Age of Ambition
2014 · 403 pages
Osnos spent eight years watching China chase fortune faster than its politics allowed, and tells it through a soldier who swam the strait to defect and a blind lawyer who escaped house arrest.
★ 4.8
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Lawrence in Arabia
2013 · 624 pages
Four amateurs shaped the modern Middle East, Anderson argues, and the strangest was Lawrence, an Oxford archaeologist who led an Arab revolt knowing his government had already promised the land away.
★ 5.7
The Cold War
A New History
2005 · 333 pages
Gaddis lays the war's origins at Stalin's door, shows how nuclear terror kept the peace it threatened, and treats the outcome as a moral verdict. Forty-five years of standoff in one commanding volume.
★ 5.8
The Prize
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
1991 · 928 pages
Oil is the story of the modern world, Yergin argues, and he follows it from the first Pennsylvania derrick through two world wars that ran on it to Saddam Hussein's tanks in Kuwait.
★ 6.4
Diplomacy
1994 · 912 pages
The fullest modern defense of power politics, written by a secretary of state who practiced it. Kissinger runs from Richelieu to the Cold War, insisting that order rests on balance, not moral aspiration.
★ 6.4
Postwar
2005 · 933 pages
Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
★ 7.6