Scouring sources for good history books for the list of all-time great history books, I was looking at the New York Times reviews, of course.
The list from the Times of “notable” history books just for 2006 is lengthy, and impressive. (The paper thoughtfully includes similar lists back to 1997.)
What do you think, Dear Reader? Are some of them worthy of the All-time list? (Notice that The Worst Hard Time is included in the list.)
History books listed below the fold.
From the New York Times‘ list of “100 Notable Books of the Year”:
AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. By Francis Fukuyama. (Yale University, $25.) Parting ways with fellow neocons, Fukuyama censures their blunders and those of the Bush administration, and offers advice for the future.
ANDREW CARNEGIE. By David Nasaw. (Penguin Press, $35.) Nasaw’s colorful biography reveals a far from conventional capitalist.
AT CANAAN’S EDGE: America in the King Years, 1965-68. By Taylor Branch. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) The third volume, remarkable for its breadth and detail, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s history of the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
AVA GARDNER: “Love Is Nothing.” By Lee Server. (St. Martin’s, $29.95.) A fond reckoning of her marriages, affairs, friendships and movies.
THE BLIND SIDE: Evolution of a Game. By Michael Lewis. (Norton, $24.95.) From the mean streets to salvation by football: a schoolboy’s story.
BLOOD AND THUNDER: An Epic of the American West. By Hampton Sides. (Doubleday, $26.95.) A history of this country’s brutal Westward expansion, with Kit Carson at its center.
CLEMENTE: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. By David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) A Pulitzer Prize winner whose previous subjects have included Vince Lombardi and Bill Clinton turns to baseball’s first Latino superstar.
THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. By Matthew Stewart. (Norton, $25.95.) An unlikely page-turner about a 17th-century metaphysical duel, fought in deceit and intrigue, that continues to this day.
THE DISCOMFORT ZONE: A Personal History. By Jonathan Franzen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) Essays by the author of “The Corrections” focus on formative experiences of his youth.
FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Memoir. By Danielle Trussoni. (Holt, $23.) With affection, respect and humor, a daughter tries to make sense of the demons her father brought home from the Vietcong’s subterranean labyrinth.
FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. By Thomas E. Ricks. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) A comprehensive account, by a veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, of how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency.
FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. By Elizabeth Kolbert. (Bloomsbury, $22.95.) A global tour of the evidence, with scientists the author meets along the way doing most of the talking.
FLAUBERT: A Biography. By Frederick Brown. (Little, Brown, $35.) The man behind “Madame Bovary” is brought to life as a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker.
THE GHOST MAP: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. By Steven Johnson. (Riverhead, $26.95.) How John Snow answered the riddle of cholera in 1854.
THE GREAT DELUGE: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. By Douglas Brinkley. (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $29.95.) A historian’s account of the horrors spawned by the infamous storm, many of them man-made.
THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. By Frank Rich. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) The Times columnist indicts the Bush administration’s approach to message management.
HAPPINESS: A History. By Darrin M. McMahon. (Atlantic Monthly, $27.50.) A tour of Western philosophy and its efforts to understand that sought-after yet most elusive of states.
IRAN AWAKENING: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope. By Shirin Ebadi with Azadeh Moaveni. (Random House, $24.95.) The Nobel laureate tells her life story, from growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran to taking on the authorities as a foremost defender of human rights.
JANE GOODALL: The Woman Who Redefined Man. By Dale Peterson. (Houghton Mifflin, $35.) A meticulous portrait of the pioneering researcher whose years of observing chimpanzees changed the way we see our fellow primates.
KATE: The Woman Who Was Hepburn. By William J. Mann. (Holt, $30.) Mann’s biography takes some complicated sexual algebra into account.
LEE MILLER: A Life. By Carolyn Burke. (Knopf, $35.) She was a muse to artists like Man Ray, and an artist herself, photographing the horror of war; that work, though, was ultimately her undoing.
THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) How a few men mounted a catastrophic assault on America, even as another group of men and women tried desperately to stop it.
THE LOST: A Search for Six of Six Million. By Daniel Mendelsohn. (HarperCollins, $27.95.) Grappling with the Holocaust in both its personal and geopolitical dimensions, Mendelsohn reconstructs the story of his great-uncle’s family.
MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. By Nathaniel Philbrick. (Viking, $29.95.) Philbrick’s vivid account of the earnest band of English men and women known as America’s founders offers perspectives of both the Pilgrims and the Indians.
THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. By Debby Applegate. (Doubleday, $27.95.) A rich portrait of the 19th-century Protestant reformer renowned for his preaching — and for an adultery scandal.
ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. By Peter Hessler. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) The New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent describes a country in constant motion and reveals its historical underpinning.
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN. By Rory Stewart. (Harvest/Harcourt, paper, $14.) The author recounts his walk across Afghanistan, in the dead of winter.
QUEEN OF FASHION: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. By Caroline Weber. (Holt, $27.50.) Weber suggests that the queen miscalculated in dressing to project an image of power.
REDEMPTION: The Last Battle of the Civil War. By Nicholas Lemann. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The story of the demise of Reconstruction in Mississippi, retold in all its terrible gore.
STATE OF DENIAL. By Bob Woodward. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Part 3 of the “Bush at War” cycle, by the longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, describes the inept conduct of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE. By Terri Jentz. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Jentz’s enraging account of her search for a maniac who viciously attacked her with an ax in 1977.
SWEET AND LOW: A Family Story. By Rich Cohen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A disinherited member of the Sweet’N Low clan digs up dirt.
TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond. By Pankaj Mishra. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) The struggle of ancient societies to define themselves as Western influences encroach.
UNCOMMON CARRIERS. By John McPhee. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) On-the-job portraits of men who drive big transport machines.
THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. By David Kamp. (Broadway, $26.) Personalities from Julia Child to Emeril Lagasse drive this lively history of the postwar revolution in American gastronomy.
THE WAR OF THE WORLD: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. By Niall Ferguson. (Penguin Press, $35.) A panoramic moral analysis of an age of military-industrial slaughter.
THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. By Timothy Egan. (Houghton Mifflin, $28.) What happened to those who stayed put in the 1930s while the very earth itself blew away.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 