Amazon worldwide bestseller tables: history
1. Night. By Elie Wiesel. Hill and Wang; 144 pages; $6.30 Penguin; £6.39. A terrifying account of the horror of a Nazi death camp where a young Jewish boy witnesses the loss of his family, his innocence and his god.
2. 1776. By David McCullough. Simon & Schuster; 400 pages; $18.51.Penguin/Allen Lane; £17.50. How George Washington and his brave rebels so nearly lost their revolutionary war against the British.
3. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. By Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 496 pages; $16.50. Penguin/Allen Lane; £14. How globalisation has made the world smaller rather than flatter, by the winner of the first FT/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.
4. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster; 944 pages; $21. Abraham Lincoln, as seen through the eyes of his key cabinet colleagues, many of whom were opponents during the Republican nomination of 1860.
5. State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. By James Risen. Free Press; 256 pages; $15.60. Simon & Schuster; £13.29. An anecdotal history of American intelligence since September 11th 2001 and how the Bush administration justified its off-the-books domestic spying programme.
6. The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq. By George Packer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pages; $17.16.Faber and Faber; £7.49.How the campaign to make Iraq a better place was ill-planned and badly executed.
7. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68. By Taylor Branch. Simon and Schuster; 1,056 pages; $23.10.Drama and social history in the last volume of the life and times of Martin Luther King.
8. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. By Sam Harris; Norton; 224 pages; $11.16.Free Press; £3.99. Why many people continue to believe in the promise of paradise to believers and damnation to all others and why they are wrong.
9. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. By Jared Diamond. Norton; 480 pages; $11.18. Vintage; £8.99.How the environment affected the rise and fall of different human civilisations.
10. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. By George Jonas. Simon & Schuster; 416 pages; $10.20. Perennial; £3.99. Five Israelis hunted down and killed those responsible for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics of 1972 and paid a terrible price.