To perhaps no one's surprise, “The Passage of Power,†the latest installment of Robert Caro's acclaimed biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, has topped the History News Network's online poll to choose the best history book of 2012.
But perhaps more interesting is what a good year William Seward, the former secretary of state who died in 1870, is having.
First, Seward - who served two presidents and engineered the purchase of Alaska - got a splashy turn in Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln,†thanks to the actor David Strathairn. And now, Walter St ahr's biography, “Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man,†has been narrowly edged out by Mr. Caro's book in the poll, while blowing past mainstream critical favorites like David Nasaw's biography of Joseph Kennedy, “The Patriarch,†which finished way back at No. 5.
The voters, who were mainly professional historians, according to David Austin Walsh, the network's editor, also applauded two more purely scholarly volumes: Jim Downs's “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstructionâ€at No. 3, and E llen Stroud's “Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast,†which finished fourth.
“There's always been a gap between professional/academic historians and biographers,†Mr. Walsh said in an email. “But thoughtful, well-researched biography and popular history still can melt the most hardened of academic hearts.â€
History News Network, a Web site that seeks to put current events into historical perspective, presented the poll as an upbeat followup to a hard-fought contest in July to choose the worst history book in print. The winner (if that's the word) was David Barton's “Jefferson Lies,†which was subsequently withdrawn from print by its publisher.
