Read Guns, Germs, and Steel

A biography of cancer from ancient Egypt to gene therapy; Mukherjee's Pulitzer.

Hofstadter on self-reference in logic, art and music, and where minds come from; the Pulitzer nobody finishes.

The first month of the First World War day by day; Tuchman's Pulitzer that Kennedy read during the missile crisis.

Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer history of the Soviet camps from the archives.

Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.

Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.

Bill Bryson explains the universe, the atom and the dinosaurs as if to a friend in a pub.

The woman whose cells, taken without consent in 1951, are still alive in every lab.