Best History Books

Doris Kearns Goodwin examines four American presidents — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ — asking how they developed the qualities of leadership and how they deployed those qualities in moments of crisis.

Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of General Joseph Stilwell, through whose career she traces half a century of American policy toward China — and the folly of American assumptions about that country.

Barbara Tuchman examines four historical episodes in which governments pursued policies contrary to their own interests — from the Trojan Horse to the American war in Vietnam — asking why governments consistently act against reason.

Jared Diamond examines why some of the world's great civilizations collapsed while others survived, identifying five key factors — environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, lost trading partners, and societal response — that determine a society's fate.

An epic multigenerational saga tracing the rise of two Irish-Catholic Boston families — the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys — from immigrant poverty to the pinnacle of American political power.

Naomi Klein's investigation into how disaster capitalism exploits crises to implement radical free-market policies that could not survive democratic scrutiny in normal times.

Through the story of a young patient in Sierra Leone, John Green traces how tuberculosis shaped art, history, and injustice — and why a curable disease still kills more than a million people a year. A passionate, deeply human work of narrative nonfiction.

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.

Geneticist Adam Rutherford retells the human story through our genes. Drawing on the revolution in DNA sequencing, he explores migration, ancestry, race, and identity — debunking myths about genetic determinism and royal bloodlines while revealing how deeply and surprisingly interconnected all humans are.

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.

Thomas Paine's incendiary 1776 pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution. Written in plain, electrifying prose for ordinary readers, Common Sense made the radical case for American independence from Britain and for republican government, becoming one of the most influential political documents ever written.

Rebecca Solnit's wide-ranging history and philosophy of walking. From peripatetic philosophers and Romantic poets to pilgrims, protesters, and flâneurs, Solnit explores how walking has shaped thought, culture, politics, and the body — a discursive, erudite meditation on putting one foot in front of the other.

Marilynne K. Roach's vivid, illustrated account of the 1692 Salem witch trials. Drawing on deep archival research, it recreates the everyday world of colonial New England — its homes, beliefs, and fears — to illuminate how an ordinary community descended into the hysteria that condemned its own.

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.

Brian Muraresku's provocative investigation into the hidden history of psychedelics and Western religion. Across a twelve-year quest through archaeology, ancient languages, and secret archives, he argues that a psychedelic sacrament may lie at the origins of Greek mystery cults and early Christianity.