Best Books of 2014: The History & Biography Honor Roll!

The genre of fiction in 2014 was too anemic to warrant an Honor Roll, but this wasn’t the case at all for other genres, many of which fielded works so strongly they readily overflowed the arbitrary 10-title limit of my ‘Best’ lists. In 2014, Honor Rolls were easily possible for four or five such genres, and I’m thinking the whole system needs an overhaul for 2015 (I never anticipated reading so many new books in one year – that fact alone might call for some new arrangement). But in the meantime, in an effort to stop the Honor Rolls from swamping the lists, I’ll combine History and Biography into one list of superb runners-up – the “best of the rest” as it were, for my two favorite genres:

10. John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster) – Biographies of John Wayne just naturally lend themselves to schmaltz and goo, and the wonder of Eyman’s super-readable book is how little it indulges in such excesses. Instead, we get Wayne the man in all his contradictions – and some first-rate analysis of Wayne the actor, a phenomenon that tends to elude even seasoned critics.

9. Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha (Knopf) – Another intensely readable book from Guha, whose 2007 India After Gandhi is a masterpiece of the historian’s art. This new book playfully inverts that earlier work’s title and gives us the best, most comprehensive, and most insightful look ever written of Gandhi in the decades before he became a charismatic and slightly insane national figurehead.

8. John Quincy Adams by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins) – America’s sixth president (and his fascinating wife) got a very satisfying amount of attention from scholars and historians in 2014, and Kaplan’s book was the pick of the bunch for its research and its hugely engaging prose. It might get some serious competition on those scores from Phyllis Lee Levin’s forthcoming book on JQA, but for now, this is the book to beat on the subject of the smartest U.S. president of them all.

7. The Price of Fame by Sylvia Jukes Morris (Random House) – The second volume of Morris’s biography of playwright and diplomat Clare Booth Luce is a thoroughly remarkable achievement, extensively (some critics would have said ‘compulsively’) detailed and informedly sympathetic. You can read my full review here.

6. The Unknown Lloyd George by Travis L. Crosby (I. B. Tauris & Co.) – Crosby’s biography of the polarizing and fascinating Lloyd George is an instant high-water mark in studies of the man and his period. You can read my full review here

5. The Wars of the Roses by Dan Jones (Viking) – Jones follows up his fantastic volume on the Plantagenets with this unfailingly gripping narrative of the contest between York and Lancaster for the throne of England. You can read my full review here

4. The Devil’s Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 by Roger Moorhouse (Basic Books) – The Hitler-Stalin Pact, so often relegated to fairly cursory treatment in larger narratives of the Second World War, is here given center-stage dramatization by Moorhouse, whose 2010 book Berlin at War was so memorably gripping. The Devil’s Alliance is every bit as good as that earlier book; it’s surely the definitive work on the ultimate super-villain team-up.

3. The Pity of War by Miranda Seymour (Rowman & Littlefield) – Seymour’s enormously entertaining (and hugely detailed – the sheer amount of research here is impressive) book acts as a much-needed counterweight to the glut of World War One histories that appeared in 2014; it paints the much larger picture of just how incredibly interconnected England and Germany were in the decades preceding the outbreak of war in 1914. Even long-time students of WWI will learn a great deal from this wonderful book.

2. The Spanish Armada by Robert Hutchinson (Thomas Dunne Books) – This latest book from one of our best working popular historians focuses on Spain’s epic naval assault on England in 1588 but also skillfully weaves in the much broader story of the whole conflict. You can read my full review here.

1. Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn (Oxford University Press) – Winn’s droll sub-title seems designed to snag the attention of period fans, since poor old Queen Anne cared not a farthing for the arts and infinitely preferred privy council meetings to playhouses (and indeed, very often treated the latter as if they were the former). But our author is cannier than that, and he pulls off an absolutely splendid biography of Anne just the same. You can read my full review here.