1. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid.  This history book actually tries to explain to the reader how things were.  Oh such books are so rare!  (Why is that?)  Definitely recommended, written at the very end of the apartheid era which gives it yet another angle of interest.

2. Nic von Wielligh and Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, The Bomb: South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme.  I had been looking for a book on this topic for a long time, and finally I found the right one in a South African bookshop.  They did build six atomic bombs, almost seven, and this is the story of how that started and was later reversed.  Hundreds of pages of substantive detail, and I had not realized how much the conflict in Angola, and Cuban/Soviet involvement, was a major factor in the whole episode.

3. David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya.  We keep on learning lots about the Maya, and this is the best book to follow what has been going on.  Well-written and clear, and it does not numb your mind with details you may not care about.

4. Mark B. Smith, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991.  I am seeing an increasing number of excellent books on what the Soviet Union really was.  This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history.  It makes the time and place imaginable.  The book also goes a long way toward disaggregating different Soviet eras, rather than just the end of Stalinism.

5. Kevin Hartnett, The Proof is in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI.  A very useful book about the history of proving math theorems by computer.