Lincoln
1995 · 714 pages
The standard one-volume Lincoln, and the method is severe: Donald allows him only the information he actually had when he acted. Out of it comes colossal ambition joined to a fatalist's passivity.
★ 5.9
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.
John Adams
2001 · 751 pages
McCullough gives the difficult, honest second president his full size: a marriage to Abigail conducted in letters across an ocean, and a friendship with Jefferson that broke and was repaired in old age.
★ 5.9
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
1979 · 920 pages
An asthmatic Manhattan boy remakes himself as a Dakota rancher, a Rough Rider, and the youngest president in American history. Morris swept the major prizes for this volume alone.
★ 6.0
The American Political Tradition
1948 · 560 pages
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
★ 6.5
The Passage of Power
The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV
2012 · 712 pages
Three years of humiliation as Kennedy's vice president, then Dallas, and Johnson seizes a stunned government. Caro tracks it week by week to the civil rights bill the South had blocked for decades.
★ 6.7
The Best and the Brightest
1972 · 688 pages
The men who walked America into Vietnam were the most credentialed in Washington, and Halberstam shows how their brilliance became the problem. He reconstructs the meetings and memos that made escalation feel reasonable.
★ 7.0