gauntlet of malice to integrate Ole Miss. Mr. Hendrickson, who devotes the middle section of the book to Mr. Meredith, has created a definitive portrait of this maddeningly inscrutable civil-rights icon. The sheer cognitive dissonance of the man's life is enough to tie any biographer in knots. How does one reconcile Mr. Meredith's bravery in the face of state-sponsored bigotry with his decision to work for Jesse Helms or campaign on behalf of David Duke's Presidential bid? As a law-school student at Columbia, Mr. Meredith got himself nominated on the Republican ticket to run against Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, until Jackie Robinson convinced him to withdraw. In 1967, he supported the gubernatorial re-election campaign of Ross Barnett, who did everything in his power to block Mr. Meredith's admission into Ole Miss. Years later, Mr. Meredith proclaimed himself the most important African-American figure in the country, and told Mr. Hendrickson that "race is no longer a significant factor in politics in America."

Mr. Meredith is the book's tragic figure-a man, according to Mr. Hendrickson, whose psychic fragmentation was exacerbated by the shattering events at Ole Miss. "The cruelty of the ordeal at Ole Miss got welded onto the already mystical-messianic temperament," he writes, "and what resulted, in the long after-years, was a life no one has been able to decode, not least the man himself." This is one of the great conundrums of the Jim Crow South: Even the heroes of the civil-rights movement can't be ennobled in a pleasing way. There are far too many shades of gray.

In the last third of the book, Mr. Hendrickson confirms that at least some of the sins of the fathers are passed down through the generations. He encounters John (J.J.) Cothran Jr., a manager at Home Depot who writes love poetry and has numerous friendships with black co-workers, yet feels that "we have blacks in Mississippi, and we have some niggers in Mississippi." James Meredith's children go in opposite directions: One gets an M.B.A. and becomes an academic, the other gets a year's house arrest for a fatal car accident. Mr. Meredith's fragmented life, it seems, has taken root in his offspring. Meanwhile, Adams County, Miss., sheriff Tommy Ferrell, Billy's boy, becomes president of the National Sheriff's Association, despite having a framed picture of a K.K.K. co-founder hanging in his office.

Mississippi'sinstitutionalized racism was so endemic to the culture that it never really went away, no matter how willful the forgetting. Instead of receding with time, it was swept up in the currents of history and continues to circulate even now. As Paul Hendrickson eloquently illustrates, Mississippi's demon agents of Jim Crow were also the victims of the uncontrollable social forces, and the fear of being cast out of the state's closed society shamed many of them into silence and complicity. That failure of nerve is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

Marc Weingarten is writing a book about journalism in the 1960's and 70's.