In 2025, twelve of the fifty books I read were histories. Together they spanned continents, centuries, ideologies, and genres. Some were sweeping narratives of empires and revolutions, others intimate studies of lives, cities, and ideas. The authors ranged from Renaissance philosophers to contemporary journalists. Looking back on this collection now, I’m struck by both its variety and a quiet cohesion: these books are not just about the past, but about how societies contend with power, trauma, and the contested meanings of freedom.
Power and Its Discontents
John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics serves as a perfect starting point. It’s a clear-eyed survey of the evolution of economic thought and the ideological clashes that surround capitalism. Cassidy isn’t polemical; he’s analytical, tracing how thinkers from Keynes to Hayek shaped (and responded to) the 20th-century world. His book provides essential context for understanding how capitalist democracies weather crises, and how criticism from both the left and the right forms an inevitable—sometimes healthy—part of the system.
Cassidy’s exploration finds a natural companion in Civilization and Colossus, both by Niall Ferguson. In Civilization, Ferguson argues that the West’s dominance was no accident: it emerged from what he calls “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Colossus extends the conversation to American power specifically, casting the U.S. as an “empire in denial”—reluctant to assume the burdens of imperial responsibility, yet deeply embedded in global dominance. Taken together, Ferguson’s books present a provocative, often contrarian account of empire and modernization.
This theme—how power is structured, sustained, and eventually strained—runs through many of the books I read. Winston Churchill’s The Great Democracies, the final volume in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, revisits the rise of Britain and America with an unmistakable mid-20th-century tone of civilizational pride. Though his prose is magisterial, the world he writes about—the Anglo-American ascension—is already under siege by the time he sets his pen down.
War, Destruction, and the Edge of Civilization
Where Churchill evokes the glory of democratic power, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is a quiet but devastating meditation on the moral toll of war. Focused on the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, Sebald probes the silence in postwar German literature about civilian suffering. His prose, full of melancholic restraint, contrasts sharply with Ferguson’s triumphalism or Churchill’s rhetorical grandeur. If Ferguson describes the machinery of empire, Sebald offers a view from the ruins.
Sebastian Junger’s War and A Death in Belmont continue this investigation into conflict, though from very different vantage points. War is immersive and immediate—a journalistic account of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings of the post-9/11 era. Junger, embedded with the troops, captures not only combat but the paradoxical camaraderie that war breeds. In A Death in Belmont, he shifts to the domestic front, using a murder case from the 1960s to explore race, violence, and the lingering legacy of fear during the Boston Strangler era. The unspoken thread linking these two books is trauma—how it is felt, interpreted, and often mythologized.
William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid is another account of war—this time from the shadows. The biography of William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster who ran British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere during WWII, reads like a spy thriller. But it also documents how information, disinformation, and covert alliances shaped the outcome of global war. It’s hard to read this without seeing the roots of today’s surveillance state.
Democracy, Dissent, and Collapse
Lives in Context: Biography and Human Resilience
Several books focus less on systems and more on individuals. Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie offers a lucid, engaging portrait of the pioneering scientist. What makes this book memorable isn’t just the science—it’s the clarity with which Sobel evokes Curie’s grit, intelligence, and solitude. In a world dominated by male institutions and fragile egos, Curie carved out a space not only to survive, but to transform science itself.
Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is similarly intimate, though more philosophical. Drawing on American legal and political history, Rosen traces how the idea of “happiness” evolved from classical virtue to individual fulfillment. His book acts as a bridge between past and present, asking how the Founders’ conception of liberty and purpose translates into modern life.
Finally, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem and Titans of History offer sweeping panoramas of world history. Jerusalem is particularly compelling—a biography of a city that has witnessed more religious passion, conquest, and tragedy than perhaps any other. Montefiore manages to narrate this without reducing it to caricature. In Titans of History, he zooms out even further, offering biographical sketches of major historical figures from Hammurabi to Mandela. While more breezy and episodic, it reminds the reader that history is always the product of human choices—often flawed, sometimes visionary.
A Common Thread: Civilization Under Pressure
So what ties these twelve books together? At first glance, they range widely in subject and style. But read as a group, they seem to revolve around a core tension: how civilizations are built, how they are sustained, and how they fracture—through war, ideology, apathy, or internal contradiction.
Whether the topic is Machiavelli’s Ancient Rome, Churchill’s Britain, Sebald’s Germany, or Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the recurring question is this: how do societies balance power with principle, stability with freedom, and tradition with change? These books don’t offer easy answers. Some, like Ferguson or Murray, offer prescriptive warnings. Others, like Sebald or Junger, linger in the ambiguity and pain of aftermath.
Yet taken together, they offer something else: perspective. They show that history isn’t a neat progression or a morality tale. It’s a living, breathing record of decisions made under pressure. And reading these works in 2025—a time of rising authoritarianism, cultural anxiety, and digital fragmentation—I was reminded that history’s greatest lesson may be its refusal to simplify.
