Since many of our readers love reading history books, we’ve had articles the past three Octobers about worthwhile ones. We’ll do that again this year—but amid coronavirus social isolation many of us are looking for good reading material. So here’s a spring set of history book recommendations.

In Richard Preston’s Crisis in the Red Zone, which made WORLD’s short list for the 2019 Book of the Year in the Understanding the World category, we get a page-turning account of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. With the current spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s a good time to read his authoritative account of a new virus strain that invaded the world.

And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain by Elisabeth Asbrink: A stash of 500 letters between members of an Austrian Jewish family survived World War II. Asbrink uses them to tell the Ullmann story—parents trapped in Vienna, their 13-year-old son Otto sent to safety in Sweden. In the early days, the Ullmanns expected reunification. They wrote about everyday life and peppered their letters with expressions of love and admonishments to be good and work hard.

He Is Risen: Rocks Tell the Story of Easter by Patti Rokus: Though the format of this picture book may be surprising at first, Rokus’ simple language and elegant rock designs tell the story of Christ’s death and resurrection in a fresh and effective way. The book’s pages feature photographs of rock arrangements on a black background, each depicting events from the Passion Week. Rokus pairs these scenes with short sentences and reference verses, keeping the format uncomplicated and easy for children to follow.

On this page I mostly review secular books, but here in eight categories are worthwhile ones I’ve read recently from Christian publishers.  

How to govern: Michael Wagenman’s Engaging the World with Abraham Kuyper (Lexham, 2019) is a good introduction to the theologian, journalist, and politician who scolded the Dutch Conservative Party for abandoning principles “in exchange for the short-term rewards of political power.” He traced “a failure of the church’s ultimate allegiance” back to the Constantinian conversation. 

Let’s conclude Black History Month with an excerpt from a sad saga, Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise. Tisby shows how even George Whitefield, the great 18th-century preacher, took time off from evangelism to advocate slavery. Without it, he said, “Georgia can never be a flourishing province.” U.S. Constitution writers, Tisby rightly notes, “used black lives as bargaining chips to preserve the union of states.”

Flight of the Raven by Morgan L. Busse: In this sequel to Mark of the Raven, Selene adjusts to being Lord Damien’s wife. Despite their hasty marriage and enemy families, they are falling in love. But the shadowy goddess known as the Dark Lady haunts Selene’s dreams, forcing her to choose between the Dark Lady or the Light, her husband’s good God. This book has all the charms of its prequel—a setting with interesting culture, likable characters, and pure romance—and also the same annoyances.