War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan has been named one of the 10 best books of 2020 by the New York Times.

It is the only Canadian title to make the list.

In War: How Conflict Shaped Us, the Canadian historian argues that war is woven into the fabric of civilization. MacMillan delves into how war has brought us death and destruction, but also improved education, created advances for women and was good for innovation in medicine, science and technology. War: How Conflict Shaped Us forces the reader to reflect on how wars have changed the societies that fight them.

"This is a short book but a rich one with a profound theme. MacMillan argues that war — fighting and killing — is so intimately bound up with what it means to be human that viewing it as an aberration misses the point," said the New York Times.

"MacMillan writes with impressive ease. Practically every page of her book is interesting and, despite the grimness of its argument, even entertaining."

MacMillan is a professor at the University of Oxford and the bestselling author of Paris 1919, which won the Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction in 2003. She delivered the 2015 CBC Massey Lectures, History's People, in which she explored figures of the past — famous and lesser-known — and how their actions changed the course of history.

Some of MacMillan's other books include Paris 1919, The War That Ended Peace, The Uses and Abuses of History, Stephen Leacock and Nixon in China.

The New York Times list featured five novels, two memoirs and three books of nonfiction. Lydia Millet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, made the list for her novel A Children's Bible, which was shortlisted for the U.S. National Book Awards.

The list also included Maggie O'Farrell's historical fiction Hamnet & Judith, which won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction earlier this year, and former President Barack Obama's memoir, A Promised Land.