The Best and Worst Books I Read in 2025
Last Minute Gifts, and Ones to Avoid
Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Because it is Christmastime, the next few articles will be somewhat relaxed, ones to check when you need a break from family with some light information. So you can order some of these as Christmas gifts, if you would so desire, I am sending this article out early, in place of Tuesday’s article. This is one that came at the request of readers, and I have done similar ones in past years. Enjoy!
The end of the year is here, so it’s time for another reading list!
I read a great deal, primarily so my articles on here can be better informed and cited; this often means delving into the bibliographies of books I like so that I can find other books on the subject. As such, I stumble across a great many books. Most are fine, including a few interesting useful details that it would have been hard to find elsewhere, but also a great deal of extraneous tedium. Some are absolutely awful. A few are quite good.
So those of you who still need to get gifts for the readers in your lives can have a few to get, and know what to avoid, I have changed around this year’s article on books somewhat: it covers what books I have read and liked, and which ones to avoid. Where relevant, I’ve also added what similar books on the subject you might see, and whether to read or avoid them; this is something I have found is valuable, as many authors have a good book or two but others that are quite bad. For each book, I’ve just done a paragraph or two about what I liked or disliked, so you can scan through them and decide which, if any, you might wish order.
Books I Liked
Revolutionary Characters by Gordon Wood
Revolutionary Characters by Gordon Wood is one of those few books about the Founding Fathers that is absolutely fabulous. That’s because it goes beyond the generalities and oft-made comments that can be found in any biography of them, and instead digs into the roots of their characters and how the ideas to which they adhered shaped the formation of America.
In it, he shows the essentially anti-egalitarian views of the Founders, as built by the idea of the “gentleman” that dominated society in their day. He then uses that to show how their views of gentility, duty, and hierarchy translated into the way the early Republic was structured. To build on that, Wood further shows what Classical sources the Founders, particularly Washington, used to build their views on what an aristocratic, republican gentleman should be. Using all of that, he then explains what made them truly unique and different, along with why democracy means that none like them have since come about. It is a fabulously interesting book, and one that is quite a pleasure to read.
Check out my full review of it here:
Also written by Wood that I read this year are Empire of Liberty, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.
Of those three additions, Empire of Liberty is the best. It is quite good, in fact, and shows how the fear of democracy he notes in Revolutionary Characters related to American life, and why mass democracy came about anyway. His depiction of social and political life in the period is quite good.
The Radicalism of the American Revolution is ok, but generally lacks the qualities that made Empire of Liberty and Revolutionary Characters quite good. It is much more boring, the subject matter is less interesting, and the overall message is somewhat less coherent. Bits of it are interesting, however, particularly his depiction of the fight between gentility and egalitarian prejudices in the culture of the revolution.
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, is absolutely terrible, and is very much a book to avoid. It is extremely boring to read; the subject matter is somehow uninteresting despite being about a momentous period in American history, his overreliance on random letters from the period makes the writing flow very poorly, and it generally lacks the zest that makes the other books enjoyable. Don’t buy this one. It is very bad
The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I by John Mosier
Unlike most of what I read, The Myth of the Great War is one I found not via my reading list or a previously read source, but rather through X (Twitter). Kurt Steiner posted about having read it and found it interesting, so I ordered a copy. I am quite glad I did, as it is by far the best revisionist history of World War I have read. In it, Mosier shows the reality of casualty statistics in the war—German casualties were far lower than the Allies claimed—and does an in-depth (but still quite interesting and exciting) study of how differences in tactics, strategy, and war material created that situation. Further, he proves that German leadership, tactics, and training were not just different than that of the Allies, but consistently quite superior.
His discussion of the differences in the sorts of artillery pieces used by each side (the German howitzers were hugely more useful than the Allied field guns, and present in far larger numbers), the way the Germans quickly shaped their division structures to rely on machine guns and artillery rather than manpower, and how the Germans won significant morale advantages and much more territory by utilizing very different tactics to go on the offensive is fascinating, and something I haven’t found elsewhere. Further, his discussion of the reality of American involvement (it was far more important than it is often credited as being), is fantastic.
So, this is one I can unreservedly recommend. It is fascinating, fun to read, and full of information that isn’t really found elsewhere.
Relatedly, this year I read both John Keegan’s The First World War, and A Century of Conflict, which is a compilation of British revisionist historian AJP Taylor’s writings about Europe from the mid-19th century through the Second World War. Both are quite interesting. Keegan’s work is very mainstream, but still interesting on the whole, and a good one-volume history of the war. Taylor’s work is somewhat more unique, but lacks the failures of most revisionist histories of the 20th century, namely their tendency to be totally adulatory of the Germans.
Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America by Michael Hiltzik
One of the most fascinating aspects of post-Civil War America is the building of the railroads, the story told in Iron Empires. Between the end of the war and 1873, the railroads laid thirty-five thousand miles of track, more than existed in all of America’s rail network before 1860. It then expanded yet more in the next two decades: “by 1895, railroad capitalization was fourteen times the national debt, and four times all local, state, and federal debt combined. At that point, 183,601 miles of rail line had been laid, approximately 42 percent of the global total.”1 Some, such as Hill’s Great Northern, did so well, responsibly, and profitably. Others, such as the Union Pacific and Erie, were disasters that were overburdened with debt by their irresponsible and rapacious owners, who used them more as a means by which the public could be milked than as a way of making reasonable profits while building the nation.
The stories that come from the monumental feat of building the railroads, and the wars between the rail barons that then resulted as scheming plutocrats tried to build massive empires of steel that crossed the nation, are incredible. Wall Street booms and busts, fabulously exciting tales of man defeating nature, fascinating stories of the financing and stock shenanigans that went into the rail buildout, and more characterize the era. Hiltzik tells it all well in Iron Empires, managing to write a book that is exciting and interesting as it is packed full of facts about an era not that dissimilar from our present AI buildout.
Also notable on this note, and not discussed elsewhere in this article, are The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles, James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest by Michael P. Malone, and The Tycoons by Charles Morris. All three are quite good, and similarly fun to Iron Empires. They are packed full of facts about how the Gilded Age was built, told via tales that are far more exciting than much of our dreary business environment, and just generally interesting. The Tycoons also includes a good discussion of the rise of managerialism, which is a subject I find quite important, and James J. Hill shows what made him so different from many of his railroading contemporaries, making it an insightful book on business growth and development in addition to being a fun to read history of one of the great Gilded Age Robber Barons.
Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families by Johann Kurtz
I have written a review of Leaving a Legacy and did a podcast with Johann on it, so little more needs to be said: it is fabulous, and if dynasty interests you, it is a great way to start digging into the subject from a moral and practical basis. Johann also discusses the issues in it with kindness and understanding rather than the blase attitude of most on our side, which makes it a good one to give as a gift.
Related to this one is Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites: A Theme Illuminating American Social History by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, which I also read this year. It is fantastic, and well worth your time, particularly if you are interested in the moral basis of aristocracy. Further, de Oliveira’s comparison of the Southern gentry in America with the Brazilian aristocracy is fascinating, and something I haven’t read elsewhere. Overall, this is a great book on both the Christian basis for a true aristocracy and the inegalitarian nature of much of America’s social history.
Check out my review of Leaving a Legacy here:
And check out our podcast here:
Lee: A Biography by Clifford Dowdey
One of the greatest Americans to exist was Robert E Lee. He was a man defined by his commitment to doing his duty, and who spent his whole life doing not that which he wanted but that which he saw as being the honorable, gentlemanly thing to do. His deep commitment to his family, Christian faith, perfection as a gentleman in the highest sense of the term, and love of Virginia were paired with immense talent and likeability, turning him into one of, if not the, greatest of the Southern gentlemen. Clifford Dowdey in his fantastic Lee: A Biography does a fabulous job of showing how Virginia’s history and culture built Lee, along with what in Lee’s family background and character made him the man he was. It is a fantastic portrait and study of the character of one of the greatest Americans, and what made him great. If you are at all interested in anything related to American history, the South, or being a gentleman, it is a must read.
Also written by Dowdey that I read this year are The Great Plantation, The Virginia Dynasties, and The Golden Age. All three tell the story of how Virginia was built, with a focus on how the colonists turned it into a land of fabulous plantations managed by gentlemen who saw it as their duty to lead, how those great planters were supported by agriculture and mercantile ventures, and how their leadership charted both the course of Virginia and early America.
The Virginia Dynasties was my favorite of these, as it focuses on the great planters of the first century or so of the Old Dominion’s history, and I find that period the most interesting. The Great Plantation is probably the best of the three to read if you are only going to read one, as it has much of the most important information from the others and uses that to tell the tale of Virginia from the earliest colonists through the end of the nineteenth century through the lens of one of its greatest and oldest plantations. The Virginia Dynasties was far less interesting than I expected, and was merely fine rather than great; Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters and Stanley Elkins’s The Age of Federalism do just as good a job of showing how Virginia’s gentlemen stamped their face on the nation, and are far more interesting to read.
Also quite good, and related to Lee, is Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S. C. Gwynne. It is a fabulous study of the man on whom Lee relied most, and who might have helped him win the war at Gettysburg had he survived Chancellorsville. While I find Lee, Wade Hampton III, and JEB Stuart to be generally more interesting characters than Jackson, this book is still quite good, and is really worth reading if you are interested in the subject.
The Serpent and the Stag: The Saga of England’s Powerful and Glamourous Cavendish Family from the Age of Henry the Eighth to the Present by John Pearson
What does it take for a family to survive over centuries? What financial moves are prudent, in the proper context, and what imprudent moves and feckless heirs can be survived if the form of wealth is structured correctly? Such is what Pearson shows in his The Serpent and the Stag, a great book about a family that rose to prominence during the time of the Tudors and is still wealthy, powerful, and culturally relevant today. The Cavendish family, after all, still owns Chatsworth, the most beautiful and impressive of the famous British country houses.
What makes Pearson’s work so fabulous is that he manages to put the head of the family at each generation in their proper context, to show both how the era made the man (or woman, in the case of the incredibly interesting Bess of Hardwick), and how the Cavendish family exerted its political, financial, and cultural influence upon the era. While some of the biographies of the various patriarchs that compose the book are more interesting than others, overall they present a compelling and well-crafted narrative of how a family can survive half a millennium and what life was like in Britain, at least at the very peak of the socio-economic pyramid, in each period of British history.
I also read Aristocrats by Robert Lacey this year. While generally more superficial than what I like (though it does go into deep detail about how the Grosvenors kept their fortune intact, which is great), it does a good job of profiling some of the few aristocratic families in Europe that have been around and powerful for a thousand years, showing what it is about those families that has enabled them to survive in a world increasingly hostile to them. It’s quite interesting, and the stories and anecdotes Lacey uses to tell it make it a pleasure to read.
Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu by Bernard Fall
Dien Bien Phu is one of those stories most of us hear when learning about the Cold War in middle or high school. “The French lost a big battle because their generals were imbeciles, and then the guys who became the communists we fought took over part of the country…America did nothing about that because it didn’t want to be racist” is usually how the tale is told, and then class moves on. What Bernard Fall does in Hell in a Very Small Place is show what actually happened. He shows why the French settled on Dien Bien Phu as a base, what about their war effort and the conditions inside Indochina made it indefensible, and what the fighting was like as the French desperately tried to hold onto it.
Further, he manages to turn that into a compelling narrative that shows why the French were doing what they were doing and how flawed their war effort was, while also dispelling most of the myths about the siege, particularly those related to artillery and desertion. It is really good, and immensely interesting if painful to read.
On the subject of French Indochina, this year I also read Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall and Background to Betrayal by Hillaire du Berrier, which was recently republished by the John Birch Society. Both are more full studies of what happened in French Indochina and why they lost. Street Without Joy is good, but not as well done as Hell in a Very Small Place; the narrative isn’t quite as well put together, the stories used are less interesting, and overall it’s just not as good. Background to Betrayal is a must-read. It is fabulously done, a real page turner despite essentially being a diplomatic and political history. Further, it shows how leftist American thoughts regarding colonialism were very much to blame in the French defeat, and how we repeatedly aided the communists.
Finally, I read The Vietnam War: A Military History by Geoffrey Wawro and Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings. Both are primarily about the American war effort, though the French war effort is mentioned. Neither is very good; both are fine enough if you want a one-volume history of the war, but are full of flaws in narrative, interpretation, and framing that make them near-unreadable to those with a rightist view of history who understand the essentially leftist nature of American involvement in the war.
Check out my review of Background to Betrayal here:
The National System of Political Economy by Friedrich List
I have written much about tariffs and referenced List’s The National System of Political Economy repeatedly, as I think it is one of the most important books an American can read. The simple fact is that we have been lied to about tariffs: far from being unvarnished negatives, they are what built America…and the Tiger Economies in Asia…and the German Empire…and even Britain, before its leaders radically changed course, quite to their detriment. List explains why that is, and why tariffs are so important, with a historical focus that makes The National System of Political Economy not just revisionist, but well-supported by historic fact.
As this work was the basis of the American System that was used over the course of the Twentieth Century to make America the fabulously wealthy economic behemoth it became, and it is rejecting List’s ideas that have hollowed out America, this really is a must read. It’s also quite interesting, and well-written, rather than being a dry economic work of the sort one might expect.
Check out my full review of it here:
Books I Thought Were Awful
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
Dominion is a weird book. The first half or so, where Holland tells the tale of how Christianity overtook first the Roman Empire and then later the whole European medieval world, is reasonably good. It’s not perfect, and Holland’s leftist bias is grating, but it’s good enough and relatively interesting. But then he changes tacks. Instead of continuing to just tell the history of Christianity, he uses vague generalities about the church as a means by which he pushes every form of liberal/leftist subversion imaginable. This goes from being odd his chapters on the Reformation to infuriating and utterly absurd once he gets to the hippies and cultural chaos of the 60s. Overall, it’s very weird, and exceptionally dumb.
All his other books are “fine” instead of good. They’re less subversive than Dominion, and include some interesting historical details, but generally suffer from a leftist point of view that is ridiculous when applied to the world of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism by Susan Berfield
Much like Dominion, The Hour of Fate is a book that should have been good. The subject—the bitter political battles between Teddy Roosevelt and JP Morgan seen during Roosevelt’s presidency—is an interesting and exciting one, and represents a major transition point in American history. Somehow, Berfield turns that into a tedious and boring history of bits and pieces of the battle between them that is largely devoid of a coherent narrative structure or important details that would have made it whole.
How she did so is beyond me, as the two incidents she chooses as the focus of the book, the Northern Securities controversy and the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike, are both ones that lend themselves well to story-based histories of the late Gilded Age, the Morgan view of business, labor relations, or any other conceivable way of framing it. But this book is a trainwreck, so all of that is lost. The one redeeming feature is that it is relatively short, so the time commitment necessary to slog through it is somewhat limited.
The Iron Barons: A Social Analysis of an American Urban Elite, 1874-1965 by John Ingham
The Iron Barons is another book that should have been interesting. The steel industry was the bedrock of American prosperity and industrial might over the course of the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Postwar Era. A study into who controlled it and how that shaped American culture and class mobility, therefore, should have been at least somewhat interesting, particularly given the characters like Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan who were so intimately involved in it.
Unfortunately, Ingham spends nearly the entirety of the book avoiding such stories and incidents that would have lent themselves well to such a study. He doesn’t even have a narrative. Instead, the book is a collection of charts and bland descriptions of them, with bland attempts at narrative that are all the more annoying as they are somehow even more boring than the charts. To be fair, the information included in this one is at least valuable, unlike most of the others in this section. But Ingham does a frustratingly poor job turning that oftentimes quite interesting information regarding class mobility and who the capitalists were into a book, thus making it one I very much didn’t enjoy and can’t recommend.
For those interested in the subject who want a better book, David Nasaw’s biography of Andrew Carnegie is reasonably good. It’s not fantastic and is a bit overly long, but is at least interesting and relatively enjoyable to read. Further, it provides something of a history of the iron and steel industries, as well as how they fit into and impacted established society and more general American economic development.
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles Marohn Jr.
As I noted in my review of it, Strong Towns is terrible. The author’s leftist bias means he’s utterly unwilling to come to terms with why American urban zones have declined and are continuing to decline: black crime and our inability, thanks to the Civil Rights Act and like legislation, to prevent or deal with it. Instead he focuses on municipal debt and tax policy, which are interesting and relevant enough in a vacuum, but absolutely ridiculous to focus on when the real problem is so far removed from them. That makes the book useless, as it makes his policy prescriptions and interpretations of such subjects as Detroit’s decline buffoonish.
For those interested in the development of towns and cityes in America, Nature’s Metropolis is a quite good history of Chicago, and Gotham is a good history of New York. Both are about the frontier days through the end of the 20th century, with a focus on how the cities impacted that to which they were most relevant; in the case of Chicago, that is the agricultural sector in the Midwest, and in the case of New York, it is finance and culture. Both also very good tellings of how new cities were built out of nothing.
For those interested in how black crime destroyed America’s cities, Days of Rage covers this in some of its chapters, with a focus on the utter destruction of New York City over the 1970s; while flawed in some ways, overall the book is quite good and worth reading. I got a lot out of it when reading it this year.
Check out my review of Strong Towns here:
William the Conqueror by David Bates
William the Conqueror was one of the greatest warlords in Medieval history despite that being a time of great warlords, and he managed to also be an effective king. So, one would think a history of such a brutal genius of a knight and conqueror would at least be exciting to read. Not so, in the case of David Bates’s William the Conqueror. It somehow manages to turn one of the great stories of the Medieval world into a lengthy compilation of tedium. It is at least informative, and Bates doesn't suffer from the same issues in political framing as the others. But it is boring. So boring that it was difficult to even skim, in fact, as I kept falling asleep while trying to read it. I have no idea how he achieved that level of tedium, but somehow he did, and it’s an awful book as a result.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Debt was one of the worst books I have ever read. It was one that came recommended by someone (though I forget who that was), and otherwise I wouldn’t have read it. But buy and read it I did, and I very much regret that. It is utterly awful, a book without a single redeeming characteristic or interesting page.
Graeber is essentially an anarcho-communist, and uses that to weave a bizarre and incoherent tale of why access to credit through debt is 1) good, and 2) evil because it oppresses poor people who should 3) be allowed to renege on their debts if in (or perhaps from) Third World hellholes. It is a stupid and ridiculous book that includes all the worst ideas of communism, anarchism, and a generally liberal view of social justice. Every copy of it, and Graeber himself, should be thrown into a volcano.
The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions by Victor Haghani and James White
The Missing Billionaires is a book that Johann Kurtz has repeatedly cited, and one which I heard others mention. So, I decided to give it a read despite generally disliking this genre of work.
On the one hand, it is interesting. The central insight of the authors is that a simple glance at the great fortunes of the early twentieth century, the historic overall returns in bond and equity markets seen since then, mean that there should be vastly more billionaires today than actually exist, even after the sky-high death taxes and income taxes of the period are considered, and relatively exorbitant amounts of spending factored in. Yet those billionaires don’t exist because the money was wasted on unbelievable extravagance, frittered away on risky speculation, not invested wisely, etc. So that is interesting, and an important insight in terms of what it means for legacy planning, but it could have been a ~3000-word article rather than a book.
To flesh out the booth with the ~100,000 other words, the authors develop an absurdly complicated and esoteric matrix for making decisions about risk, investment, spending, and the like. Given that one of them worked at Long Term Capital Management, which blew up because of such overcomplications and imprudent decision-making related to trusting in it, that overall drift of the book makes sense. But it is still dumb, and makes the book largely ridiculous and uninteresting, outside of its central insight. Once again, that is unfortunate, as this could have been a quite good book that could be passed around like Leaving a Legacy to those interested in the subject. Instead, it’s a ridiculous book that stands as a testament to the hubris of the authors.
The Age of Jackson by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
The Age of Jackson is a book wholly destroyed by the author’s sense of self-importance and liberal bias. What could have been a quite interesting study of life in America during the radical and upending Jacksonian period is instead a boring, far-left history that I found essentially unreadable. I alternated between extreme annoyance and immense drowsiness when reading it, which hardly recommends it.
For those interested in Jackson, Robert Remini’s The Life of Andrew Jackson, which I read this year, is very good. While not as superb as Remini’s three-volume history of Jackson, which I read a few years ago, it is still quite good and informative. It’s also an easier place to begin. Either option is vastly preferable to Schlesinger’s catastrophically terrible book.
Thanks for reading! Enjoy these books, and Merry Christmas!
Featured image credit: Dr. Marcus Gossler, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
The Amazon lists have just got even longer
Just a heads up, the Amazon link for the new printing editions of Background to Betrayal appears to lead to a page that no longer exists ie the page is gone. When I search for the new print edition of the book through Amazon, it also no longer comes up. Who knows if this is temporary or permanent (and deliberate), but for now the books can be bought through the publisher for the new prints.