5 Notable Books of 2025

Here are 5 works of nonfiction, which changed how I see and think about the world.

Photo by Mari Potter on Unsplash

As the end of the year approaches, I like to look back at the most noteworthy new books I have read in the past year. Since I look to new nonfiction books to find interviews for Public Sphere, these titles are all nonfiction; I read fiction too but the titles tend to be older. (Paid subscribers can see my 2024 list here.) Here is my list for 2025, in order of their release date.

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The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes. MS NOW host Chris Hayes writes about how algorithmic social media, smartphones, and Trump are all competing for the scarce resource of our attention. Hayes compares attention to Karl Marx’s theories about labor. Marx argued that humans became alienated from their labor because it had been commodified by companies who extracted it for profit; Hayes argues that tech companies have created alienation by commodifying our attention spans and extracting them for profit. Hayes’ recommendations are utterly ordinary, such as reading a newspaper or going for a walk, but they are precisely the quaint antedotes to a world which seems ever more fractured.

Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, by Victoria Amelina. The Ukrainian writer and human rights advocate Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in 2023. Her book was only about 60 percent finished when she died at age 37. The book’s opening sentence is powerful, just a few days before the full-scale invasion would upend her life: “I have just bought my first gun in downtown Lviv. I’ve heard that everyone is capable of killing, and those who say they aren’t just haven’t met the right person yet. An armed stranger entering my country might just be the right person.” The rest of the book consists of vignettes about her experience turning from a fiction and children’s book writer into a war crimes investigator. I met Amelina in Lviv in 2022; it’s a crime that her book will remain forever unfinished.

Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Why did so many Russians support Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Russian investigative journalists living in exile in London, try to answer that question by profiling their former friends. These Russians were once pro-Western liberals and turned into Kremlin lackeys; Soldatov and Borogan spoke to some of them for the book, and the result is chilling. These pro-Putin intellectuals are educated and aware of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, but they have various excuses about why the war is justified.

Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, by Vollker Ullrich, trans. Jefferson Chase.