The best books that make history live and breathe

I have read many military diaries in my research on World War II, and none are more enthralling than this. Lieutenant General Alan Brooke (Colonel Shrapnel, a subordinate called him) was Britain’s complicated Chief of the Imperial General Staff from November 1941 through the final victory.

From cover to cover, the diary he kept in the form of a chat with his wife – “My evening talk with you on paper” – enlightened and often moved me with Brooke’s unique insights about the perilous course of the war and his intimate, unfiltered observations and typically caustic opinions about his legendary British, French, and American colleagues, Winston Churchill memorably among them.

I know of no more candid, heartfelt exposure of the burdens, rewards, and personal challenges of high command in wartime.

A longtime diet of tasty historical novels having left me entertained and lazy, my first look at volume one of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who rose to precarious power as King Henry VIII’s ruthless fixer and lost his head for his trouble, was not a case of love at first sight.

It is not a passive read. For me, it took a second trip to Chapter One to discover that Wolf Hall is a work of art. Given the focus it deserves, it brings to vivid life a terrifying world of 16th-century intrigue and proto-totalitarianism, densely populated with scheming complex characters and treacherous maneuvers.

I found it artfully wrought, beautifully written, worthy of its Booker Prize, and brewed to be sipped, not gulped.

The perfect Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson film Remains of the Day is faithfully based on the brilliant Booker Prize winning novel of the same name by a Japanese-British Nobel Prize winner.

Set in the English mansion of a rich American expatriate, narrated by his deluded and repressed British butler, the book tells the story of German and British influencers who gather in the late 1930s in an effort to help avert war, genuine in the case of the wishfully thinking British, pretended in the case of the calculating Germans.

Its captivating prose kept me glued to the page, its fascinating characters and their hidden thoughts and motives even more so. I read it on an ocean cruise and all but ignored the ocean. 

I have read many excellent books about World War Two, but none has kept me shaking my head in awe like this stunning account of the decisive US bombing campaign against Germany. Masters of the Air is an intensely personal account of the impossibly brave men and boys – for boys they often were – who bombed Nazi Germany into defeat.

Most of them by far were wounded, killed, or imprisoned, often in appalling conditions, after bailing out of plunging aircraft. It is hard to imagine a more moving account of tenacious courage and unimaginable stress or a more thorough, intriguing presentation of the air war over Germany.

I could not get enough of this vivid, inspiring book.

In researching and writing my book about our third president, I revisited Jon Meacham’s masterly portrait of the man and rediscovered its many rewards, steeped as it is in the subtleties of Jefferson’s character, the brilliance of his mind, and his unsurpassed contributions to our country’s democratic foundations, despite his disappointing flaws and missed opportunities.

I have always found Meacham’s peerless prose and storytelling skills a worthy match for his perceptive insights. If I could recommend just one book about Jefferson (excluding my own, of which I have positive opinions), it would be his.