The Penguin Hotline Recommends: Gifts for the History Buff

Nothing says “holiday spirit” better than bootlegging, murder, and general crimes and misdemeanors in the Jazz Age.  Few write as colorfully and entertainingly as Karen Abbott about the American way of sin.

From the author of Clementine. Another intriguing heroine steps out from the shadows of history – a Baltimore socialite with a wooden leg who defied the Nazis and sparked the French Resistance as a spy in wartime Europe.

Grand history on three continents across four centuries, as the author of The Templars lays out the events of history’s most famous sequence of holy wars. The book’s characters range from Richard the Lionheart and the sultan Saladin to Margaret of Beverley, an Englishwoman who defended Jerusalem during Saladin’s siege armed with a cooking pot for a helmet.

If you loved (or gave as a gift) Roberts’s magisterial biographies of Napoleon or Churchill in the past, now you can stuff a stocking with this succinct summary of some of the greatest moments of wartime leadership, focusing on Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Margaret Thatcher.

A supercool book about the tiny insect that has had an oversized impact on global history.

The American Revolution series is a fantastic sweep across the decades in which thirteen colonies became a country, now in uniform trade paperback.

Confederates in the Attic, an early book, and, Spying on the South, sadly, the last work of a consummate chronicler of the mysterious by ways of the American experience. Horwitz deftly melds history, journalism, and social commentary in his excursions through the South. A perfect pairing for a history lover.

From the author of The Mathews Men, an extraordinarly moving survival tale from the Arctic waters in the early days of World War II, when an Allied convoy was abandoned by its escorts (thank you, Winston Churchill) and had to make its own way to safety to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviets.