LANSING -- G. Mennen Williams was a bitterly disappointed man after John F. Kennedy’s election in November 1960.

The ambitious Michigan governor, who had hoped to become president himself or, failing that, at least a member Kennedy’s Cabinet, had been tossed a conciliatory bone, assistant secretary of State for Africa. That would make him head of what biographer Thomas Noer called a “traditionally minor agency in the State Department.”

Williams, only the second Democratic governor since the Civil War, distrusted the new president’s commitment to liberalism and felt Kennedy “favored pragmatism over principle,” Noer writes.

But Williams had few alternatives because he’d already pledged not to seek reelection in Lansing. He accepted Kennedy’s offer and performed with enthusiasm and flamboyance, according to Noer.

He later served as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and eventually returned home, only to lose a U.S. Senate race but win 16 years on the state Supreme Court, including a stint as chief justice.

Noer tells the tale in the smoothly written “Soapy” (University of Michigan Press, $35), which sets out Williams’ life and career into the context of state and national politics. The title reflects the nickname Williams received because his mother’s family owned the Mennen Cosmetics Co.

Despite his wealth and privilege, he believed government owed a duty to improve society and the lives of the people, a political philosophy that underscored his initiatives in public education, social services and civil rights. He had successes and defeats, and Noer suggests that some legislative defeats were largely of his own making.

“Unlike most of his Democratic contemporaries, Williams rejected the necessity of compromise and pragmatism,” he writes. “His refusal to adjust to the political realities of Michigan left his ideology undiluted but his concrete achievements limited.”

And that experience may offer a lesson for  ideologically narrow politicians on both ends of today’s spectrum.

If Williams was a landmark of Michigan’s political landscape for decades, stellar buildings such as the Belle Isle Conservancy, Detroit Public Library and Fox Theatre are landmarks of its urban landscape.

Robert Sharoff describes those and other major buildings, while photographer William Zbaren shows them, in their new “American City: Detroit Architecture, 1845-2005” (Wayne State University Press, $60).

That story began in 1701 when the earliest French settlers built Detroit’s first building, Ste. Anne’s Church. It evolved a century later when Judge Augustus Woodward proposed a new urban plan after a fire wiped the city out in 1805. Its architecture eventually encompassed a range of styles.

Their book even finds a silver lining to the more recent precipitous drop in Detroit’s population and tax base: “The decline resulted in the downtown remaining more or less intact at a time when other cities were losing historically significant structures on a pell-mell basis due to the rush of new development.

“The result is that today Detroit has one of the highest concentrations of excellent buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries of any American city.”

Visitors, commuters and residents alike can see the evidence in such cultural gems as Belle Isle Conservatory and Orchestra Hall and such office buildings as the Buhl and the Penobscot.

As Sharoff and Zbaren show and tell, they can also see modern structures that enrich the city’s physical scene, including the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Renaissance Center.