HNN "best history book of 2012" poll featured in NYT

To perhaps no one’s surprise, “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment of Robert Caro’s acclaimed biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, has topped the History News Network’s online poll to choose the best history book of 2012.

But perhaps more interesting is what a good year William Seward, the former secretary of state who died in 1870, is having.

First, Seward — who served two presidents and engineered the purchase of Alaska — got a splashy turn in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” thanks to the actor David Strathairn. And now, Walter Stahr’s biography, “Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man,” has been narrowly edged out by Mr. Caro’s book  in the poll, while blowing past mainstream critical favorites like David Nasaw’s biography of Joseph Kennedy, “The Patriarch,” which finished way back at No. 5....