Last week, resident how-to blogger and Stuff Mom Never Told You podcaster extraordinaire Cristen Conger explained how to buy a book for Dad. But if you’re looking for your own summer read, NPR has a few nonfiction suggestions, one of which piqued my interest — Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History.

John Freeman, who compiled the list of nonfiction picks, says: “By revealing time and again how often the stories nations tell themselves are in fact wrong, and reminding us of those consequences, MacMillan has formed a powerful and important argument that people — and not just the people in power — must know their true histories.” There’s an excerpt available for you to read on NPR. org. While it offers just a taste of MacMillan’s thesis, you can get a sense of what she’s gearing up to explain.

History is popular, she points out, because it’s “fascinating,” “fun” and “helpful in making sense of the world we live in.” But if we live by the dictum that we must study history in order to avoid making the same mistakes again, we’ve got to know more than names and dates. It’s essential to know the hows and whys of history, the nitty-gritty details that might be less palatable than flashy stories of intrigue and bravura biographies.