History & science TBR picks

Peter H. Wilson’s Heart of Europe is a near‑1,000‑page synthesis first published in 2016, released by Belknap/Harvard and sold in a 941‑page edition that reviewers called a magnum opus. books.google.com Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror first appeared in 1978 and later won the U.S. National Book Award in history in 1980, cementing its reputation as a long‑form narrative of the 14th century. en.wikipedia.org C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image, published posthumously in 1964, is the author’s final non‑fiction work and remains a standard introduction to medieval cosmology and literary models. en.wikipedia.org Justine Firnhaber‑Baker’s House of Lilies was published in 2024 as a 408–448‑page popular‑history account of the Capetian dynasty, and the author is a professor of history at the University of St Andrews. books.google.com Samuel Arbesman’s The Magic of Code was released on June 10, 2025 by PublicAffairs and frames code as a connective “language” crossing biology, literature, and computation in roughly 300 pages. hachettebookgroup.com Robert Wachter’s A Giant Leap hit shelves on February 3, 2026, is described by the publisher as an “instant national bestseller,” and is based on reporting that includes more than 100 interviews with leaders across medicine and tech. penguinrandomhouse.com Taken together the picks span roughly five decades of scholarship and trade publishing—Wilson’s 941‑page survey and Tuchman’s 700‑plus‑page narrative versus Arbesman’s ~304‑page tech history and Wachter’s 352‑page health‑AI primer—offering both deep archival canvases and shorter, topical science treatments. books.google.com