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2008

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed

Review
"This is a masterpiece brimming with decades of dedicated research and dexterous writing. It is essential for any collection on U.S. history, Colonial America, Virginia, slavery, or miscegenation." Library Journal (read more)

2007

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Review
"[B]y using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude." New York Times (read more)

2006

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

Powells.com Staff Pick
A fresh, stirring look at the Dust Bowl and Depression, Timothy Egan follows the personal dramas of a handful of families, allowing their voices to reveal the environmental and human tragedies that rocked the nation. Grippingly detailed, this exciting yet compassionate work of history is difficult to put down. I enjoyed it to the last page. Recommended by Michal, Powells.com (read more)

2005

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Review
"[A] master essayist, great American novelist, and astute political observer....[A] remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief, matched by a penetrating tribute to marriage, motherhood, and love." Booklist (Starred Review) (read more)

2004

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle

Review
"Told with exemplary care and intelligence, this narrative chronicles inflammatory times in black and white America and pays tribute to those heroes who struggled to get Old Jim Crow where he lived. The way history should be written." Kirkus Reviews (read more)

2003

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos M. N. Eire

Publisher Comments
In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing... (read more)

2002

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro

Review
"Mr Caro's research spans decades and his command of material is encyclopedic. He drives the story forward irresistibly and makes the arcane almost graphic...If Mr Caro's work on Johnson has not already set a new standard in American political biography, it surely will when his story of Johnson's presidency is complete." The Economist (read more)

2001

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

Publisher Comments
With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Andrew Solomon takes the reader on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of... (read more)

2000

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick

Publisher Comments
In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex--an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page... (read more)

1999

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower

Publisher Comments
A foremost historian examines Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II, giving readers the rich and turbulent interplay between West and East, the victor and the vanquished, in a way never before attempted. 75 illustrations.... (read more)

1998

Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball

Synopsis
A personal history of slavery in the South, written by a descendant of South Carolina slaveowners who traced the histories of the slave families owned by his ancestors and searched out their descendants. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.... (read more)

1997

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis

Synopsis
A biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by a professor of history at Mount Holyoke.... (read more)

1996

An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us by James Carroll

Synopsis
James Carroll's memoir of his father, an Air Force general who helped plan the bombings in Vietnam. Carroll, a young priest at the time, preached against the war in the presence of his father and other Pentagon officials. His father never forgave... (read more)