My favorite books

I have spent a lifetime reading books and they have been a source of joy, inspiration, intellectual challenge, and emotional growth for me. I can think of few greater gifts to convey to my children and grandchildren (and anybody else who views this list) than to share the books that have meant the most to me. This is a work in progress and I will be adding to it over time … until I run out of time!

It is obvious at a glance that I have a strong preference for non-fiction, which has been true from my teen years onward. (That’s at least partly due to a childhood pal who turned me on to Barbara W. Tuchman, one of the greatest popular historians of our time.) I have, however, read many beautiful and moving works of fiction and I don’t mean to shortchange the magic of entering imaginary worlds that only fiction can provide.

I give credit to my parents, both avid readers in their day, and especially to my Aunt Kathryn, who was a career-long librarian in Hennepin County, Minnesota. My inclusion of the sentimental favorites of “Black Beauty” and “Stuart Little” are nods to gifts she sent me as a young reader. I am also grateful for the many times that Kathryn gave me the ALA’s banned books list and exhorted me to “read as many as you can.” She hated the very idea of book-banning.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my list. I hope these books provide a roadmap of inspiration and exploration for many others long after I am gone.

Note: Any books that are underlined below are linked to further information and explanation. That too is a work in progress.

97 books ... and counting!

American Civil War

• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), by James M. McPherson
• A Stillness at Appomattox (1953), by Bruce Catton
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Biography and Memoir

• Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995), by Gitta Sereny
• Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife (2009), by Francine Prose
• Baldwin: A Love Story (2025), by Nicholas Boggs
• Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), by Andrew Roberts
• Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival (2025), by Stephen Greenblatt
• The Diana Chronicles (2007), by Tina Brown
• The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), by Anne Frank
• Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost (2011), by Paul Hendrickson
• Hitler (2 volumes) (1999; 2000), by Ian Kershaw
• Nicholas and Alexandra (1967), by Robert K. Massie
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), by Robert A. Caro
• RFK: A Memoir (1969; 2003), by Jack Newfield
• Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above (1990), by Robert C. Tucker
• Stay True (2022), by Hua Hsu
• These Precious Days (2021), by Ann Patchett
• With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (1977), by Stephen B. Oates
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson (4 volumes) (1982; 1990; 2002; 2012), by Robert A. Caro

Civil Rights Era

• America in the King Years (3 volumes) (1988; 1998; 2006), by Taylor Branch
• The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (2024), by Wright Thompson

Fiction and Poetry

• 1984 (or Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1949), by George Orwell
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), by Mark Twain
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), by Arthur Conan Doyle
• American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945), by George Orwell
• Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse (1877), by Anna Sewell
• The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1965), by Wilfred Owen
• Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler
• Fatherland: A Novel (1992), by Robert Harris
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), by Arthur Conan Doyle
• John of John (2026), by Douglas Stuart
• Little Big Man: A Novel (1964), by Thomas Berger
• The MANIAC (2023), by Benjamin Labatut
• Maus (2 volumes) (1986; 1991), by Art Spiegelman
• Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), by Herman Melville
• The Plot Against America (2004), by Philip Roth
• Sophie’s Choice (1979), by William Styron
• Stuart Little (1945), by E. B. White
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022), by Gabrielle Zevin
• The World According to Garp (1978), by John Irving

Holocaust

• The Drowned and the Saved (1986), by Primo Levi
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), by Hannah Arendt
• The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (1986), by Martin Gilbert
• Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1977), by Gitta Sereny
• The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), by Daniel Mendelsohn
• Man's Search for Meaning (1946), by Viktor E. Frankl
• Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution (1992), by Christopher R. Browning

Interwar and World War II

• Hiroshima (1946), by John Hersey
• Katyń: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth (2010), by Allen Paul
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), by Richard Rhodes
• No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front (1994), by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer
• Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (1971), by Barbara W. Tuchman

JFK Assassination

• Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (2005), by Gerald D. McKnight
• Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007), by David Talbot
• Conspiracy (1980), by Anthony Summers
• JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2008), by James W. Douglass
• The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know About the Assassination of JFK (1993), by Gaeton Fonzi
• Rush to Judgment (1966), by Mark Lane

Miscellaneous History

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970), by Dee Brown
• Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (2020), by Isabel Wilkerson
• Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985), by J. Anthony Lukas
• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021), by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995), by Alexander Stille
• King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), by Adam Hochschild
• Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993), by David Remnick
• A Night to Remember (1955), by Walter Lord
• The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (1977), by David McCullough
• A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996), by Orlando Figes
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018), by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (1984), by Evan S. Connell
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (2014), by Ben Macintyre
• Young Men and Fire (1992), by Norman Maclean

Music

• Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (2007), by Jonathan Gould
• Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994), by Peter Guralnick
• Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), by David Hajdu

Philosophy and Ethics

• The Fate of the Earth (1982), by Jonathan Schell
• The God Delusion (2006), by Richard Dawkins
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), by Christopher Hitchens
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), by Stephen Greenblatt
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), by Robert M. Pirsig

Science and Medicine

• The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), by Carl Sagan
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), by Rebecca Skloot
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018), by Stephen L. Brusatte
• Silent Spring (1962), by Rachel Carson
• The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (1996), by David Quammen

Vietnam Era

• The Best and the Brightest (1972), by David Halberstam
• A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), by Neil Sheehan
• Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (2012), by Fredrik Logevall
• The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (1996), by Paul Hendrickson
• Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett — Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (1995), by William Prochnau

World War I

• The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), by Paul Fussell
• The Guns of August (1962), by Barbara W. Tuchman
• The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1966), by Barbara W. Tuchman