'People of the Book' is set in the Thirty Years War, which began and still shapes our present system of world order. David Stacton's incomparable prose reveals how the treatises of scholars and the tactics of commanders so rarely comprehend the vagaries of the human condition. Stacton sets up a dual plot. One follows the fortunes of the Swedish King Gustavus Adophus, the other recounts the fate of an orphaned boy and his little sister who try to make their way across Germany from their ruined home to refuge with an imagined uncle.