Best History Books

A sweeping vision of humanity's future as Homo sapiens pursues the ancient goals of immortality, bliss, and divinity — and what we risk losing in the process.

The ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu, comprising thirteen chapters on military strategy that have been applied to business, law, sports, and competitive endeavors for 2,500 years.

A financial history of the world, tracing the evolution of money, banking, bonds, stocks, insurance, and real estate from ancient civilisations to the 2008 crisis.

David Grann investigates the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for an ancient lost civilization he called Z.

The definitive account of the 1929 stock market crash — the speculative bubble, the collapse, and the economic consequences that shaped modern financial regulation.

Herodotus's account of the Greco-Persian Wars — from Croesus of Lydia through the Persian invasions of Greece, culminating in Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Along the way, extensive digressions on Egypt, Scythia, Babylon, and the customs of peoples across the known world.

Drawing on fifty years of fieldwork in New Guinea, Jared Diamond examines what traditional societies — in conflict resolution, child-rearing, diet, aging, multilingualism, and religion — can teach the modern world, and what we have lost in the transition to state societies.

Twenty-one meditations on pressing questions of our time — from artificial intelligence and political disillusionment to terrorism, nationalism, and the challenge of staying sane in the information age.

Mark Adams travels the world in search of the lost city of Atlantis — interviewing scholars, crackpots, archaeologists, and believers — in a witty and surprisingly serious investigation of one of history's most persistent myths.