You can go far back in time, as with Barry Cunliffe's Europe Between the Oceans, 9000 BC to AD 1000 (Yale University Press, 480 pp., $39.95), in which a great historian narrates one heck of an eventful 10,000 years. Or you can come nearer the present age, with Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein (Scribner, 896 pp., $37.50), which powerfully traces a turning point in our history a generation ago. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton, 800 pp., $35), won this year's National Book Award in nonfiction. Our reviewer James S. Sanders called it "a history of the emotions" felt by a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson "as they forge lives in a divided country."
Big bios. The winner is, as usual, Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday bicentenary comes in February. Our reviewer Desmond Ryan surveyed many titles, including Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson (Penguin, 384 pp., $35), which, Ryan wrote, "maintains [McPherson's] very high standards." As a popular subject, a close second, as usual, is Winston Churchill, with Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1897-1945, by Carlo D'Este (HarperCollins. 843 pp., $39.95). And, this year being John Milton's quadricentennial, there are many fine Milton bios, including Milton, by Anna Beer (Bloomsbury, 480 pp., $34.95). You also have John Lennon: The Life, by Philip Norman (Doubleday, 864 pp., $34.95), a comprehensive bio that had the aid and blessing of Yoko Ono.
Perhaps the most startling bio of all is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French (Knopf, 576 pp., $30). Our reviewer Floyd Skloot calls it a "harrowing" study of a life of "mythic cruelty."
