Charles Cerami has been labeled bycritics as a popular historian and an author whose cinematic, you-are-therenarrative style, more than his scholarship, has made best sellers out of hisprevious works, Jefferson’s Great Gamble and YoungPatriots. So one could be forgiven forexpecting Cerami’s newest book, Dinnerat Mr. Jefferson’s (Wiley, $26), to be more of a crossbetween the History Channel andthe Food Network than a straight history tome, especially given the promisesmade in the subtitle, Three Men, Five Great Wines,and the Evening that Changed America.

Ah, but promises, promises. The wines and the evening get extremely shortshrift — just one chapter, a mere 13 pages among 288. But as for the three men —Republicans Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and their rival , FederalistAlexander Hamilton — Cerami delivers soundly. He knows these men well, havingwritten extensively about them in his previous works, and confidently sets themin motion here. At times, it’s an unforgiving portrayal of their roles in whathistorians call the dinner-table bargain.

Far from being a chicken-or-beefquandary, the dinner-table bargain of June 1790 was an act of brilliantgamesmanship, one that held together the fragile, two-year-old United States.At issue were the location of the nation’s permanent capital and Hamilton’s proposal tohave the federal government assume the existing debts of all 13 states,consolidating them with the federal debt. The compromise? To appease powerfulVirginians, who saw the debt consolidation as a loss of state power, thecapital would be carved out of Virginiaswampland along the Potomac River.

Though theissues are old, Cerami’s take on them isn’t. A former foreign-affairs editor atthe high-dollar newsletter service KiplingerWashington Editors, Cerami seems to view his subjectsthrough a current-events filter, with an eye for parallels between the politicspracticed by our Founding Fathers and the politics perpetrated by their progenytoday. Credit crises, illicit affairs, and party battles fought in the pressmay be found in stories ripped from today’s headlines, but Cerami has takenthem from the annals of history instead and shown how these men handled suchcrises — not from atop pedestals and podiums but around the dinner table.

Drink Up

Thomas Jefferson didn’t leave notes onwhat he served to eat and drink on the evening of the dinner-table bargain, thenight that inspired Charles Cerami’s book. But Cerami offers several educated guessesas to what might have been available , based on what the author of theDeclaration of Independence had been known to drink. All these wines would makeexcellent choices for your next important gathering.

 • A 1786 Bordeauxfrom Graves, France . Today, the 2005 Bordeaux vintage is allthe rage in wine circles. But it’s still too young to drink. The 1786, on theother hand, is probably ready.

• A Montepulciano, from Tuscany,Italy.It was once declared the king of all wines, and the best versions today arelabeled Vino Nobile diMontepulciano. A very differentwine, one carrying a similar name but a cheaper price tag, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo,is made in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

• A non-mousseux (meaning still, not sparkling) white winefrom Champagne, France. This would be an uncommonfind on Stateside wine lists today.

In all, only six pages are devoted to thewines and courses served that night. In an appendix, Cerami includes sixrecipes from a modern book called Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance, but only half of those recipes were writtenin Jefferson’s own hand.

Decoder King

You may not know her name, but you’lllove what Edith Grossman can do with a Spanish book. By J.D. Reid

If not for thosenameless book translators, we’d have to learn a whole lot of languages in orderto be able to enjoy classic works of fiction. Greek for The Odyssey. Russian for War and Peace. British for Shakespeare. It’s a frighteningthought.

Luckily, translators like Edith Grossman make it easy on us. Grossmanwas widely praised in literary circles for her 2003 translation of Don Quixote. Harold Bloom even called Grossman “theGlenn Gould of translators,” which would be pretty meaningful to you if you’dever heard of any of these people. The bottom line is: Grossman is good. Shenot only translates words from one language to another, she also ably capturesthe original author’s voice in her translations. That’s the case again — so I’mtold — with Grossman’s latest Spanish-to-English project, Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Modern Library, $15), which is out in paperback this month.

Nada is as classic in Spainas the rain is on the plain. The book won the Premio Nadal and the PremioFastenrath de la Real Academia Española, which are prizes that have very prettySpanish names. Laforet wrote the book when in her early 20s, and it tells acoming-of-age tale of Andrea, a young woman who moves in with relatives in Barcelona just after theSpanish Civil War. Andrea has to live with an ever-present cast of vicious andbitter characters — an eccentric has-been violinist, a violent uncle, a sneakygambler, a religious nut, a grandmother, a baby, and a parrot. Just how do youcome of age when your relatives linger over your shoulder at all times? Betteryet, how do you respond when someone says, “If I’d gotten hold of you when youwere younger, I’d have beaten you to death”?

It’s a thinker. But , by puttingthe story into words we can understand, Grossman has made some of the thinking easyon us.