Books like Civilization by Niall Ferguson

Bill Bryson turns the universe into a conversational guide, tracing science from the Big Bang through evolution, geology, chemistry, astronomy, and particle physics with humor and clarity.

A compelling overview of American history through the eyes and experiences of its women, workers, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working poor.

Adam Smith’s seminal 1776 treatise that laid the groundwork for modern economic theory, presented here in a reprint of Edwin Cannan’s 1904 edition with a new preface by economist George J. Stigler.

A comprehensive history of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, detailing the rise of Adolf Hitler and the collapse of the Third Reich during World War II.

Samuel P. Huntington’s seminal work explores how rising international tensions after the Cold War may be driven by clash among cultural civilizations, offering a detailed theoretical framework beyond his 1993 Foreign Affairs article.

From Goodreads (edited by me though): **One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis** Modernity, secularism, development, and progress have long been viewed by the powerful few as benign ideals for the many. Today, however, botched experiments in nation-building, democracy, industrialization, and urbanization visibly scar much of the world. As once happened in Europe, the wider embrace of revolutionary politics, mass movements, technology, the pursuit of wealth, and individualism has cast billions adrift in a literally demoralized world. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected and the spiritually disorientated, that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. Many more people today, unable to fulfill the promises—freedom, stability, and prosperity—of a globalized economy, are increasingly susceptible to demagogues and their simplifications. A common reaction among them is intense hatred of supposed villains, the invention of enemies, attempts to recapture a lost golden age, unfocused fury and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra explores the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American “shooters” and ISIS (ISIL) to Trump, Modi, and racism and misogyny on social media.

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

Clive James compiles over a hundred essays, arranged alphabetically, that examine the lives and ideas of twentieth‑century intellectuals, artists, musicians and philosophers, urging the preservation of Western humanism.