21 Best New History Books to Read Now

New Yorker staff writer, Jonathan Blitzer’s thoroughly reported new book about the roots of the growing crisis at the southern border “is a character-driven chronicle of 40 years of transcontinental violence and displacement... [and] a welcome intervention in a toxic discourse, one that unveils the ties that bind our artificially fractured hemisphere," wrote the Texas Observer’s Gus Bova.

Asia’s meteoric rise is one of the most consequential geopolitical trends of the twentieth century. The continent’s rise, however, has been one fractured by nationalist sentiment and divergent political ideologies. Still, aspirations for Asian universalism and solidarity persisted, and in this incisive new history, Sugata Bose, examines how these sentiments have endured and offered an alternative to the U.S. led global system.

From populist rage, to the shockwaves of AI and automation to ideological fracture, the early decades of the 21st century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history, but it is not the first. Fareed Zakaria, one of the most respected personalities on television as a public intellectual who makes analysis of complex global trends accessible to all, masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world.

Dan Stone’s comprehensive new history of the Holocaust has received rave reviews since its release. Samuel Clowes’ review in The New Republic sheds some light on why: "Instead of presenting Holocaust history as a tidy affair wrapped in a bow with neat moral messages, Stone proposes that we examine its unfinishedness, its unknowability, and its incompleteness… By confronting these uncomfortable truths, Stone hopes to jolt us out of complacency."

One of Foreign Policy’s most anticipated books of the year, this exhaustive account of the lengthy relationship between Saddam Hussein and the United States from New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winner, Steve Coll, provides crucial new context about the decisions that eventually led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Versatile and venerated author Amitav Ghosh returns with another compelling interdisciplinary book, which Foreign Policy named as one of its most anticipated books of 2024. Smoke and Ashes combines travelogue, memoir, and history writing to tell the riveting story of how the opium trade transformed the world.

This audacious new history of the introduction of psychedelics into the cultural mainstream in the middle of the twentieth century, centers around the anthropologists, and doomed lovers, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson whose pioneering work on expanding human consciousness helped usher in this new era.

Glowing reviews have been rolling in for Rebecca Boyle’s new anthropological and scientific history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon. In the New York Times, Katrina Miller wrote, "Boyle walks the reader through a history of both Earth and humanity, from the formation of our planet and the evolution of life to the development of civilization... and, eventually, science... she argues, the moon has played a starring role in how we came to be, and who we are."

This work of recent history tells the story of the countless Afghani interpreters and others who worked alongside the British and American armies, and were largely abandoned when Western troops left the country in 2021. In the Guardian, John Simpson praised the book as, "beautifully researched and deeply moving, [this book] brought me to tears more than once."

Elle’s Lauren Puckett-Pope called this history of Maryland’s Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums to be closed, from Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton “a radically complex work of historical study, etching the intersections of race, mental health, criminal justice, public health, memory, and the essential quest for human dignity.”