Posts published in December 2025

Once again, a disproportionate share of my reading this year was a reflection on what was going on in the world at large; maybe the realities were just too compelling to avoid. (That's while I also was spending more time watching DVDs and streaming, the bulk of that fiction, so may be these were balancing sides.) If 2024 was (I wrote a year ago) "a year in which more people could have used a little more reflection," then 2025 was a year that got in our faces and climbed all over us. Reading non-relevant material most of the time would seemed like a copout. The sole function entry here is as pertinent as any of the nonfiction.

As before: These are a few reflections on books I read for the first time this year - not necessarily the 10 best, exactly, but those which had the largest impact on me. Not all were recently published, though most were, but they all were new to me this year.

And once again, they're listed here in alphabetical order (by author name), not preferential ranking, which would be too problematic for books as different as these.

 

Zeinab Badawi - An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence (2025). The title overstates a little,in that (as the author quickly acknowledges) this isn't really a fully comprehensive history of the continent: Even if it were skimming, that would require quite a few large volumes.

What it does do, very well, is to pick out key turning points and instances that show what Africa's history generally was like and how it developed. Large parts of this have appeared in other book over the years (as in the empire of Mali) but others seem to have slipped into real obscurity until Badawi brought them forth (as in the Nubian kingdom).

Among Americans, there's probably a widespread sense that Africa had little history other than in the context of its interactions with Europe and America. It fact as much as going on in that continent as in Europe or Asia, but developed in different ways, as the nature of the continent provides different constraints and incentives. A view of the continent from the continent has been long needed. If you want to find out what you've been missing in a less-explored part of world history, here's a good place to start.

Darryl Campbell  - Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software (2025). There's a concept here addressed in other books but more broadly: That as business managers move away from the direct ownership and control of the people who invented and personally operated and created the goods or services, into the hands of people who knew how to manage but lack the hands-on understanding of the substance of the business ... that, well, things go wrong.

Managing the numbers - which is what management training largely is about ("you can't manage it if you can't measure it") - is useful, but it only gets you do far, and it can easily send you down blind alleys. That has happened in many kinds of businesses, as many consumers (or employees or suppliers or simply citizens) could tell you. But the implications may be especially vast when it comes to software, and the companies - titans like Meta and Apple and Microsoft and Alphabet - that rely on it.

The original intended uses of software in places like Facebook were vastly different than what has emerged in the last decade-plus. Campbell gets int the guts of how and why that happened, and it's not a pretty story.

Paul Thomas Chamberlin - Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (2025) As I read this book, it didn't seem to support the shorthand version of what it seemed to be arguing: That World War II wasn't so much the good-vs-evil conflict most of us have come to understand, but rather a massive conflict between long-established and upstart empires.

The strength of the book, though, is that Chamberlin doesn't try to push his premise too hard. He makes good cases for the relative positioning of various nations, and their aspirations, as key components in how the war developed: It's more a slightly adjusted lens than a whole new world view.

That said, with the strong analysis here over a mass array of scholarship which has continued to develop decades after this conflict, there's also this: Scorched Earth is just about as good a one-volume history of World War II, where it came from and why it happened as it did, as you'll find. A longish but smooth read that will leave you better informed, with some new thoughts along the way.

Brian Goldstone - There Is No Place for Us (2025). Any of us could be a few missteps or misfortunes away from the kind of stories told in There Is No Place for Us, the most remarkable book I read in the first half of this year. And that ought to be enough to keep us all awake, because those stories are a series of revolving nightmares - close enough to our own realities that they ought to kick home hard.

The subtitle for the book, by journalist Brian Goldstone, is Working and Homeless in America, which is accurate enough but, like the title, needs some definition and clarification. That in fact is part of what the book does.

The book follows the lives, over about a five year time period (up to about 2022)  of five families in Atlanta, Georgia, describing in detail what they're going through as they try to find an affordable place to live. Here's one of the twists: All of them (or at least the head of household in each case, and sometimes others in the family as well) work full time. With one exception, they are not substance abusers (the significant exception is an alcoholic, driven to it in part because of the housing nightmare). Nor are they (again, with one debatable exception) contending with mental issues. These are people struggling with a web of bad options and no clear way out.

The more recurring theme is the lack of affordable housing - or put another way, the astounding high cost of rent and real estate in recent years. These people are working for minimum wage or not much more, but they are consistently working, and they cannot find a place to live that fits anywhere close to their budget. That is a situation many of us should be able to identify with.

On the rental side, Goldstone writes the nation now has a deficit of 7.3 million low-income apartments - a vastly higher deficit than in decades earlier. "Giant private equity firms, institutional investors and corporate landlords have been buying up properties en masse and then jacking up rents beyond the rate of inflation, 're-tenanting' buildings (replacing poorer tenants with wealthier ones), and neglecting basic maintenance because they know that if one household moves out, another will quickly take its place."

In Atlanta, he writes, a few mega-firms have swept up tens of thousands of residences, raising rates and making them all but unaffordable to most people - in fact, nationally, only about 15% of people can afford the standard basic apartment rates. This sounds like a broken business model, but it yields massive income at least in the short time, as Goldstone explains.

Remember: However secure you may think you are, you're not all that far away from joining their ranks. May you have better luck than these people have had.

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024). A bestseller, and on merit from the standpoint of putting a useful framework around a serious complex of social problems which had not been so well defined before. Here, specifically: The effect smart phones and related electronics have had on children in the last 16 years or so (basically, since the advent of the iPhone).

Author Adam Grant had this reaction: "Jonathan Haidt makes a powerful case that the shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods is wreaking havoc on mental health and social development. Even if you’re not ready to ban smartphones until high school, this book will challenge you to rethink how we nurture the potential in our kids and prepare them for the world.”

Haidt doesn't actually go that far; he is working in matters of degree and a balancing of benefit and harm. This isn't a hard-edged manifesto. But that careful reliance on solid research helps, and so does the relatively modest set of steps he recommends that could have an outsized positive effect. Quite a few public officials seem almost to have been reading this in the moves nationwide to scale back the use of phones during school days. That and more could provide a great turnaround in years to come, for a while generation that wasn't prepared for the technology they're now living with.

 

Brian Hill - Unconstrained (2024). The lone faction title here, but rooted in one of our big actual concerns (and terrors). As computing power, and its free-standing independence, grows, it can seem bewildering It may feel like a big problem, or potential problem, but is this something that can actually be potentially serious?

This feels almost like a counterpart to a book I read last year (and published about the same time) called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, which outlined a fictional but highly plausible doomsday scenario showing how an actual nuclear war in our age might happen. That one was categorized as non-fiction, but it is an extrapolation, and a warning.

This "near-future sci-fo thriller" about artificial intelligence is set in September 2032, focusing on a next-generation AI that has developed a sort of independent sentience and the ability not only to re-program itself but also reprogram any other computing device (think of a car or refrigerator or outdoor cooking stove as well as the more obvious) for its purposes. Its intent is not defined as malign, but its activities could be enormously damaging to our kind of life forms.

The point here is that AI can "think" faster and with fewer errors than humans can. All of the instructions to creating such a device have been up to now crafted by humans, but we're either at or approaching a point where the coding inside an AI may be so complex that no human can comprehend it. That's the point reached (by a human research and development tech firm, which creates "the Intelligence") at the beginning of this story. Where the "intelligence" takes things from there is the meat of the story.

Hill does something else useful here by way of reinforcing the independence of this creation in writing scattered chapters in the books from the viewpoint of the AI itself - making it in effect another character in the book, and as active as any of the humans. While Hill outlined one way an AI creation could go rogue and do damage, it's far from the only way. If guardrails aren't placed around this tech sometime soon, we all could find out about some of the others the hard way.

Patrick McGee - Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (2025). By all rights, a richly-reported and thickly-detailed book about informational finance and business dealings on a large scale shouldn't have the tightly-knit plotting and thematic through liner of a pulp novel. And yet this one does, which fact ought to send a shiver down your spine.

The reason is that the biggest (depending on how you count) company in the United States and maybe the world,m and certainly on the very short list of most influential, has inb essence been captured by China. It's an old movie plot really, maybe that of a screwball comedy or a Loony Tunes cartoon: The overconfident hunter becomes the prey. Apple needed a massive amount of cutting-edge production work done at high speed and low cost, and couldn't get it done almost anywhere but China. Over time, China became not only the production core but also a central market for Apple, and the balance of power shifted. Saying Apple now is at China's mercy would not be going too far.

Do you use Apple products - an iPhone, a computer, an online service, something else? Many millions of Americans do. The implications are vast, and getting vaster at a time when no one in the United States seems willing or able to deal with it.

Tim Minshall - How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing (2025). Here's an entertaining book about how the hidden (from the public) side of manufacturing businesses actually work. (It's one of several on that general subject I've read in recent years, and maybe the best.) It's even short, fewer than 200 pages. But it covers the general field of how manufacturing is getting done, and how it is transforming.

The stories have a homely rather than cutting-edge kind of base. Minshall opens, for example, with the story of how you make a roll of toilet paper (and why it's a more difficult process than you might imagine).

This could amount to a collection of trivia except that Minshall also has some prescriptions for how to improve our often-flawed systems. As a description said, "along the way, he explores how we can improve the fragility of our global manufacturing system and the impact it has on the natural world, pre4senting a path to a trult sustainable future."

It's actually one of the more hopeful books I read during the year.

Jeff Pearlman - Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (2025). If you're not a fan of rap, well, fine; I'm not. And still wasn't after reading this book (though it did prompt me to check out a few specific recordings). But this artful biography, my favorite bio of the year, got to me precisely because it got behind the stereotypes and explored, among other things, what happened when a highly unusual and individualistic person tried to live up to a stereotyped image.

In this case, he died.

Rap and especially gangsta tap is largely about attitude (it has that in common when many fields of entertainment), and in a popular or commercial environment the attitude has to be match to the lifestyle and action if popularity is to continue. But the Tupac Shaker (his real name, which I hadn't realized - count that as my falling prey to presumptions) that Pearlman describes here was a highly artistic and sensitive, not to mention extremely talented, man. (He was almost shockingly sweeping in his music appreciation, which ranged to unlikely influences including the Indigo Girls and Don McLean.) He evidently capable of performing on stage in almost any of format needed. (His limited acting performances apparently included some extremely strong appearances, stealing scenes and reaching depths far more experienced actors didn't match.) He might have gone on to a wide range of unexpected successes had he lived.

It's another cautionary take, leading me to wonder who else I've misunderstood, and not least this: Don't prejudge people, maybe and even especially if they want you to.