《经济学人》2015年度好书历史类

 

The searing account of five teenage hibakusha ("explosion-affected people"): how they survived the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and the terrible price they paid in the aftermath of the war.

 

 

A great and terrible story of a battle that was fought 200 years ago, told with energy and clarity by a writer who has a deep understanding of men in combat and why they do what they do. "Waterloo" proves that Bernard Cornwell's non-fiction is as fine as his novels, if not finer.

 

 

How a multinational¹ Muslim empire was destroyed by the first world war, by a historian of the 20th century who is director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford² University.

 

 

A historian at Yale University has made a detailed⁴ study of where Jews were in most danger during the second world war. In France and Italy, three-quarters of the Jews survived. In eastern territories, which suffered "double occupation", first by the Soviets⁵ and then by the Nazis⁶, at least 90% of them perished.

 

 

A masterly new chronicle, by Britain's most engaging historian of the ancient world, about Rome from its myth-shrouded origins to the early third century. She shows that the key to its dominance was granting citizenship⁷ to so many people.

 

 

By focusing on a sector⁸ that until 1900 was the world's most important manufacturing industry, Sven Beckert offers a fine account of 900 years of globalisation.

 

 

How tap-dancing entertained many, even as it had clear racist⁹ overtones. An engaging, warts-and-all history of one of America's greatest creative inventions by a dance critic at the New York Times.

 

 

How Russia went to war. A gripping, poignant¹⁰ and in some respects revolutionary contribution to European history by a distinguished¹¹ British scholar who is descended¹² from several of the protagonists¹³ he describes.