Read Gulag: A History

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

Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

Why Eurasia conquered the rest: geography, crops and animals rather than people; Diamond's Pulitzer.

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

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

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

Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.