Political Books You’ll Want To Read Going Into 2025

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters.

A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times). On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

For six years, journalist Patricia Evangelista documented killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of then president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs — a crusade that led to the slaughter of thousands — immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of terror created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others. A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an investigation into the human impulses to dominate and resist.

The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell — and the ones we don’t — shape our realities. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world — and our own souls — and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline — amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.

From America’s favorite government teacher, a “fascinating and fun” (Adam Grant) portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country. In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.

A “gripping” (The Washington Post) account of how the major transformations in history — from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism — have been shaped not by humans but by germs. By placing disease at the center of this wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past — and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.

An award-winning journalist’s exploration of how race, identity, and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics.

Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: To maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

The essential new book by CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto, identifying a new, more uncertain global order with reporting on the frontlines of power, from existing wars to looming ones across the globe.

An urgent investigation into the experience of seeking an abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the life-threatening consequences of being denied reproductive freedom. “Indispensable … Whatever your gender, race, religious background, or political preferences, Luthra’s Undue Burden should be on your required reading list” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future. A master storyteller, Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world’s new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.

From the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail. In their new book, Acemoglu and Robinson build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history.

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer.

In a stirring and succinct examination of post-Roe America, “one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation” (Washington Post) takes on what’s become the country’s most resonant political issue.

A brilliant exploration of freedom — what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival — by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny. Intimate yet ambitious, this books helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.

With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: To stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order — and helping us to see how it might be otherwise — The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.