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Careless innovators, anti-war activists, and wild women: Best nonfiction from 2025

Published 6 months ago • 3 min read

Great nonfiction I read this year

Careless People

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Fantastic title that would make for a great dystopian novel, except it's our shared reality. It's an insider's story of Facebook—the greed, myopia, and hypocrisy of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and their accomplices. 'Careless' describes their apathy toward anything other than profits and privilege, but it's also the most charitable thing you can call them. That, or 'innovators.' It's astonishing how asleep at the wheel and ill-equipped they've been to deal with the crises they helped create—but when you read this book, you're not so astonished. They know. They just don't care.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild

Here's the rare historian where fixation on the (right) details makes for a riveting read. The characters display a fullness--complete with imperfections--more typical of fiction than war history. It's a dense chronicle of the British anti-war movement with important lessons for today. It's a story of how a well-educated nation with supposedly high-minded moralism got swept up in a patriotic frenzy for a war that claimed tens of millions, and the small minority who tried (through ridicule, violence, and imprisonment) desperately to save the country from itself.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

by Ian Leslie

This book traces the 23-year relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney through 43 songs. Leslie argues their partnership was rooted in shared trauma—both lost their mothers young and bonded over music as a way to process grief. The book examines how their relationship was compulsive and tempestuous, but also tender, and full of mutual love and admiration. Their creative conflict sparked some of the greatest music of all time. Their personal conflict pushed each other away and ended The Beatles. And yet well after that denouement, they still longed for each other. Leslie reframes their creative partnership as something deeper than professional collaboration—an intimate friendship where they expressed through music what they couldn't say directly.

Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

These last two books were both inspired by a backpacking trip to the Grand Canyon in October. I long wanted to read John McPhee's multi-person profile of the environmental movement, the genesis of which he explained in a great craft essay in The New Yorker. It comprises three separate profiles of 'anti-environmentalists' (a real estate developer, an industrial miner, and a dam architect), and the common denominator is a fourth profile of long-time head of the Sierra Club and one of America's greatest environmental activists, David Brower, that runs as an undercurrent of each. Each clash of profiles takes place in one of America's great natural landscapes--the North Cascades, Cumberland Island, the Colorado River. The profiles together surface a broader story of humanity's perpetual struggle between growth and preservation. At the heart of that struggle is a conversation.

Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island

by Will Harlan

After reading McPhee's profile set in Cumberland Island, I immediately returned to this book that I had only read excerpts of many years ago in a writing class. This book is primarily about Carol Ruckdeschel, a criminally under-recognized badass of the environmental movement, but it also includes fun tangents on the leatherback turtle and the Carnegie heirs that staked claims over the island in the late 19th century. Ruckdeschel lived on the edge of society, entirely self-sufficient and hidden from society's norms and expectations, but unafraid to take center stage to save Cumberland Island or canoe the Chattahoochee River with then Governor Jimmy Carter to get national protection. She's a compelling character outside the environmental escapades too. Smart, beautiful, and fiercely independent, she attracted a long line of suitors who rarely kept up. One was even killed in self defense that's still a part of island lore.

Other great nonfiction I read this year and would highly recommend:

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District Distinct

By Wesley Melville

As a business consultant and ICF-certified executive leadership coach, I've helped over a hundred founders, entrepreneurs and business leaders grow their impact professionally and personally. On Sundays, I write a newsletter highlighting some of those coaching insights and ideas with the hope of helping others grow their impact too.

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