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Well, since the question wasn't limited to fiction ebooks, I'd have to say my two favorites in 2009 were Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame and Louis D. Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky.
Lincoln is one of the most fascinating persons in American history and Burlingame's biography is the standard against which all Lincoln bios will be judged for many years to come. if anything, it is too complete a bio.
Brandeis was a highly successful Boston lawyer who is mainly known for his role as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. But Brandeis is the lawyer, the standard, that every lawyer should strive to be and reach but to which no lawyer before or since Brandeis ever rose. Brandeis was often a lawyer "to the situation" rather than a lawyer to an individual, with the result that he was exceptionally well-revered in his day, as well as well-disliked.
For anyone interested in biography, I'd recommend these two titles in particular.
Other interesting nonfiction books include Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley; The Poison King: the Life and Legend of Mithradates by Adrienne Mayor; Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg; Fear: Antisemitism after Auschwitz by Jan Tomasz Gross; The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch; and Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from antiquity to the Present by Marvin Perry.
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