Kagan, a professor of classics and history at Yale, has distilled his four-volume history (and other scholarship on 5th-century B.C. Greece), into this single, magnificent book. With excellent, well-integrated maps. A popular writer as well as a scholar, Kagan succeeds admirably in his aim to offer both pleasure and wisdom in this wise account. He draws on Thucydides, Aristotle, and other lesser-known contemporaries in illuminating the 30-year war between Athens and Sparta  (GRE183, $17.00)