Looking for the best history books to read?

Historical nonfiction has the power to bring the past into sharp focus, revealing its relevance and importance, and making it easier for us to grasp and memorize. The right history book can even make a celebrated hero feel like someone we’ve known our whole lives, or turn complex events into thrilling prose. In fact, I believe the best history books are equal parts educational and entertaining, which is the distinctive quality of the titles I’ve put together here for you today.

So, without further ado, here’s a list of the 5 best history books of all time that will both hold your attention and help you catch up on our world history.

1. “Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind” by Noah Yuval Harari 


Most history books cover only a specific period of history; it may be a single event, or a decade, a century at most. Sapiens, on the other hand, chose a completely different approach. Spanning the entire history of humankind, Sapiens manages to cover the last 70,000 years of human existence from the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century into less than 500 pages. With an insightful and clear voice, Harari, an Israeli historian, offers an interesting insight into what he believes were the 4 biggest breakthroughs in human history:

The Cognitive Revolution
The Agricultural Revolution
The unification of humankind
The Scientific Revolution

Noah Harari poses all the big questions. What makes us special? What makes us deadly? How it came to be that we completely dominated the earth? He also has some answers, but they’re not what you’d expect. Sapiens explores who we are, how we got here, and where we’re headed.

2. “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin


This easy-to-read biography uses amusing anecdotes to introduce history buffs to a very human Abraham Lincoln. Acclaimed historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin weaves an accurate tale as she follows the life of the 16th president of the United States from the early 1800s, through the Civil War until the tragedy of his assassination in 1865. The book portraits all the men who served with Lincon, as well as all the rivals he later managed to integrate into his cabinet, and analyzes them with great insights into their characters and visions.

More than anything, Team of Rivals is an in-depth study in leadership and managerial skills, so powerful that has apparently given Obama the model for his presidency. Goodwin’s bestseller is a meticulously researched and wonderfully written biography, full of humor and wisdom, and accessible even to the most casual reader.

3. “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” by William L. Shirer


Almost 50 years after its publication, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is still recognized as the definitive work on the Nazi regime. It is all here – the birth of Adolf Hitler, his rise to power in the 1920s, the weakness of the European powers, and then the war itself from Germany’s early successes to the eventual defeat.

The foreign correspondent William L. Shirer reported on the Nazis since 1925 and wrote the book after gaining access to a huge collection of documents captured by the Allie. We’re talking officials’ diaries, testimonies from the Nuremberg trials, private letters, the minutes of secret meetings. And because of Shirer’s proximity to the major players of the Third Reich, the book has an intimacy that sets it apart from the usual historical reports of events.

It is dense, detailed, powerful. It is also exhausting, overwhelming, and inevitably depressing, but it remains today the definitive record of one of the most upsetting chapters in the history of mankind.

4. “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn


They say that history is always written by the winners. Howard Zinn, American historian and political activist, tried to change that. In his bestseller that sold two million copies worldwide, Zinn tells a history not often seen in traditional books, which usually puts great emphasis on nations as a whole and illustrious men in high places. Instead, this book chronicles history from the perspective of the working-class people, Native Americans, slaves, the man who went off to actually fight wars, and the women who tried to keep going after losing them.

From Columbus’ expedition and the original sin of the Native Americans suppression, passing through President Bush’s “war on terror”, Zinn delivers insightful analysis of the most important events that shaped our present. It’s is not a simple American history textbook, but a brilliantly written portrait of the U.S. past through the lives of those too often overlooked.

5. “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford


In the West and the Middle East, the perception of Genghis Khan has always been strongly negative. And yet, in nearly every country he conquered, he brought new forms of cultural communication, developed trade, abolished torture, granted religious freedom, making his reign vastly more progressive than the ones of his European or Asian counterparts. With this beautifully written work of revisionist history, the cultural anthropologist Weatherford tries to present a different side of the ruler who created from scratch a modern empire. In order to do so, Weatherford carried meticulous research, exploring thousands of miles of what was once Mongol territory, gathers information from famous political scientists, and goes through original Mongolian documents.  

In the end, Weatherford manages to deliver a beautiful narrative of the rise and the influence of the figure of Genghis Khan, attributing also positive cultural effects to his rule.