Histories Worth Losing a Weekend To

Harari's big-picture history of Homo sapiens — from the cognitive revolution to the agricultural revolution to the digital revolution — is the kind of book that makes you look at a supermarket or a banknote and see something completely different. Some historians push back on the broad brushstrokes, but as an introduction to thinking historically about the human species, nothing in recent memory comes close.

Anne Frank's diary — written while she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944 — is the most widely read first-person account of the Holocaust and one of the most read books in history. Its intimacy is devastating: Anne is not a historical symbol in these pages but a teenager thinking about boys, writing, and the future she believed she would have.

Erik Larson interweaves two true stories from 1890s Chicago: the construction of the World's Fair and the murders of H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. Both narratives are extraordinary — one a story of visionary achievement against impossible odds, the other a story of how easily predators disappear in cities of strangers. Larson proved that history written like a thriller is still history.

Wilkerson spent 15 years researching the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — and tells it through the lives of three individuals. One of the great works of American narrative history: the intimacy of memoir combined with the scope of epic history.

Mary Beard's history of Rome refuses to be a parade of emperors and battles. Instead she asks what it was like to actually live in Rome — how citizens experienced the city, how power worked at street level, what people ate and worried about. Her accessible, irreverent style makes Rome feel not like a distant civilisation but a recognisable world full of recognisable anxieties.

Frankopan recentres world history away from its usual Europe-first axis, arguing that the Silk Roads connecting East and West were the true engine of human civilisation from antiquity to the present. The result is a history of the world that places Persia, China, and Central Asia at the centre of events that Western textbooks typically treat as peripheral or context-free.

Robert Caro's 1,300-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who shaped New York City for 50 years without ever winning an election — is the definitive study of political power in America. How does a man with no elected office accumulate more real authority than presidents? Caro's answer, built across thousands of interviews and documents, is the most important political education available in a single book.

Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the current mass extinction event — the sixth in Earth's history and the first caused by a single species — is the most important environmental book of the 21st century. She follows scientists working on frogs in Panama, bats in New York, coral reefs in the Pacific, and ammonites in the fossil record, building a case that is impossible to dismiss and difficult to forget.

Amin Maalouf's corrective to the exclusively Western historiography of the Crusades draws entirely on Arab chroniclers and historians to present two centuries of conflict from the perspective of those who were invaded. Essential reading for understanding why the Crusades remain a living political and cultural reference in the Middle East in a way that they generally are not in Europe.

Harari's big-picture history of Homo sapiens — from the cognitive revolution to the agricultural revolution to the digital revolution — is the kind of book that makes you look at a supermarket or a banknote and see something completely different. Some historians push back on the broad brushstrokes, but as an introduction to thinking historically about the human species, nothing in recent memory comes close.

Anne Frank's diary — written while she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944 — is the most widely read first-person account of the Holocaust and one of the most read books in history. Its intimacy is devastating: Anne is not a historical symbol in these pages but a teenager thinking about boys, writing, and the future she believed she would have.

Erik Larson interweaves two true stories from 1890s Chicago: the construction of the World's Fair and the murders of H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. Both narratives are extraordinary — one a story of visionary achievement against impossible odds, the other a story of how easily predators disappear in cities of strangers. Larson proved that history written like a thriller is still history.

Wilkerson spent 15 years researching the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — and tells it through the lives of three individuals. One of the great works of American narrative history: the intimacy of memoir combined with the scope of epic history.

Mary Beard's history of Rome refuses to be a parade of emperors and battles. Instead she asks what it was like to actually live in Rome — how citizens experienced the city, how power worked at street level, what people ate and worried about. Her accessible, irreverent style makes Rome feel not like a distant civilisation but a recognisable world full of recognisable anxieties.

Frankopan recentres world history away from its usual Europe-first axis, arguing that the Silk Roads connecting East and West were the true engine of human civilisation from antiquity to the present. The result is a history of the world that places Persia, China, and Central Asia at the centre of events that Western textbooks typically treat as peripheral or context-free.

Robert Caro's 1,300-page biography of Robert Moses — the urban planner who shaped New York City for 50 years without ever winning an election — is the definitive study of political power in America. How does a man with no elected office accumulate more real authority than presidents? Caro's answer, built across thousands of interviews and documents, is the most important political education available in a single book.

Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the current mass extinction event — the sixth in Earth's history and the first caused by a single species — is the most important environmental book of the 21st century. She follows scientists working on frogs in Panama, bats in New York, coral reefs in the Pacific, and ammonites in the fossil record, building a case that is impossible to dismiss and difficult to forget.

Amin Maalouf's corrective to the exclusively Western historiography of the Crusades draws entirely on Arab chroniclers and historians to present two centuries of conflict from the perspective of those who were invaded. Essential reading for understanding why the Crusades remain a living political and cultural reference in the Middle East in a way that they generally are not in Europe.