Best History Book Reviews

A History of the Ottoman Empire offers a comprehensive survey of Ottoman history in broad contours. Its author, Douglas A. Howard, Professor Emeritus at Calvin University, defies misconceptions and prejudices about...

“It was the most terrible conflict that anyone could remember. Entire kingdoms were mobilised for combat. Slaughter fit to stupefy poets was visited on the ranks of the rival combatants" (3). Tom Holland’s first lines of Athelstan...

Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard and the Bancroft Prize-winning author of the Empire of Cotton (2015), assembles a staggering amount of primary and secondary research on several continents. He...

A conundrum of history books is that some great research is written in an uninteresting fashion, and some beautifully written tomes are filled with errors in their research or lack citations...

Keith Michael Baker’s Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror is a 27-chapter comprehensive biography of one of the men identified with the French Revolution’s most violent period. While mostly known today as the author...

Amir Alexander begins Liberty’s Grid by considering the view of the San Fernando Valley from Castle Peak, a hill near his home. Although the Valley is peculiar in many respects...

In The Heretic of Cacheu, Toby Green uses one extraordinary life to illuminate a broader historical landscape shaped by commerce, belief, gender, and cultural...

John Haywood, who received a PhD in early medieval European history, is a veteran of creating historical atlases, and his latest book does not disappoint. The Making of the Middle Ages focuses on the...

The Maya Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes and Ancestors by Mallory E. Matsumoto is the eighth instalment of Thames and Hudson’s mythology guides series and has succeeded in packing a huge quantity...

Born in the year 894, Aethelstan was the third in a remarkable line of great warrior kings from Wessex. His grandfather, Alfred the Great, halted the Viking advance into southern England...