On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

David McCullough’s Truman and The Path Between the Seas; Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; Richard Kluger’s The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune; Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem; J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of American Families; Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex; Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America; Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century; Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s Mencken: The American Iconoclast; David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire; Andrew Delbanco’s Melville; Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s de Kooning: An American Master.