Another super late post. Where did 2025 go? Here are my best books of 2025 from the first half of the year. As always, history makes the deepest impressions.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’m STILL having a blast with my bookstagram account. I’m way more active there, posting multiple times in a week. Follow me @obsessivelybookishjojo to see what I’m reading!
This was my first 5-star read of 2025. An incredibly gripping book that is both inspiring and enraging!
Telling the stories of female scientists at MIT, who forced a reckoning in scientific academia of its persistent and longstanding discrimination against female faculty, Zernike’s fantastic storytelling weaves these women’s individual stories into a compelling pattern of marginalization, both subtle and explicit, in the highest levels of science.
The book is anchored by Nancy Hopkins, who, like many women who come of age in scientific fields, starts off believing that science is a meritocracy and that discrimination is a thing of the past. The women’s evolution towards understanding what discrimination and harassment mean through their experiences is so relatable.
Boy, am I glad to be a STEM woman now. While there are still many issues to address, it is a world of a difference than what Hopkins et. al faced when they were building their careers. I don’t know how they could be so productive while also dealing with fighting for lab space, being underpaid, sacrificing their personal lives, having their work taken from them, not to mention the open groping by famous scientists (!!!) and assault!
The book’s ending is definitely not the ending of the fight for women in science. I feel like saluting to women like Hopkins, who literally pave the way for a better experience for the next generation, of which I am a part.
I highly recommend this book, especially if you’re interested in women’s history or science. Zernike’s writing creates an immersive experience that propels you from one episode to the next. There’s not a dull moment in this book.
What a banger of a book!
I’m a big fan of books that take their time and cover hundreds of years of history, because often, certain things are clarified only if you take this kind of scope. It was such a privilege and honor to stay focused on this Caribbean island for 500 years in this book.
I love how this book is written. It tells not only of the leaders, dictators, and revolutionaries of the land, but also the people who move and shape Cuban history. It also exhibits how history “always looks different depending on where one stands.” This is “a history of Cuba that functions also as kind of history of the United States,” how its geography forms its history with its northern, powerful neighbor.
My favorite quote from the book:
“The long and fraught encounter between Cuba and the United States was instead a struggle between American power and Cuban sovereignty, and about what the character and limits of each would be. But for Cubans to assert their sovereignty as they did—in opposition to their northern neighbor’s long presumption of direct and indirect rule—was not just to press their right to self-rule. It was also fundamentally to challenge Americans’ very notion of themselves as a nation. Cuban history can have many meanings, and many functions. One of the many things it can do, as I’ve said before, is to serve as a mirror for the history of the United States. And in that mirror, the American empire for liberty…is revealed differently. Not as an empire for liberty at all, but just an empire.”
Ferrer’s insights that often appear at the end of each chapter are fascinating, rooted in in-depth research and reflections on Cuba. One thing that I wished the book fleshes out more is the people’s experiences during Fidel Castro’s reigns. It definitely makes me want to read more about Cuba.
This pairs really well with How to Hide an Empire, one of my favorites last year.
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A superb analysis of the century between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. Gates guides readers from the Reconstruction Era to the Redemption era (wherein the South “redeems” itself), the nadir of Jim Crow, where the progress achieved during Reconstruction was dismantled and more. He draws a historical pattern of backlash against any major Black progress, including the era after the first Black POTUS.
If you’ve heard about the narrative war that the South won post Civil War, this book breaks down how that narrative of white supremacy became embedded in the cultural psyche: through an orchestra of intellectual and artistic works that include literature, writings, science, art, movies, and paraphernalias.
The inclusion of many of these visuals in the book demands and dares us to confront this dark history face to face. It doesn’t let you escape it, which gives a minuscule glimpse of how violent and pervasive the resubjugation of Black Americans was.
But that’s not the whole story. Gates also tells of the valiant fights by Black Americans to combat these forces for the world to see their humanity, brilliance, and cultural contributions. The last part of the book brings us through World War I and the Harlem Renaissance, illuminating the competing and nuanced visions among Black leaders and creators to fight for Black Americans to speak for themselves.
It took me a long time to read through this book because it deserves the time and reflection to process its arguments. I shelve it as a must-read on Black history.
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For American readers, neighborhoods don’t look the same way again after this book. Now you squint and wonder about the questions the book asks—who are out and who are in?
The central argument of THE COLOR OF LAW is that segregation in American cities and suburbs was not a de facto phenomenon (i.e., emerging from individual or private parties’ choices and prejudices); it was a de jure segregation, created by the laws and policies of federal, state, and local governments.
Rothstein systematically argues ten aspects of how de jure segregation came to be, including zoning laws, public housing, IRS, Black Americans’ income suppression, and others. In many places, it destroyed previously integrated neighborhoods. The resulting effect is the cornering of Black Americans in segregated living spaces with compounding, generational impact of being excluded from the wealth-building opportunities afforded to white Americans. It also means that a lot of the nation’s prosperity in the 20th century was subsidized through the labor of Black Americans.
Reading this book reminds me much of the land grab campaign that America’s western expansion did to Native Americans; a similar, suffocating experience while reading BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE by Dee Brown.
But because BURY MY HEART has THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE by David Treuer, which is a response that celebrates Native American lives through each government policy and reshapes their image in popular imagination (not just victims, but much, much more), I wonder if there is a corollary to THE COLOR OF LAW. Instead of an outsider’s voice, I wonder if there is a similar insider voice that tells the same history from the lens of Black Americans.
All in all, pick this book up for the compelling analysis, but don’t leave out Black voices on the topic.
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Superb investigative journalism about hell on earth.
To uncover the workings of one of the most insidiously secretive institutions in America, namely the private, for-profit prisons, Bauer goes on an undercover mission to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison facility owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). For 4 months, he witnesses, covertly records, and takes notes of the daily happenings in this hellhole, while also being a part of all kinds of psychological games that inmates and guards play on each other.
This reporting though is more than just about the people in this facility. It is also (and primarily so) about the system that creates and incentivizes the dysfunctions. You can imagine how a company that cares about the bottom line treats the safety and health of both inmates and their own employees. It is an inquiry about how money, greed, and the corporate model handle the “corrections” of human beings (they don’t), how they exploit society’s desire to not think about this too much and get away with so much wrong.
In between chapters that tell of his experiences, Bauer also covers the informative history of prisons in America and its evolution since the antebellum era. There was a time when prisons were privatized, then practices of convict leasing became popular, to prison farms, chain gangs, until today’s once-again rising private prisons. These all are torture houses. If you’ve heard about how mass incarceration evolves from slavery, Bauer shows it step by step how closely tied they are together.
The most chilling sentence in the book is this:
“Immigration detention, after all, is the frontier of private prison growth.”
There is a reflective question that the book quietly asks, what kind of society allows this to happen? Like Bryan Stevenson says, “You judge the character of a society by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated.” There is an indictment here of how profit tortures people. When push comes to shove, if you serve the god of money, you will trade in human souls.
This is such an important book and an incredible investigative journalistic work. If you’re interested in mass incarceration and the criminal justice system, this covers the private prison part of it. It’s a grueling read because of the subject, but the writing is propulsive and excellent.
Incisive, biting, sardonic, witty, fiery, and cutting. This is singularly unique memoir of a singularly unique life.
I have never read anything like this. Nguyen’s sharp words combine with the unique format, including the second-person voice, the playful formatting of inner dialogues and adjacent thoughts, the placement and sizes of fonts. Everything is working very effectively in producing a clear voice that is unequivocal and unapologetic in analyzing his own experience not “from and about the bright center of empire” but from its “shadows and far reaches.”
His outsiderness gives him a clear view of the violence behind AMERICA™.
This book is also, incredibly, a tender story about his family. There is so much pain that they bear in both worlds, Vietnam and America, and they do it with much grace.
There are so many profound things in this book, it’s hard to capture in a short review. All I can say is that I highly recommend it.
If you enjoy these reviews, come over to @obsessivelybookishjojo! These are essentially repurposed from my posts there.
Favorite Books Lists
2024: Best Books of 2024 Part 1, Best Books of 2024 Part 2.
2023: Best Books of 2023 Part 1, Best Books of 2023 Part 2.
2022: Best Books of 2022 Part 1, Best Books of 2022 Part 2.
2021: Best Books of 2021 Part 1, Best Books of 2021 Part 2.
2020: Best Books of 2020 Part 1, Best Books of 2020 Part 2.
2019: Best Books of 2019 Part 1, Best Books of 2019 Part 2.
2018: Best Books of 2018 Part 1, Best Books of 2018 Part 2.
2017: Best Books of 2017 Part 1, Best Books of 2017 Part 2.
2016: Best Books of 2016 Part 1, Best Books of 2016 Part 2.
2015: Best Books of 2015 Part 1, Best Books of 2015 Part 2.
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