Best History Books

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — and the legacy of slavery on the body, memory, and soul.

Joseph Heller's darkly comic masterpiece follows bombardier Yossarian through the absurdist bureaucracy of World War II, inventing the most important logical paradox of modern language.

Why did Europeans conquer the Americas, Africa, and Australia rather than the other way around? Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning answer overturns centuries of racial and cultural explanations: the answer lies in geography, agriculture, and the uneven distribution of domesticable plants and animals.

George Orwell's first-person account of fighting for the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War — the trenches outside Huesca, the revolutionary Barcelona of 1936, the May Days street fighting, the Stalinist suppression of the independent left, and his narrow escape from arrest and execution.

Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war masterpiece follows Billy Pilgrim, who has become 'unstuck in time' and moves non-linearly through his experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden and his later suburban American life.

James Gleick traces the history of information from African talking drums through Claude Shannon's information theory to the digital deluge of the modern age.

Steven Pinker's comprehensive argument that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress have dramatically improved the human condition — and why we should defend them.

Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the mysterious ivory trader Kurtz — and discovers the horror at the heart of European imperialism.

Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, the unelected master planner who shaped New York City for four decades and accumulated more power than any other American in the 20th century.

The definitive biography of Alexander Hamilton — orphan immigrant, Revolutionary War hero, first Secretary of the Treasury, and the Founding Father who built the American financial system.

Stephen Ambrose follows Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division from training through D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and the fall of Hitler's Eagle's Nest.

The epic story of Jean Valjean — ex-convict transformed by grace into a man of extraordinary goodness — pursued across decades by the implacable Inspector Javert.

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his journey from a Transkei village through law, activism, 27 years of imprisonment, and his emergence to lead South Africa's democratic transition.

Doris Kearns Goodwin examines Lincoln's political genius through the lens of the three rivals he defeated for the 1860 Republican nomination — whom he then appointed to his cabinet.

One of the most important American autobiographies ever written, chronicling Malcolm X's transformation from street criminal to international civil rights icon.

Edmond Dantès, wrongfully imprisoned for years, escapes with a vast fortune and reinvents himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to exact perfect revenge on those who betrayed him.

William Shirer's definitive account of Nazi Germany — from Hitler's birth to the Reich's collapse — written by a journalist who witnessed much of it firsthand.

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer, establish a democracy, and watch helplessly as the pigs gradually become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced.

David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams, the principled, irascible, and frequently underestimated second president of the United States.

From the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the 21st century, Harari traces the full sweep of human history, asking why our species conquered Earth while others failed.

A narrative history of the first month of World War I — August 1914 — tracing how Europe's powers stumbled into catastrophe through a combination of rigid military planning, diplomatic failure, and the momentum of mobilization.

The story of Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent in 1951 and became the most important biological materials in modern medical history — all while her family lived in poverty and ignorance of what had been done.

Michelle Alexander's landmark argument that mass incarceration is the newest system of racial caste control in America — the functional successor to Jim Crow laws and before them, slavery.

Erik Larson's account of Winston Churchill's first year as Prime Minister — May 1940 to May 1941 — when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany and Churchill forged a nation's will to endure.