2008

Saul Friedländer. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

This multifaceted study - at all levels and in different places - enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices - mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs - Saul Friedlander avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. ~Book jacket

2007

Lawrence Wright. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Explores both the American and Arab sides of the September 11th terrorist attacks in an account of the people, ideas, events, and intelligence failures that led to the attacks.

2006

Caroline Elkins. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya

Thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II, but just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu--some one and a half million people. The story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold, because of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence.

2005

Steve Coll. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Ghost Wars answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of September 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail?

2004

Anne Applebaum. Gulag: a History

Using new resources as well as her own original historical research, Ann Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

2003

Samantha Power. "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

Based on her study of various well publicized incidents of genocide during the 20th century, Power (human rights policy, Harvard U.) concludes that Americans are slow to respond to it, and that the battle to generate US government intervention is lost in the realm of domestic politics. She does not mention American Indians.

2002

Diane McWhorter. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

"The Year of Birmingham." 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and the events that brought about America's second emancipation.

2001

Herbert P Bix. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

In this biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world.

2000

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.

1999

John McPhee. Annals of the Former World

Collects several pieces which originally appeared in The New Yorker along with a new chapter, completing McPhee's 20-year geological exploration of a cross-section of North America. Traveling piecemeal along the 40th parallel, he explores the knowledge and personalities of his various companions.

1998

Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Diamond offers a convincing explanation of the way the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

1997

Richard Kluger. Ashes To Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris

A definitive history of America's controversial tobacco industry that focuses on Philip Morris traces the development of the cigarette, revelations of its toxicity, and the impact of political and corporate shenanigans on the battle over anti-smoking.

1996

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.

1995

Jonathan Weiner. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

The Beak of the Finch tells the story of two Princeton University scientists - evolutionary biologists - engaged in an extraordinary investigation. They are watching, and recording, evolution as it is occurring - now - among the very species of Galapagos finches that inspired Darwin's early musings on the origin of species.

1994

David Remnick. Lenin's Tomb

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.

1993

Garry Wills. Lincoln at Gettysburg

By examining both the Gettysburg Address and Abraham Lincoln in their historical monument and cultural frame, Wills reveals much about a President so mythologized but often misunderstood.

1992

Daniel Yergin. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Tells the history of oil-and the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil.

1991

Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson. The Ants

This landmark work, the distillation of a lifetime of research by the world's leading myrmecologists, is a thoroughgoing survey of one of the largest and most diverse groups of animals on the planet. Holldobler and Wilson review in exhaustive detail virtually all topics in the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of the ants.

1990

Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson. And Their Children After Them

1989

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.

1988

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.

1987

David K. Shipler. Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land

The Jew, according to the Arab stereotype, is a brutal, violent coward; the Arab, to the prejudiced Jew, is a primitive creature of animal vengeance and cruel desires. In this monumental work, revised and more relevant than ever, David Shipler delves into the origins of the prejudices that have been intensified by war, terrorism, nationalism, and the failure of the peace process.

1986

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

1985

Studs Terkel. The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two

Americans who were at home and abroad describe their lives during World War Two.

1984

Paul Starr. The Social Transformation of American Medicine

1983

Susan Sheehan. Is There No Place on Earth for Me

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

Carl E. Schorske. Fin-de Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

A landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time; a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born.

1980

Douglas R. Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Explores hierarchical systems, self-reference, and the cause of consciousness.

1979

Edward O. Wilson. On Human Nature

1978

Carl Sagan. The Dragons of Eden

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.

1977

William W. Warner. Beautiful Swimmers

1976

Robert N. Butler. Why Survive Being Old in America

1975

Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard writes in the form of a journal, trying to understand God by chronicling the seasons along Tinker Creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and by exploring the paradoxical coexistence of beauty and violence.

1974

Ernest Becker. The Denial of Death

1973

Francis FitzGerald. Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III, Robert Coles Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

1972

Barbara W. Tuchman. Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945

1971

John Toland. The Rising Sun: the Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

In his foreword, Toland calls "The Rising Sun" "a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened--muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox."

1970

Erik H. Erikson. Ghandhi's Truth

1969

Rene Jules Dubos. The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer So Human An Animal

1968

Will Durant and Ariel Durant. Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth and concluding volume of The Story of Civilization

This volume of the Story of Civilization traverses Europe, culminating in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the storming of the Bastille

1967

David Brion Davis. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture

1966

Edwin Way Teale. Wandering Through Winter

1965

Howard Mumford Jones. O Strange New World

1964

Richard Hofstadter. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

1963

Barbara W. Tuchman. The Guns of August

Author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't.

1962

Theodore H. White. The Making of the President 1960