Books – Detail

From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail, "the definitive history of the 2008 banking crisis," comes a spellbinding narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history.

The New York Times: 100 Notable Books of 2025

A prize-winning historian's fascinating and unfamiliar recasting of America's war of independence as a transformative international event. In this revelatory and enthralling book, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America's founding event.

In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal.

In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China -- one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux.

Capitalism has long been understood as a driving force behind the biggest political, economic, and social dislocations of our time. But in this sweeping, kaleidoscopic history of the economic system that has shaped our world, the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he examines global capitalism through the eyes of its critics.

The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin's lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however--it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill.

In The Gales of November, acclaimed journalist John U. Bacon delivers the definitive account of this haunting maritime disaster and the era that produced it. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with families, friends, and shipmates of the lost men, Bacon explores how the Fitzgerald came to symbolize the power and promise of America's postwar industrial might--and how its loss marked the end of a booming age of Great Lakes shipping.

To celebrate America's 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a ... deep dive into the creation of one of history's most powerful sentences: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This book recounts the Marquis de Lafayette's farewell tour of the United States in 1824-1825, exploring its historical significance and cultural impact. It describes Lafayette's journey across the states, the nationwide celebrations, and the political and social context of early 19th-century America. Drawing on Lafayette's perspective and contemporary eyewitness accounts, the narrative offers insight into a nation reflecting on its revolutionary past while facing a changing future.

Lafayette visited the Athenaeum during his tour.

A sweeping history of one of the nation's most important African American churches and a profound story of grace and perseverance amidst the fight for racial justice-from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Kevin Sack.

The New York Times: 10 Best Books of 2025