As a teen, I fell in love with narrative history — the use of classic storytelling techniques, such as characters, scenes, and dialogue — to write compelling histories. My first crush was on Barbara Tuchman, a journalist-turned-author who won the Pulitzer Prize for her books The Guns of August and Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
A history teacher assigned me to read A Distant Mirror, a book about what Tuchman called “the calamitous 14th century.” Her writing was so evocative to my eighteen-year-old imagination: I could almost feel and see the fine particles dust kicked up during the jousting matches she described.
Now, her somewhat old-fashioned prose doesn’t quite stir me in the same way, and I’m aware that academic historians haven’t always been her fans. But I still appreciate Tuchman’s ability to synthesize beautifully information and her gift for recreating a distant world with the delicate brushwork of a watercolorist.
I was honored to have been asked to pick five books that influenced my life as a writer by Jane Ciabattari, a columnist for Literary Hub. My choices included Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas, Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, and Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia.
You can read our lengthy conversation here. With the recent passing of Tony Horwitz, a former reporter turned-bestselling author, I wish I had added one of his many wonderful books to my list (I read Baghdad Without a Map many years ago and, more recently, Blue Latitudes, in which he follows Captain Cook to Hawaii and elsewhere. His wonderful Civil War book, Confederates in the Attic, is also a favorite.)
Here’s an article by one of my favorite historians, Jill Lepore, from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation on the blurring line between scholarly and popular history writing. I’d love to hear what your favorite books of narrative history are!