Books Read in 2025

~ loganfrederick

Two Stars

Three Stars

Four Stars

When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany – by Adam Fergusson

Democrats generally did not like to admit or acknowledge in 2024 that the election was about inflation and the cost of living. There was a lot of incredulity about “how could people vote for Trump”. But the historical analogy, which those same people are often apt to make, was sitting right in the history books: Hitler was elected into the German parliament. Why? At least partially because of the failure of the Weimer Republic which preceded him and the hyperinflation under their reign.

Fergusson here has concisely chronicled the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic through newspaper clippings and the diaries of everyday Germans. So much of all societies and history can be boiled down to the upper class fucking with the finances of the lower classes. And while inflation was not the sole reason for Hitler’s rise, it certainly did not help the prior regime’s popularity.

Readers may find the material academic and dry, but harsh realities are more often meant to sit with you uncomfortably, not entertainingly.

Fed Up: An Insider’s Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America – by Danielle DiMartino Booth

The Federal Reserve is one of the most powerful institutions of the world that the average American does not pay attention to or know anything about. Or at least it was until 2023, when inflation, interest rates, and cost of living became the hot topics going into the presidential election and people were looking for answers as to why their finances were fucked.

This memoir from a former staffer at the Dallas branch of the Fed is a great insiders dissection of the failures of the institution, which broadly fall into two categories: The hubris of those who’ve been leading the Fed the past 20 years, and their myopic view of the solution space to economic problems.

She documents how the Dallas Fed internally clashed with Janet Yellen both in her time at the San Francisco office and later as the Secretary of Treasury in DC, and her predecessor too-hands-off Tim Geithner in the run-up and fallout of the 2008 financial crisis.

Essentially, it was a detachment from the real economy and a breakdown of common sense amongst the academic class on how to deal with the economic tremors of the 2000s which seeded the Trump nationalist and Democratic socialist movements we’re seeing today.

Fed Up really earns its five star rank by being published in 2017, years before the interest rate calamities of the 2020s which ultimately proved correct much of what Danielle DiMartino Booth wrote.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company – by Patrick McGee

There has been a cultural anxiety about domestic jobs being relocated to China for a couple decades now, yet it’s unclear to me how much the average American understands how it happened.

McGee has chronicled in great detail the perfect example of this phenomena. Apple, a company started with its founders hand-building its first Macs, began its outsourcing journey in the 90s as a life- and money-saving move when the company was notoriously on the brink of bankruptcy before Steve Jobs’s return.

This fateful decision slid the company (and country) down the slippery slope of dependence on Foxconn, the cutthroat but undeniably effective manufacturer who paired Apple’s rise with its own and positioned it as the backbone for the world’s most popular hardware.

Apple in China is an incredible balance between micro-business tactics and the macro-geopolitical consequences of having one of our most valuable and important businesses embedded in a foreign country.

Stuck: How the Propertied and Privileged Broke the Engine of Opportunity – by Yoni Applebaum

The last Presidential election was decided by inflation, primarily of our most basic needs: food and shelter. Author Applebaum was prescient, claiming to have started Stuck a decade ago due to the popularity of the Rent is Too Damn High movement.

He chronicles the history of housing in America and how it has completely flipped upside down over time. At the turn of the 1900s, the average American was a renter and often actively migratory. This changed gradually as the century churned forward, often driven by Democrat policies that were more conservative than a modern member of the party would outwardly associate with. This includes, at best, overly optimistic efforts to maintain existing community cultures (in opposition to immigrants) and, at worst, outright racist zoning laws.

Both incredibly well-researched and readable, this is the book to understand the most important domestic political and economic issue of the moment.

Five Stars

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies – by Nick Bostrom

Before there was ChatGPT, before AI became all anyone talked about, there was a little 2014 book by Nick Bostrom whose paperback fits in the palm of the hand. As a professor of philosophy at Oxford, he was prescient about, or perhaps the progenitor of, what came to pass: the concept of superhuman intelligence, how perhaps the people who build this AI will need to be organized in something like a non-profit, and the tension between the need for international collaboration on this technology and the low likelihood of it taking place, just to list a few of the countless concepts he captured in this definitive work on artificial intelligence.

This is the book that was read by all the AI leaders you might just despise, except they read it a decade ago and were inspired to build the world in which we now live. For that reason, it may be the most important book of the 21st century.

Abundance – by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

This one got so much publicity that it makes less sense for me to explain the contents than to recommend one of the many interviews the authors

But for anyone who has tried to avoid politics the past couple years, the short synopsis is: Two left-leaning journalists try to paint a picture of a techno-utopian future. In doing so, they highlight how today’s politics prevent this from being a reality, especially the Democrat’s inability to manage their own states.

Ultimately, they’re providing imagination to a Democratic party which has had very little. If we want a brighter future for this country, then people fundamentally need to be more optimistic and believe tomorrow can be better than today. Abundance is the most mainstream attempt I’ve come across at making that point. That is the reason why I would both recommend everyone read it, and why it got as much press as it did.

Best Books of 2025

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – by Dan Wang

China’s rise is the overarching geopolitical topic of our times. Yet I get the sense that Americans around me don’t have the faintest idea of how China has become such a threat.

Breackneck is a fair-minded pros and cons analysis of the two cultures. The author essentially sums up the two cultures as the United States being led by lawyers and China led by engineers. This is evident in who fills their political rank and how their economy operates. China is a society of action. When done well has pulled a generation of its citizens out of poverty into middle class luxury, and when done poorly results in the efficient execution of minority genocides and unwanted children resulting in a demographic crisis. In America, our own preference for legalistic debate has mostly resulted in a broad economic malaise and a resentment for the only sector of the economy trying to grow (Silicon Valley).

This books supports an opinion of mine that is not appreciated by most Americans: Much of what has celebrated and rewarded politically and often financially in the United States the past two decades has been wrong, both morally and quantitatively. If these cultural undercurrents are not corrected, and doing things is prioritized at the same level as talking about how we feel about them, it puts Americans’ fundamental understanding of reality at risk of being lost to adversarial perspectives who absolutely do not care about our feelings.

Nuclear War: A Scenario – by Annie Jacobsen

A decade ago, I read what I would argue (mostly with myself) is the best book I’ve read since college: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, which tells the true story of a 1980 nuclear missile explosion in Arkansas and the risks of nuclear weapons in an era where they’ve faded out of people’s day-to-day concerns.

Nuclear War is the spiritual successor, this time shorter and blunter.

The format is unique. Without spoilers, Jacobsen establishes a scenario where another nation launches a nuclear missile at the United States. Minute-by-minute, of which we have very few, she walks through every important decision that needs to be made by members of government and the very minimal data they have with which to make it. It reads like an episode of 24, due to both pace and subject matter, made all the more horrifying by the plausibility.

All of this is informed by her extensive research and interviews with government personnel helping her paint the most realistic portrait of the apocalypse possible.There is no more important topic, and Jacobsen has written a definitive document on how it could realistically unfold.

Published by loganfrederick