Books like Incredible History — picked by fans

David McCullough is one of my favorite authors of history, and Mornings on Horseback is, in my opinion, one of his best works.

McCullough introduces us to the young Theodore Roosevelt, from early childhood to early adulthood. Born to a Southern mother and a father who would later contribute heavily to the Union cause, he grew up in a mansion in New York City but spent considerable time ranching in the Badlands of North Dakota.

Teddy Roosevelt was a fascinating man with contradictions and character, the perfect subject for a masterful biography.

Read this book to get a glorious sweep of human history told like a fireplace story. Beginning with prehistoric man and progressing through to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book is the definitive “narrative of the human race” (as told by Booklist).

Ben Schott from The Observer said it best: “One feels as if Gombrich is guiding one through time with a grandfatherly gleam in his eyes.”

If you want to learn the language carved on tombs and inside pyramids all over Egypt, you should start here! This book will take you through a wide variety of Egyptian inscriptions, teaching you something new (the different kinds of signs, word order, and even the numbering system) with each one.

Along the way, there are countless opportunities for practice in the beautifully arranged and formatted book.

This book has been my favorite ever since I was a small child—in fact, without the passion for history that this book sparked, I don’t think my book would exist today. Throughout the book, drawings of landscapes, cutaway houses, battle scenes, or people abound.

Poring over those pages, one feels transported to an earlier age—a time when Athenian merchants hawked their goods at the foot of the Acropolis, when intrepid Polynesians sailed far across the crystal-blue Pacific, and when Viking warriors raided villages around Europe.

Simply put, the book is a time machine.

This is a first book, covering Aiyar’s years in China as a political correspondent for the Indian Express and The Hindu. Because she is Indian, Aiyar’s perspective differs from Americans’ viewpoints, which drew me, as I’ve been to both India and China. Aiyar tracks the impact of rapid growth on her informants’ sense of self and place—and then compares China’s growth to India’s. It’s a fast-paced, lively book featuring lots of interaction between Aiyar and her students, their families, and other informants—a thoughtful portrait of a culture shifting from tradition into an unknowable future, written by a journalist constantly aware of the radical differences between Indian and “new Chinese” values and sensibilities.  

This book, so excellent in giving valid arguments and then predicting China’s supposed inevitable economic demise, is a clear example of how most American authors reason about China without taking into account the huge economic differences it has with our economy.

McMahon and all the others forget that a) in the year 2000 there were 600 million cheap laborers in the countryside, and there still are more than 200 million available now, b) the Beijing Communist dictatorship is cruelly keeping wages of production workers at less than half ours, and c) the existing free trade, started by Bill Clinton in 2000, provides a huge yearly income to China that erases all possible financial troubles they may have.

These three elements together make Mr. McMahon’s book an intellectual silliness. Most authors in our Western world make the same error. It is high time this be realized and corrected.

This book is the classic and foundational book in which the author designates the requisite characteristics of modern sports: secularization, equality, specialization, rationalization, and bureaucracy.

Secularization distanced sport from the association with religious rituals such as the ancient Olympic Games. Distinct rules and regulations relative to participants designated equal opportunities for success. The sport's perceived physical, social, and moral benefits provided a rational reason for their practice. Specialized events required specialized practice, furthering the advent of professionalism.

The greater profusion and practice of sport led to the creation of associations to administer and regulate the activities. Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70, later added commercialization and urbanization as a feature of modernity.

This book provides one of the best factual examinations of arguably the most powerful sports organization in the world, along with its extensive network involved in staging the Olympic Games. Published during the year the Olympics were held in communist China, it provides fascinating insights into the actors connected to the Olympic Movement and how money, power, and politics often are the key factors driving decisions.

I was especially attracted to the plethora of graphs and figures providing concise, informative snapshots of critical and often elusive information such as TOP sponsor fees paid, employee lists for international federations, television redistribution entities, and voting rights of the World Anti-doping Agency.

There aren’t many sources that can provide as much proprietary information, especially with respect to the financial and governance domains of the IOC and its broader ecosystem. This book is the one I reach for most often when needing to find… show more.

In this book, David Goldblatt chronicles the political history of the Olympics, beginning in the 1890s when a plucky French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, chiseled the ancient Greek Olympics from antiquity and rendered them in modern form.

Goldblatt is a sports lover through and through who celebrates Olympic athletes in all their resplendent glory while also skewering the five-ring honchos who all too often pursue their own narrow interests over the collective good. This book brims with fun forays into the quirky crevices of Olympic history with a close eye on how culture matters.

John R. Short is another scholar who has been blowing the whistle on the hidden costs of Olympic Games, especially for host cities, for many years.

In this recent release, written for a popular audience, he provides some history of the Games, but, more importantly, a step-by-step breakdown of why the Olympics costs cities much more than the IOC or bidding committees would like you to believe.

He also includes a thorough list of ‘further reading’ resources (and my book plus almost all of the authors on this list are on it!).