10 Favorite History Books I Read in 2025

Studies in Strategy, War, and Politics

My 2025 reading list ended up tracing an unexpected arc, a study of how states think about power, why they wage war the way they do, and how institutions succeed, fail, and occasionally reinvent themselves. What began as a scattered set of titles slowly revealed a shared terrain: the psychological pathologies of military leadership, the rise and limits of airpower, the evolution of grand strategy, and the lived experience of soldiers caught inside vast geopolitical machinery. These ten books, spanning from the trenches of Verdun to the jungles of Burma, from the Truman administration’s internal debates to the cultural fantasies that shaped American airpower, all forced me to reconsider familiar narratives.

One of the surprises of the year was how rewarding it was to revisit older works of scholarship, books written before the archival revolutions, before the historiographical turns, before our present-day analytical fashions took hold. Their distance from contemporary debates gave them a clarity that often feels missing today, and their arguments stand or fall on conceptual strength rather than the novelty of new sources. Reading them alongside more recent studies made it easier to see how interpretations shift over time, and how specific insights endure despite the passage of decades. Taken together, these books made 2025 one of my richest years of historical reading, reminding me that understanding the past is less about accumulating facts than about interrogating the assumptions that shape how we tell the story of history in the first place.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence — Norman Dixon (1976)

Dixon’s examination of failure inside British military institutions is both clinical and unsettling, moving beyond caricatures of bad generals to expose the psychological and organizational structures that continually reproduce catastrophic decision-making. His argument, that certain institutional cultures select for conformity, emotional insecurity, and rigid hierarchical thinking, feels uncomfortably timeless. What I liked most is the way Dixon forces readers to confront how militaries can become self-reinforcing systems of denial, where “incompetence” is not an accident but an emergent property of the incentives within the organization. It is a book that lingers because it makes you look at every modern operational failure—from Crimea to the British misadventures in Mesopotamia—with a sharper, more skeptical eye.

The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon — Michael Sherry (1988)

Sherry’s cultural and intellectual history of airpower is one of the most incisive works on how Americans came to believe in the promise of strategic bombing. He traces how the airplane became entwined with ideas of technological salvation, sanitized violence, and national destiny, a mythology that hardened during World War II and persisted into the nuclear age. Sherry refuses to separate technology from imagination; he shows how political leaders, military planners, and the public projected fantasies of precision and moral superiority onto a weapons system that rarely delivered either. For anyone trying to understand why the United States still gravitates toward airpower as a solution to complex political problems, this book offers the intellectual genealogy.

The Fate of the Day — Rick Atkinson (2025)

From one of my favorite authors, Rick Atkinson’s The Fate of the Day captures the turbulent middle years of the American Revolution, a period often overshadowed by the dramatic opening clashes of 1775–76 and the climactic campaigns of Yorktown in 1781. Atkinson shows how, by 1777, the Continental Army was a battered force that had survived more by determination than capability, and how the British Empire, despite its vast power, found itself ensnared in a conflict that was proving far more costly and complex than expected. As always, Atkinson tells a turn-paging story of Washington struggling to hold his army together through defeat, desertion, and deprivation, while Franklin in Paris subtly maneuvers France toward an alliance. Atkinson portrays these years not simply as a string of set-piece battles: Brandywine, Saratoga, Monmouth, Charleston, but as a crucible in which both sides confronted the limits of endurance, strategy, and political will. The result is a vivid narrative that illuminates the Revolution as a grinding, improvisational struggle and a reminder that democratic ideals, once declared, require sustained sacrifice to preserve them.

The Crisis of the Old Order — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1957)

Schlesinger’s history of America in the years before FDR is a study of collapse—economic, ideological, and institutional. It is less a biography of FDR and more reconstructs a society wracked by inequality, paralyzed by political orthodoxy, and increasingly aware that its governing framework could not meet the demands of the moment. Schlesinger, the future Special Assistant to President Kennedy, narrates the slow disintegration of confidence in the “old order,” showing how elites clung to outdated ideas even as events outpaced them. His account of the Hoover administration reads less like a partisan critique and more like a lesson in how the American political system of the late 1920s and early 1930s ossified, culminating in the market crash of 1929 +and the beginning of the Great Depression. The book resonates today because it captures the sensation of a nation watching its old certainties crumble, waiting for a new governing philosophy to emerge but unsure of what form it will take.

German Strategy and the Path to Verdun — Robert Foley (2005)

Much ink has been spilled on the Battle of Verdun, but why did the German Army that was so enamored with maneuver and decisive battle pursue attrition against states with superior resources? Foley’s work is an outstanding corrective to simplistic narratives about Verdun as an unavoidable and pointless bloodletting. Instead, he focuses on the evolution of German operational thinking, tracing it back to 1871, highlighting how strategic culture, bureaucratic infighting, and overconfidence shaped the path to one of the war’s most infamous battles. What I liked most is how Foley exposes the tension between theory and practice: the German General Staff and Erich von Falkenhayn had an intellectual framework for decisive battle, but in reality, they were trapped by logistical and manpower constraints, flawed assumptions, and internal disagreements. His analysis shows how organizations can talk themselves into disastrous decisions while believing they are acting rationally. The book’s relevance extends well beyond World War I; it is a study in how great powers misread their own capabilities and the nature of the wars they expect to fight.

Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 — Fergal Keane (2010)

Keane’s narrative of the Kohima siege transforms a relatively neglected campaign into a profoundly human story of endurance, brutality, and tactical improvisation. His writing gives voice to British, Indian, and Japanese soldiers who fought in some of the war’s most inhospitable terrain, capturing the psychological toll as much as the physical hardships. What I appreciated is how Keane balances intimate portraits with a clear sense of strategic significance: Kohima was not merely a desperate defensive stand but a turning point that derailed Japanese ambitions in India. The book stands out for its emotional clarity, neither romanticizing the defenders nor vilifying the attackers, but presenting a landscape where courage and horror coexist. It is a reminder that decisive battles often occur far from the theaters that dominate popular memory.

The Clash: A History of U.S.–Japanese Relations — Walter LaFeber (1997)

LaFeber’s sweeping diplomatic history traces the long arc of American–Japanese relations, revealing how two nations with competing visions of security and economic order edged steadily toward confrontation. What I liked most is the book’s refusal to cast either side as a caricature. Instead, LaFeber shows how structural pressures, resource scarcity, expansionism, domestic politics, and shifting global hierarchies shaped each country’s choices. His analysis makes the eventual explosion of war appear less like a failure of diplomacy and more like the culmination of decades of mutual misreading. The book is especially valuable today, as it illustrates how great-power conflicts can grow from overlapping anxieties rather than malevolent intent. It’s diplomatic history at its most lucid and unsettling.

The Road to Berlin — John Erickson (1999)

Erickson’s monumental history of the Red Army’s advance from Stalingrad to Berlin is both a military epic and a study in institutional transformation. He captures not only the ferocity of the Eastern Front but also the enormous intellectual and organizational effort required to turn a battered Soviet force into a strategic instrument capable of conducting deep, coordinated offensives. Erickson’s ability to weave operational detail with political context shows how Stalin’s demands, logistical realities, and the Red Army’s evolving doctrine shaped each phase of the war from Kursk to Berlin. The book reflects Erickson’s unique access to Soviet sources, and his narrative has a density and authority that remains unmatched. It is essential reading for understanding how victory was built through adaptation, coercion, sacrifice, and learning under fire.

The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. III: Europe—Argument to V-E Day (1951)

This thick official volume, written and edited by the University of Chicago, over 900 pages, offers both detail and candor, making it still one of the most illuminating accounts of the U.S. strategic bombing and tactical air campaigns in Europe in 1944-1945. It tracks the evolution of doctrine, the relentless logistical challenges, the friction between theater commands and Washington, and the gap between theoretical precision and operational reality. The book makes clear that the air campaign was not a march of technological inevitability but a contested, improvised effort shaped by human judgment and organizational politics. For anyone studying airpower, this volume is a reminder that the myth of clean, decisive bombing collapses under the weight of its own archival record.

A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War — Melvyn Leffler (1992)

Leffler’s magisterial account of early Cold War strategy remains one of the most influential works in diplomatic history. He shows how the Truman administration navigated a world in flux—balancing genuine fears of Soviet expansion with the opportunities and constraints of American economic and military power. Instead of viewing policymakers as ideological zealots or cynical strategists, he presents them as actors confronting uncertainty, institutional pressures, and global instability in the aftermath of the most destructive war in history. The book lays bare how modern American national security policy and the grand strategy of “containment” emerged from a constant struggle between threat perception, bureaucratic competition, and domestic politics. It is a masterclass in how grand strategy is actually made—not as a neat blueprint, but as a series of contested, contingent choices.

Honorable Mentions

• The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815 by Noel Mostert (2008)

• A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 by Kenneth Swope (2016)

• To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alister Horne (2007)

• Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski (2005)

• Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today by David Albright and Andrea Stricker (2016)

• Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History by Robert Sherwood (1948)

• Gustavus v Wallenstein: Military Revolution, Rivalry and Tragedy in the Thirty Years War by John Pike (2025)

• The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres, and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War by Robert Cowley (2025)

• Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision by Roberta Wohlstetter (1962)

• Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert Massie (2004)