Gerald Posner is the author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. His other best-sellers include Case Closed, on the J.F.K. assassination, and Motown: Money, Power, Sex and Music.
The Warburgs by Ron Chernow (Vintage, $21). Forget about the Kennedys, this is a captivating soap opera revolving around a family every bit as anointed with great fortune, and intersecting the crossroads of fate and history. The fascinating anecdotes in this sometimes dark saga are worth revisiting time and again.
Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith (Perennial, $16). Goldsmith’s talents for scrupulous research and vivid writing have never been better displayed than in this seductive biography of Victoria Woodhull, magnetic healer and clairvoyant. Goldsmith artfully weaves the politics of feminism in Victorian America against the raging spiritualist movement that swept the country.
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer (Simon & Schuster, $25). It is now popular to criticize Shirer’s work as falling short in one area or another, but no single book has so effectively captured Nazi Germany’s broad historical sweep. It also benefits from Shirer’s own fine journalistic eye and his 1930s posting to Berlin.
The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowicz (Bantam, $19). This seminal historical study is a benchmark in a field about which so much has been written. Dawidowicz successfully explores the lasting puzzle of how “decent” and sophisticated Germany embarked on history’s unparalleled war of annihilation. Every time I read this book, I want to trade in our VW Beetle.
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro (Random House, $22). This doorstop of a book (almost 1,400 pages) thoroughly illuminates both Robert Moses the man and his startling accumulation of power, and also provides one of the most intimate and lively histories of New York ever printed.
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