Bill Lockyer explores top-rated historical non-fiction books

San Francisco, CA - ( NewMediaWire ) - October 14, 2020 - A graduate of both the University of California and the University of the Pacific, former elected official Bill Lockyer retired from politics in 2015. A lifelong bibliophile, the retired California-based politician today resides happily between Hayward and Long Beach and maintains an ever-growing library of predominantly non-fiction historical works.

“I’ve always enjoyed reading mysteries and crime novels, but my main passion has long been historical non-fiction,” explains attorney and former elected official Bill Lockyer, speaking from his home in Long Beach, Los Angeles County.

Exploring both his own collection and ratings from Goodreads, the world’s largest website for readers and book recommendations, Bill Lockyer has recently delved into what is now widely considered to be among the finest works of historical non-fiction ever to be published.

“Among the top-rated historical non-fiction books on Goodreads are ‘The Hiding Place,’ by Corrie ten Boom, ‘Band of Brothers,’ by Stephen E. Ambrose, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,’ by Yuval Noah Harari, and ‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe,” reveals Bill Lockyer.

Published in 1971, 1992, 2011, and 2018 respectively, Goodreads’ four highest-rated works of historical non-fiction have each scored 4.42/5 based on between 40,000 and almost half a million ratings, according to the attorney and former elected official Bill Lockyer. Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 work, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,’ he points out, has, to date, been rated in excess of 488,000 times by Goodreads users.

Similarly highly ranked among historical non-fiction books on the platform are ‘The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,’ by Isabel Wilkerson, ‘Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,’ by Laura Hillenbrand, and ‘The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics,’ by Daniel James Brown.

Scoring 4.39/5, 4.37/5, and 4.35/5, and all published between 2010 and 2013, Laura Hillenbrand’s ‘Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,’ Bill Lockyer further goes on to point out, has now been rated an incredible 761,000 times.

Several further works, Bill Lockyer reports, by authors including Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dee Brown, Ron Chernow, and Kate Moore, have all received ratings of between 4.15 and 4.28. “Laura Hillenbrand also has a second work of historical non-fiction among those which are most highly rated, too,” Lockyer notes, “in the shape of the 1999 publication ‘Seabiscuit: An American Legend,’ which scores 4.22/5 based on approximately 150,000 ratings.”

Among the best-known works of historical non-fiction, however, and also highly rated by Bill Lockyer and Goodreads users alike is the book of writings from the diary kept by Anne Frank while she and her family remained in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Published in 1947, ‘The Diary of a Young Girl,’ also known as ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ has now been rated by Goodreads users a staggering 2.7 million times, achieving an average score of 4.15/5.