Best non-fiction books of 2025

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, 1871-1918.

Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism: A Journey Through History.

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.

Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.

Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English.

Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.

Erik Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite.

Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025.

Jeff McMahan, editor, Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought.

Paul McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.

William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest.

Nicholas Walton, Orange Sky, Rising Water: The Remarkable Past and Uncertain Future of the Netherlands.

What else?  I will give you an update on anything notable I encounter between now and the end of the year.  And here is my earlier post on the best fiction of the year.