skopia
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.
The marble Washington was a performance: Chernow finds a man of hot temper, sharp ambition, and constant calculation underneath, and follows him from surveying to Mount Vernon's slave quarters to the presidency.
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.
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.
Having written six volumes of Churchill's official biography, Gilbert put the whole life into one book, from the cavalry charge at Omdurman to 1965, drawing on twenty years inside the papers.
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.
A minor German princess arrives in Russia at fourteen, deposes her husband eighteen years later, and rules for thirty-four. Massie writes her from the inside, drawing on her own candid memoirs.
Hitler kept lazy hours and rarely issued a written order. Kershaw explains the machine anyway: officials across Germany competing to anticipate what the Führer wanted, radicalizing policy from below into genocide.
Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, Hamilton reached New York at seventeen, wrote most of the Federalist Papers, and built American finance. Chernow drives it all toward the duel.