"A Hero of Two Worlds" is a book of sweeping historical fiction set in Rome in the early 1860s, when the great fight to transform the Italian peninsula into a country was raging. It traces the life of a young American sculptor named Rufus Trask from his arrival there in 1847 to his soldiering in the Union Army in the American Civil War sixteen years later. The story offers a rich portrait of life in Rome's American expatriate community, teeming with talented artists and louche flaneurs, intrigue and illicit affairs. It also plumbs Trask's double life as a carefree American devoted to his...