Best History Books

The definitive account of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty behind OxyContin, and their role in creating and perpetuating the opioid crisis.

The diary kept by a Jewish teenager hiding in a secret annex in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands — the most widely read personal account of the Holocaust.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, one of America's most consequential and underestimated presidents.

A searing analysis of America's unspoken caste system, comparing it to India's caste system and Nazi Germany's racial hierarchy to illuminate the structural foundations of inequality.

David McCullough tells the gripping story of two self-taught bicycle mechanics from Dayton who changed the world by inventing powered flight.

Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has ever happened, from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation — written with his characteristic wit and warmth.

The story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, told through the abduction and murder of Jean McConville and the lives of IRA members Dolours Price and Gerry Adams.

The epic story of the Great Migration — the decades-long exodus of six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer — its origins, treatments, and future — told through the stories of patients, scientists, and physicians across centuries.

James Gleick chronicles the birth of chaos theory and the scientists who discovered that randomness and disorder follow surprising mathematical patterns.

A rich biography of history's greatest creative genius, based on Leonardo's notebooks and the latest scholarship, exploring the intersection of art and science that defined his work.

A comprehensive history of the gene from Mendel's peas to CRISPR — and a searching investigation of what our growing power over the genome means for humanity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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