2007

Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Tim Weiner reveals the story behind the CIA in this first definitive history of the organization. This book is based on over 50,000 documents, many from the CIA's own archives.

2006

Timothy Egan. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.

2005

Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking

Chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, while the couple's only daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock.

2004

Kevin Boyle. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Ossian Sweet, the grandson of a slave, made a successful life for himself and his family as a physician in Detroit in the 20s.  When he was indicted for murder, Clarence Darrow came to defend him - and his wife - in a case that helped ignite the struggle for civil rights.

2003

Carlos Eire. Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in readers lives when they are certain they have died--and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

2002

Robert Caro. Master of the Senate

This third installment of Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson" presents an unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works, how the U.S. Senate works, and how Johnson mastered both on his way to the presidency. Caro relates how Johnson broke southern control of Capitol Hill to pass the first civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction.

2001

Andrew Solomon. The Noonday Demon

With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, Solomon takes the reader on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets.

2000

Martahnial Philbrick. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

The true story behind Melville's masterpiece--a riveting tale of history and true-life adventure with new insights from a long-eyewitness account of the tragedy of the whaleship "Essex".

1999

John W. Dower. Embracing defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Dower examines the immediate aftermath of World War II. He draws on a wide range of Japanese sources to illuminate how the shattering defeat and six years of US military occupation affected every level of society in ways no one anticipated.

1998

Edward Ball. Slaves in the Family

Between 1698 and Emancipation, the Ball family of South Carolina owned 235 plantations and close to 4,000 slaves. Now"Slaves in the Family" tells the true story of the black and white families who lived side by side through 300 years of American history.

1997

Joseph J. Ellis. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Following his subject from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character.

1996

James Carroll. An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us

Joe Carroll was an Air Force lieutenant general who chose Vietnamese targets for American bombs. Joe's son James began adulthood by fulfilling his father's abandoned dream of joining the priesthood. But soon a father's hopes for his son -- and a son's peace with his father -- were ruined, yet another casualty of a war that changed America forever.

1995

Tina Rosenberg. The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism

Profiles the personal struggles of the people and leaders of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia as their nations endure the transition from a dictatorship system to popularly elected governments.

1994

Sherwin B. Nuland. How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

At once memoir and meditation, this timeless work explores how we die, examinaing the common roads to death, and describing some facets of death's multiplicity.

1993

Gore Vidal. United States: Essays, 1952-1992

In an anthology of more than one hundred essays, representing forty years of commentary, observations, and profiles, the iconoclastic author of Live from Golgotha shares his wit and wisdom on American politics, culture, literature, and personalities.

1992

Paul Monette. Becoming a Man: Half a Life

The author discusses his childhood during the 1950s, the tortures of concealing his homosexuality, the bigotry he has encountered, and much more.

1991

Orlando Patterson. Freedom

1990

Ron Chernow. The House of Morgan

Tells the rich, panoramic story of four generations of Morgans and the powerful, secretive firms they spawned.

1989

Thomas L. Friedman. From Beirut to Jerusalem

The seminal study of the Middle East conflict.

1988

Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.

1987

Richard Rhodes. The Making of the Atomic Bomb

A gripping, authoritative account of the men, women, science, drama and intrigue behind the single most important event of the century: the discovery of nuclear energy and construction of the atomic bomb.

1986

Barry Lopez. Arctic Dreams

A passionate tour of the Arctic landscape covers such topics as the aurora borealis, polar bears, killer whales, migrating icebergs, the region's indigenous people, and the author's spiritual experiences there.

1985

J. Anthony Lucas. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

1984

Robert V. Remini. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-45, Vol. 5

Covers Jackson's reelection to the presidency and the weighty issues with which he was faced: the nullification crisis, the tragic removal of the Indians beyond the Mississippi River, the mounting violence throughout the country over slavery, and the tortuous efforts to win the annexation of Texas.

1983

Fox Butterfield. China: Alive in the Bitter Sea

An overview of the political turmoil and tragedy of the cultural revolution.

1982

Tracy Kidder. The Soul of a New Machine

Data General was in danger of losing its edge in the high technology war. Thirty wiz kids--design engineers--were given the job of building a computer more advanced than anything that then existed--and under an absolutely impossible deadline.

1981

Maxine Hong Kingston. China Men

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

1980

Tom Wolfe. The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff.  It's the quality beyond bravery, beyond courage.  It's men like Chuck Yeager, the greatest  test pilot of all and the fastest man on earth.  Pete Conrad, who almost laughed himself out of the running.  Gus Grissom, who almost lost it when his capsule sank.  John Glenn, the only space traveler whose apple-pie image wasn't a lie.

1979

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Robert Kennedy and His Times

Schlesinger's account vividly recalls the forces that shaped Robert Kennedy, from his position as the third son of a powerful Irish Catholic political clan to his concern for issues of social justice in the turbulent 1960s.

1978

Walter Jackson Bate. Samuel Johnson

1977

Bruno Bettleheim. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

1976

Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory

Fussell's landmark study of World War I remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world.

1975

Richard B. Sewall. The Life of Emily Dickinson

How did Emily Dickinson , from the small window over her desk, come to see a life that included the horror, exaltation and humor that lives her poetry? With abundance and impartiality, Sewall shows us not just the poet nor the poetry, but the woman and her life.

1974

Lewis Thomas. The Lives of a Cell

1973

Frances Fitzgerald. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

This landmark work, based on Frances FitzGerald's own research and travels, takes us inside Vietnam -- into the traditional, ancestor-worshiping villages and the corrupt crowded cities, into the conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists, Catholics and Buddhists, generals and monks -- and reveals the country as seen through Vietnamese eyes.

1972

Joseph P. Lash. Eleanor and Franklin

1971

James MacGregor Burns. Roosevelt, The Soldier of Freedom

The concluding volume of the first complete biography of FDR, 1940-1945.

1970

Lillian Hellman. An Unfinished Woman, a Memoir

An Unfinished Woman is a rich, surprising, emotionally charged portrait of a bygone world -- and of an independent-minded woman coming into her own.

1969

Norman Mailer. The Armies of the Night

1968

Jonathan Kozol. Death at an Early Age

1967

Justin Kaplan. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

1966

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

As special assistant to the president, Arthur Schlesinger witnessed firsthand the politics and personalities that influenced the now legendary Kennedy administration. Schlesinger"s close relationship with JFK, as a politician and as a friend, has resulted in this authoritative yet intimate account.

1965

Louis Fisher. The Life of Lenin

1964

Aileen Ward. John Keats: The Making of a Poet

1963

Leon Edel. Henry James, Vol. 2 & 3

1962

Lewis Mumford. The City in History

1961

William L. Shirer. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer's monumental study of Hitler's German Empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of this century's blackest hours. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic.

1960

Richard Ellman. James Joyce

1959

J. Christopher Herold. Mistress to an Age

1958

Catherine Drinker Bowen. The Lion and the Throne

1957

George F. Kennan. Russia Leaves the War

1956

Herbert Kubly. An American in Italy

1955

Joseph Wood Krutch. The Measure of a Man

1953

Richard DeVoto. Course of Empire

1952

Rachel Carson. The Sea Around Us

Here is the strange story of the seas - how they were born, how life emerged from them, and the marine world within them. Rachel Carson's writing teems with images - the newly-formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky; volcanic action throwing up huge masses on the ocean floor to create immense mountains and desolate canyons; giant squid battling sperm-whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface.

1951

Newton Arvin. Herman Melville

Newton Arvin's eminently readable biography beautifully captures the troubled, often reclusive man whose major works include Typee, Omoo, Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy Budd, and his indisputable masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

1950

Ralph L. Rusk. Ralph Waldo Emerson