Best non-fiction books of 2025 - Marginal REVOLUTION
The year started off slow, but it ended up being a normally strong time for quality, readable non-fiction. Here is my list, noting that the links lead either to my reviews or to Amazon. These are roughly in the order I read them, not ranked ordinally. Here goes: Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State. Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, Kerala: 1956 to the Present. Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Amy Sall, The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power. Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin. David Eltis, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades. Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. Daniel Dain, A History of Boston. Short review here. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance. Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism Roger Chickering, The German Empire, 1871
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