Civil War

2005 · Doris Kearns Goodwin · 944 pages · Nonfiction / History

Team of Rivals reframes Abraham Lincoln's presidency through the three men he beat for the 1860 nomination and then, astonishingly, put in his cabinet, Seward, Chase, and Bates, and follows the prairie lawyer outmaneuvering, absorbing, and finally winning the devotion of politicians who each began convinced they were his superior. Doris Kearns Goodwin's quadruple biography became one of the most influential history books of its era, name-checked by presidents and mined by managers, and its portrait of political genius as emotional intelligence remains the definitive modern Lincoln. It is nearly a thousand pages, the thesis occasionally flatters the evidence, and no reader has ever wished it shorter by the end.

2022 · Shehan Karunatilaka · 400 pages · Literary Fiction

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a wild, furious, blackly comic novel about a dead war photographer trying to solve his own murder in 1980s Sri Lanka. It's messy, overstuffed, and unforgettable.

1936 · Margaret Mitchell · 1037 pages · Historical Fiction

An epic of survival and ambition anchored by one of fiction's most compelling protagonists, though its romanticized portrayal of the antebellum South requires critical engagement from modern readers.

2012 · Steven Spielberg · 150 min · Biography / Drama / History

Lincoln succeeds because Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't play a monument. He plays a tired, funny, cunning politician who happened to change the course of American history during the worst month of his life. Spielberg surrounds him with an ensemble that brings the messy realities of democracy to vivid life, and Tony Kushner's screenplay finds genuine drama in parliamentary procedure. It's a film about how the sausage gets made, and it makes that process as gripping as any battlefield.

2024 · Alex Garland · 109 min · Thriller / War

Civil War is a visceral, intentionally apolitical war film that works brilliantly as a sensory experience and journalism story, even as its refusal to engage with the politics of its premise frustrates viewers looking for deeper commentary.