It used to be that religion served, at least in theory, to make people act in civilized ways and to sublimate their more barbarous instincts. Once, the hope of heaven and the terror of hellfire were the carrot and stick meant to keep humankind trudging along the otherwise unrewarding path of virtue. But now that we're all home reading memoirs and autobiographical novels during those lazy hours that in the past were more profitably passed in our chosen house of worship, a different sort of apprehension–far more daunting than the threat of burning lakes and pitchfork-wielding demons–has taken over the thankless task of making us tread the straight and narrow. Now, what keeps us honest, or in any case more pleasant than we normally might be, is the understandable anxiety that someone (perhaps even our own beloved children) may someday write a book about us–a book in which our unconscionable behavior and bad manners are exposed for the delight and delectation of the whole harsh world of readers.

Regarded in that light, Rebecca Chace's first novel, Capture the Flag , functions more or less like Jonathan Edwards' famously harrowing sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Ms. Chace, whose well-received Chautauqua Summer described her experience as a trapeze artist with the Flying Karamazov Brothers, is the daughter of a distinguished New York literary lineage. Her father is the writer, editor and political theorist James Chace, her mother the poet Jean Valentine. And though it's impossible and, in any case, beside the point for the casual reader to ascertain how much of Ms. Chace's fiction has been taken, as they say, from life, what's undeniable is that she has faithfully rendered the foibles and failings of her own and her parents' generation: the volatile chemistry of love and self-interest, nurture and neglect, freedom and responsibility that caused Ms. Chace and her contemporaries (the novel is set in the 1970's) to grow up in a most peculiar limbo–half-indulged, half-feral.

The eponymous game that lends structure and provides the (perhaps too) dominant motif for Capture the Flag is the yearly ritual that the Edwards family and the marvelously named Shanlick-Masons play on the latter's farm in upstate New York. As one might expect, a good deal more is at stake–matters of sex and competition, loyalty and tradition–than the white T-shirts that serve as the trophies in a contest that is way more expansive, elaborate and fiercely Darwinian than most of us will remember from our vague meanderings about the schoolyard. As the children grow older and their parents' marriages falter and crumble under the pressures of personal dissatisfaction and their artist-intellectual subculture's rather touchingly dorky version of the swinging 70's, the question of whether the game will survive–and who will continue to play it–becomes a metaphor for inchoate longings and more palpable confusions.

Ms. Chace's protagonist is the sympathetic and chronically bewildered Annie Edwards, who is 11 when we first meet her, face blackened with grease paint, racing over the fields and through the forests as she searches for the elusive flag–and finds, instead, a bewildering and troubling sexual encounter with Justin Mason, the adolescent stepson of her father's best friend. Ms. Chace is good at depicting the ways in which children comprehend absolutely everything and absolutely nothing, a skill that serves her well as Annie tries to unravel the mysteries of the adult life around her. Why does her mother keep abruptly disappearing for unscheduled vacations–"All anyone would say was that Ellen was in the hospital because she needed a rest"–at an upscale Westchester loony bin? Why does her father grab the ass of that strange woman at the Shanlick-Masons' New Year's Eve loft party? What heady tensions and forbidden attachments connect the Shanlick-Masons–a notably darker and more sexed-up SoHo version of the Brady Bunch–a family that boasts the most heavily freighted and highly charged sibling situation since Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles ?

While the adults' attention is so obviously focused elsewhere, Annie–like the young Shanlick-Masons–is left pretty much on her own to navigate the mean streets and meaner private schools of Manhattan. By necessity an autodidact, Annie learns about drugs and sex at an alarmingly early age. ("By the middle of eighth grade she had figured out that if you stayed with one guy for a while you weren't a slut no matter what you did with him–and somehow everyone knew what everyone else did as soon as it happened. If you switched boyfriends a lot, and went all the way with them, then you were a slut and nobody would like you–even the boys. When the boy with whom she had lost her virginity broke up with her she was heartbroken for about two weeks.") And after a series of bruising and painfully offhand relationships with boys, Annie finds herself drawn into a relatively sweet affair with one of the fascinating Shanlick-Mason sisters.

Though Ms. Chace writes with a great deal of compassion and sympathy for her novel's soi-disant grown-ups, the novel's final section makes it terrifyingly clear how little these preoccupied parents (kept understandably busy tracking the progress of their own divorces and remarriages) know about the secret lives of their kids. For all the privilege and sophistication with which these young New Yorkers are being raised, there's something terribly Dickensian about this kind of post-60's Manhattan childhood. Annie and her downtown friends are like updated Oliver Twists, attending unsupervised Upper East Side teen-sex parties, hefting six-packs and taking drugs, roaming the streets like little bands of Artful Dodgers.

Capture the Flag is not only an accurate portrait of two generations at a certain moment in Manhattan history, but a cautionary tale. The next time you catch yourself squabbling unattractively with your spouse or groping some stranger at a social occasion, it might be wise to remember: The little darlings are watching, and probably taking notes.

By force of intelligence, character and an uncommonly close partnership with President Harry Truman, Dean Acheson was 20th-century America's most powerful Secretary of State. He was also its greatest, in the eyes of many historians and commentators, because of his role in creating the institutions and relationships that revived the West after World War II and helped it prevail in the Cold War.

For young Americans, Acheson is a little recognized and underappreciated figure from those grim years a half-century ago when the devastation of world war and the expansion of Communism presented daunting challenges to the United States. In retrospect, America's response to those challenges comprised a golden age of U.S. diplomacy, and Acheson was the man of action behind key accomplishments. For those who have forgotten or have never known of Acheson's contributions, noted foreign policy analyst James Chace has written a stimulating, at times dramatic biography of this American giant.

Acheson was strong-minded and outspoken. Above all, he was decisive. He dressed like a British gentleman and wore a bristling mustache, attributes that were easy targets for his many virulent critics. I first experienced the sharp Acheson tongue during a 1961 tour d'horizon briefing in his Georgetown home. Along with other Congressional Fellows of that year, I sat on the floor of his study while the former Secretary of State presided from a high-backed chair. Impeccably tailored, cocktail in hand, Acheson gave a commanding critique of events and personalities, becoming ever more blunt as the session wore on and the second martini arrived. He ended with a scathing depiction of a fellow Democrat, Adlai Stevenson, who had distanced himself from the Truman-Acheson legacy during his two unsuccessful campaigns for the Presidency. In Acheson's opinion, Stevenson was wrongheaded and soft about most international challenges and disloyal, even duplicitous, in politics.

The son of Connecticut gentry, Acheson did not start out on a path to greatness. He was an underachieving, rebellious student at Groton prep school and at Yale College, a gay blade known mostly for his wit. He became a serious student only at Harvard Law School. He finished fifth in the class of 1918 after discovering "the power of thought" under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter, who became a lifelong friend and adviser.

After brief military service, Acheson was dispatched by Frankfurter to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. The eminent judge and his colleague, Oliver Wendell Holmes, joined Frankfurter in Acheson's pantheon of heroes. Later in life, Acheson added Gen. George C. Marshall to the select list of great men who shaped his life and thought.

In 1921, Acheson joined the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington and Burling, with which he would be associated throughout his life, in between tours of government service and after his time as Secretary of State. An ardent and active Democrat, he joined the Roosevelt Administration as Under Secretary of the Treasury in 1933 but was out of a job the next year after disagreeing with the President over the legality of a Government gold-buying plan. He remained a Roosevelt supporter, undertook several assignments for the Administration and publicly backed the President for a third term in the fall of 1940. By 1941, Acheson was back in government, this time as Assistant Secretary of State for economic affairs, where he was instrumental in forging and selling to Congress the Bretton Woods accords that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as the economic and financial underpinnings of the postwar world.

Before returning to private practice in 1947, Acheson rose to Under Secretary of State. He pushed to secure aid for Greece and Turkey to fight off Communist insurgencies; he pushed for Marshall Plan assistance to Europe for its economic recovery.

In 1949, he was tapped by Truman to succeed Marshall as Secretary of State. During his four-year tenure, he completed the building of key postwar international institutions: NATO, the Japan peace treaty and the security alliance between Japan and the United States all bear his imprint. In short, Acheson was more than Present at the Creation , the title of his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.

Despite his achievements, he was a lightning rod for political attacks more vicious than anything to be found in today's political culture. It was a time of tumultuous events-the Communist takeover of mainland China, the Korean War and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. In office and after, Acheson was a primary target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist demagoguery. In 1950, House Republicans unanimously voted in their party caucus for his removal from office, and their Senate counterparts concurred by a vote of 25 to 5.

The anti-Acheson tide among archconservative Republicans began flowing during the "Who lost China?" debate and crested with the sharp military reversal in the Korean War after the surprise intervention of Chinese troops. President Truman stuck by Acheson, who remained Truman's trusted adviser until Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency in 1952. Even after leaving office in January 1953, Acheson found himself so dogged by criticism and tainted by McCarthy's slurs that he had difficulty attracting legal clients. His wife remembered those years as a time when "people turned their backs" and "wouldn't speak to us."

Never one to suffer silently people he dismissed as "fools and self-serving blackguards," Acheson fought back, mainly with well-honed words. But on one occasion he had to be restrained by an aide during a committee hearing: He was on the point of landing a punch on the jaw of a baiting Republican senator.

With the passage of time and the election of John F. Kennedy, Acheson's ostracism ended. Once again, his advice was sought and his talents put to use in special assignments from Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. However, of all the chief executives he served in one capacity or another, only Truman remained an idol to him.

Mr. Chace makes good use of family diaries and letters to capture Acheson's vivid personality and confident intellect. To the familiar story of the era's great events, he adds fresh information from Russian and Chinese archives. In Mr. Chace's hands, the portrait of Acheson is respectful, discrete. The brusqueness and bursts of bitterness that marked Acheson's later years are presented without comment.

Mr. Chace's assessment of Acheson's professional decisions and political views are for the most part solidly conventional. But he is particularly acute when he dwells on the disparity between Acheson's pragmatic diplomacy, his tendency to seek limited objectives and his soaring rhetoric of universalizing threats. Being "clearer than truth," in Acheson's words, may have been necessary to gain Congressional and popular backing for such initiatives as aid to Greece and Turkey, or for a conventional arms buildup at the beginning of the Cold War. But as Mr. Chace observes, "these rhetorical devices laid the groundwork for an expansive American policy of global containment, which would be carried out by his successors."

Acheson was a benign hegemonist in the latter decades of his life. He grew increasingly skeptical of Europe's ability to evolve into a common political and economic polity and thereby to stand as a partner of the United States in global affairs. Late in life he concluded that "in the final analysis, the United States [is] the locomotive at the head of mankind, and the rest of the world the caboose." Compare that bon mot with a maxim from his earlier government years: "A balance of power has proved the best international sheriff we have ever had."

The United States is moving into an era when overlording, however well intentioned, sparks resistance from allies and adversaries alike. By political means, and in some cases by terrorist bombs, states and political movements are taking issue with what they see as American coercion.

Acheson's true legacy lies not in his latter-day pronouncements but in his actions from the great years of government service. With other statesmen of the time, he created the framework for the emergence of a prosperous and peaceful Western world able to best the Soviet threat without resorting to war. Mr. Chace's biography reminds us that the architecture for this success was put in place by Truman, Acheson and their associates.