Best History Books

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

American volunteer Robert Jordan fights with Spanish guerrillas during the Civil War, assigned to blow a bridge — and falls in love with Maria in the three days before the mission.

The first book in Asimov's groundbreaking Foundation series, in which mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the fall of a galactic empire and sets in motion a thousand-year plan to preserve civilisation.

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.

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.

The Soviet Union has collapsed. Its former citizens—Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Tajiks—speak to Alexievich about what happened to their lives, their beliefs, and their understanding of happiness. Some grieve communism; some feel liberated; many feel lost. Alexievich's masterpiece and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize.

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.

The definitive account of the Soviet camp system: Solzhenitsyn's three-volume, seven-part history and personal testimony of the Gulag, drawing on 227 survivor testimonies gathered in secret over fifteen years. This abridged edition (authorized by Solzhenitsyn himself) brings the essential text to under 600 pages. One of the most important books of the twentieth century.

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.

A sweeping history of the digital revolution — from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, William Shockley, and the personal computer pioneers — arguing that the most important innovations were always the product of collaboration, not lone genius.

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.

Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp in India during World War II and, after a twenty-one-month crossing of the Himalayas, reaches Lhasa — where he becomes a tutor and friend to the young Dalai Lama as the Chinese invasion closes in.

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

In 1952, twenty-three-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set off on a motorcycle to travel the length of South America — a nine-month, 8,000-mile journey that transformed the future revolutionary's understanding of his continent.

Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan (1979-1989) returned home in zinc coffins or with wounds that could not be named. Alexievich interviews the survivors, the mothers, and the widows—recording a war that the Soviet state refused to acknowledge. 'Zinky boys' was soldiers' slang for the zinc-lined coffins the bodies came home in.

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.