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The Progressive’s Favorite Books of 2025

Our writers share their picks for this year’s best books.

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At the end of each year, writers and editors at The Progressive share some of their top books of note from the past twelve months.Here are the 2025 picks:

Eleanor J. Bader

When the first International High School opened in New York City in 1985, it aimed to transform the way young immigrants learned English and integrated into American society. Forty years later, a network of thirty-one international schools exists in seven states plus Washington, D.C.

The history of the Internationals Network is rooted in sustained advocacy, coalition building, and a deep commitment to policies that meet the needs of immigrant and migrant students,” Chandler Patton Miranda, an assistant professor of education, writes in Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth (Harvard Education Press). The priority, she explains, is “equity and holistic student development.”

Among other things, students are encouraged to work collaboratively. Assignments favor project-based learning over rote memorization, and faculty pay great attention to each student’s social, emotional, and material needs, whether this means providing them with warm clothing, temporary shelter, or a referral to legal counsel. The typical four-year timetable for graduation is not enforced, with many students spending five, six, or even seven years at the schools before graduating.

While Miranda’s research centers on a New York City program she calls International High School, she neither sugarcoats the complexity of teaching often traumatized immigrants nor does she sidestep the political hostility against newcomers. Nonetheless, Sanctuary School offers readers an optimistic, insightful glimpse into public education as a public good and presents a prototype that can be adapted by districts throughout the country. Her description of schools that are working to meet the needs of young people entering the United States is powerful and upbeat. It is a model to champion.

Michaela Brant

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf) by Omar El Akkad is a wake-up call. The book weaves the author’s, the public’s, and the U.S. government’s reactions to the genocide in Gaza to demand that even those of us who feel like we are “doing our part” double down and speak out loudly and emphatically against it. El Akkad’s reflections come from his experiences as a father, journalist, novelist, U.S. citizen, and an immigrant who has lived in several countries in the Middle East and North America.

The short but powerful book reminds us not to shy away from feeling devastated by the hell and destruction in Palestine that we see live-streamed on social media. Despite the current ceasefire, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians has not ended. We must fight for the dead in Gaza, the living, and, as he writes, “against the theft of your soul” by a world and a regime that wants us to give our silent complicity.

Ruth Conniff

It’s hard to imagine a more timely and necessary book than Cristina Jiménez’s Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change (St. Martin’s Press). Jiménez, co-founder of the youth immigrant justice movement United We Dream, arrived in the United States as a child with her parents, fleeing poverty and repression in Ecuador. Before she learned English, she struggled to find her place in a large public high school in Queens, New York. With the help of her parents, who held down multiple low-paying jobs, she realized her mother’s dream that she become the first person in her family to attend college.

Jiménez’s memoir, part personal narrative and part history of the movement, feels like she poured it all out in one long, passionate breath. She gives voice to the hope, fear, anguish, and redemption of the immigrants on the bleeding edge of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian crackdown.

On one hand, it’s almost unbearable to read about the triumphs of a brash youth movement that arm-twisted President Barack Obama into creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and rallied public opposition to the injustice of family separation and mass deportation, knowing what came afterward. On the other hand, the series of setbacks and the courageous, ongoing struggle that brought a mass movement of young people out of the shadows, vowing never to go back, is a good tonic in these dark times.

Jiménez makes clear that our current troubles didn’t bubble up overnight. She traces her own educational journey, her shock at learning about the long, violent history of racism in the United States, and the cyclical immigration crackdowns led by the descendents of immigrants whose own relatives were “illegals” themselves.

She provides a full picture of the hope and promise of U.S. democracy and the relentless struggle it involves. The progress she witnesses and helps to bring about is not, as she explains to her mother, “a miracle from God,” but the product of painful, dogged organizing. The story of that struggle, connected to the larger story of social justice movements across American history, illuminates both the durable cruelties of our society and the transcendent possibilities of community, courage, and love.

John Graf

Opening the Door for Jackie: The Untold Story of Baseball’s Integration (McFarland), Keith Evan Crook persuasively challenges the “great man theory” of baseball’s modification—with the signing of Jackie Robinson—of its exclusionary position as all-white “Organized Baseball.”

Picking up where historian Jules Tygiel left off in the book Baseball’s Great Experiment, an authoritative history of the deal hatched by sports executive Branch Rickey to sign Robinson, Crook chronicles the workings of a wide cast of characters. A scorecard of New York legislative actors and a broad social movement united a progressive coalition that pressured the 1940s Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and New York Yankees to follow a new state law against employment discrimination.

The telling of baseball’s integration history has been enriched by this book’s expansion of crucial factors beyond the undisputed heroism of Robinson, as well as Rickey’s complex motives in signing him. Crook has meticulously described an alliance of labor, community and civil rights organizations, and the African American and radical press that together can claim credit for the breaking of the color line as much as “great men.” The author takes a leading place among a growing contingent of baseball historians writing as Noam Chomsky might have if his outpost were the sports page.

Sarah Lahm

Author, attorney, and Civil Rights Corps founder Alec Karakatsanis’s new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (The New Press), packs a stunning punch and should be on everyone’s must-read list, especially as we head into the midterm elections year of 2026.

Copaganda is a weighty but highly readable book that will have every progressive-minded reader up in arms. Remember the short-lived tenure of Chesa Boudin, a progressive district attorney for San Francisco, California? Boudin won the election of 2019 only to be forced out of office in 2022, thanks to a recall effort that was largely funded by Republican billionaire William Oberndorf. Karakatsanis demonstrates how media outlets such as The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle contributed to Boudin’s downfall through faulty reporting on the supposed failures of his policy preferences.

As district attorney, Boudin favored an end to cash bail and a reduction in the number of people sent to prison, among other such measures. These policies are evidence-backed methods for reducing crime and lowering the costs associated with incarceration, yet mainstream news outlets derided them through persistent and often outright fabricated pro-police propaganda, Karakatsanis writes. Rather than allow progress on crime issues to take root, well-funded news organizations often publish false or misleading articles and opinion pieces that are designed to keep the copaganda flowing and the “punishment bureaucracy” flush with cash.

Read this book now, and you will be well-equipped to think for yourself during the 2026 election cycle.

Bill Lueders

This fall, at age ninety-one, the great writer Wendell Berry added to his oeuvre of more than fifty books with a heartfelt rendering of a pivotal event in his family’s life: when his grandfather in 1906 took his tobacco crop to market, only to receive less than the cost of getting it there.

This led over years to a model cooperative that brought farmers a fair price. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story (Counterpoint Press) is technically a novel but hews even more tightly to true events than his other books and short stories about the fictional Port William, Kentucky.

Berry is, as always, a beacon of moral clarity, and his call for rejuvenating rural communities has never been more urgent.

On August 18, 2005, a record twenty-seven tornadoes touched down in Wisconsin, including one on land that Tamara Dean shared with her partner. As she writes in her poignant collection of essays, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press), the twister uprooted forty acres of their trees, some of vast girth.

Dean, an essayist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Orion, and other publications, balances the money to be made from extracting the fallen timber against the risks to loggers; she saw the fear in their faces as they eyed the dangerously steep slopes. She tells her partner, David, about wanting to do the most “compassionate” thing. “Compassonate to whom?” he asks. “Well, to all living beings,” she replies. “People, animals, plants.” In the end, she decides to let the downfalls rot their way back to nature.

Always thoughtful, caring, and inquisitive, Dean recounts her years living in the state’s hilly Driftless Area, in a house she and David built by hand using 7,220 earthen blocks. She digs into the area’s history, unearthing the story of a local woman who died from an abortion in 1876, as well as the tale of another who mightily resisted rural electrification coming to her home in the 1930s. Other essays deal with fires, floods, groundnuts, hydration, Lyme disease, and neighbors—human and otherwise.

It’s a delightful book that bears comparison to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. For the planet to survive, we need people willing to take risks and try new things, guided not just by curiosity but also compassion.

Lisa Mullenneaux

Sara wakes at the sound of the bell and lines up with other females for device inspection. They shiver in the cold as the inspector points a scanner at the back of their skulls to verify their identity. “The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference. From white domes on the ceiling, cameras watch.”

So begins Laila Lalami’s Orwellian fourth novel, The Dream Hotel (Pantheon). Sara Hussein, an archivist at the Getty Museum, has been flagged at Los Angeles International Airport as “high risk” of committing a crime—based on her dreams—and has been remanded to a retention center until she can lower her risk score. But the game is rigged: Guards are rewarded for charging violations that boost scores. Safe-X, a private company, runs the lockup, where the word “prison” is never uttered.

If this scenario sounds like dystopian fiction, you haven’t been following the news. Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi were all abducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the same manner and sent to holding pens in Louisiana and Vermont. They were never charged with a crime. What they had in common, besides being students, was their pro-Palestine activism.

Though Lalami began writing The Dream Hotel in 2014, the techno-surveillance state has caught up with her imagination. How long will it take, she asks, before our dreams incriminate us? How much of our privacy can we relinquish and still remain free? What Sara chooses in her prison that’s not a “prison” is also our choice: to resist that invasion before it claims us.

Delaney Nelson

In 2024, more than 300,000 people passed through the infamous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the Darién Gap. Migrants hoping to reach the U.S.-Mexico border are forced to make the crossing, which is the only land bridge connecting South America to Central America and its northern neighbors.

In The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers University Press), immigration reporter and Al Jazeera columnist Belén Fernández embarks on her own journey through the expanse she characterizes as a “mass migrant graveyard,” known for its treacherous terrain, smugglers, and paramilitary violence.

Fernández blends personal narrative with reporting and sharp analysis as she delves into the sociopolitical conditions and inhumane border policies that force migrants to pass through “el infierno verde,” or “the green hell.” She writes with wit and candor, using the Darién Gap as a case study of how a multitude of global crises—including climate change, state violence, and narco trafficking—are all connected. In doing so, she forces the reader to consider their own freedom of movement across borders.

Right now, virtually the entire U.S. population has detectable levels of forever chemicals in our blood. At least 172 million Americans are drinking water that is polluted with toxic PFAS, a category of manufactured chemicals that cannot break down in nature and are linked to a variety of health complications, including cancers, neurological problems, and birth defects.

In They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals (Crown), journalist Mariah Blake traces the history of these chemicals from their creation in the 1930s to their subsequent widespread use in a variety of products, including cookware, vascular grafts, and the atomic bomb, and to their now ubiquitous presence in ecosystems and people across the world.

“Inside us,” she writes, “they stay there like a ticking time bomb of disease.”

Blake details the many decades of cover-up by industry giants like DuPont and 3M, with the help of the federal government. And most hopefully, she covers the everyday people taking up the fight against these corporations to protect their communities—and sometimes winning: “We can’t count on our leaders to protect us from these threats without intense, sustained public pressure. The companies advocating inaction are too powerful, the systems favoring it too entrenched.”

JP O’Malley

Over the past six decades, Eric Foner has written several books about the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Reconstruction era (1865-1877). The eighty-two-year-old American historian is a prolific critic, too. His latest, Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays (W. W. Norton & Company), is a remarkable collection of journalism that Foner has published over the past twenty-five years.

“No narrative of the Civil War can ignore the centrality of slavery,” Foner observed in The Nation in October 2011. Four years later, he published an op-ed in The New York Times entitled “Why Reconstruction Matters” that explained why the Constitutional and democratic reforms enacted for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War turned out to be a crushing disappointment—especially in the South, where most African Americans were subjected to appalling apartheid from the 1870s until the 1960s, in some instances, with the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Elsewhere, Foner provides a superb analysis of great American lives, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama.

Engaging and measured, the writing asks many questions, namely: Is there such a thing as fundamental freedom? Who is entitled to citizenship? And what is the connection between politics and economics? The nuanced answers Foner provides teach us why this history matters, particularly its injustices. In our present age of post-truth absolutism, this book has never seemed more relevant.

JP O’Malley is a cultural critic and journalist. He regularly writes book reviews, author profiles, and feature articles for The Sunday Independent, The New European, Index on Censorship, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Ed Rampell

Run Zohran Run!: Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor (OR Books) is a firsthand account of the upstart candidate’s victory in the June 2025 Democratic primary race for mayor of New York City. According to a New York Post headline, “Mamdani won most votes of a candidate in NYC primary history,” crushing incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, and others in the ranked-choice electoral contest.

Brooklynite Theodore Hamm’s page-turner takes readers inside Mamdani’s candidacy to reveal how the insurgent immigrant woke up the city that never sleeps. Much has been made about the telegenic, Ugandan-born contender’s social media skills. (Mamdani’s mother is Indian American filmmaker Mira Nair.) For instance, the thirty-four-year-old joined the Polar Bear Club’s annual New Year’s Day plunge at Coney Island, an attention-grabbing stunt that visually illustrated a key component of the progressive’s platform: freezing the rent for rent-stabilized apartments. Mamdani’s platform also demands free buses, city-owned grocery stores, no-cost child care, and other pro-working-class measures paid for by taxing the 1 percent to make the Big Apple affordable for ordinary people.

Hamm stresses the essential role played by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in getting the underdog leftist’s platform out to the masses, writing: “Zohran’s DSA-led field operation provided a volunteer army,” galvanizing younger, immigrant, South Asian, Muslim, and pro-Palestine voters to achieve what New York City DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo called “one of the greatest accomplishments of the left and of the socialist movement in the United States in the last century.”

Norman Stockwell

Two brothers, two countries of pivotal importance to U.S. foreign policy, and two important books. I first met Jon Lee Anderson in the late 1990s, when he wrote a tremendous biography titled Che: A Revolutionary Life. Since that time, we have kept in touch on occasion, and I have followed his nearly three-decades-long career at The New Yorker. Anderson’s on-the-ground reporting from Central Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, and the Caribbean—all areas of both conflict and global import—has resulted in numerous profiles of world leaders. But even more critical to our understanding of these regions are his stories of everyday people whose lives are irrevocably affected by those foreign leaders, as well as the actions of our leaders in the United States.

In To Lose A War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban (Penguin Press), Anderson draws from his twenty-five years of returning to Afghanistan to cover two wars and two occupations. Most of the content comes from his writing for The New Yorker, but parts are updated and retitled based on the changes that have taken place since he first entered the country during the war against the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. This book is essential to understanding why Afghanistan has earned its name as the “graveyard of empires.”

Scott Anderson is Jon Lee’s younger brother. They have co-authored two books together, Inside the League and War Zones. In 2014, I interviewed Scott Anderson about his magnum opus biography of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence in Arabia—which was more than ten years in the writing—and in 2015, he hosted a book release party in New York for my book on journalist John Ross.

Scott Anderson’s latest volume, King of Kings—The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday), tells the history of what Andrew Bacevich has described as “a great humiliation” which the United States has never “gotten over.”

Much like Anderson’s 2020 book, The Quiet Americans, which tells the story of a tragedy and farce of miscalculations in the world’s most famous spy agency (as I described in The Progressive five years ago), King of Kings is rife with stories of errors and tragic mistakes in international relations that have led us to what may be an irreconcilable antipathy and the repeating potential for hair-trigger confrontations with this former ally and the second largest nation in the Middle East.

Another new book by an old friend is Robert Wolf’s latest volume, Coyotes and Stars: Stories from the American Southwest (Free River Press), in his nationwide ramble to showcase the stories that make up the soul of this country.

“The idea for the book came from my desire to get people from all regions of the country and as many occupations as possible to document their lives and work in an ongoing series of books,” Wolf writes. This book, like most of the rest of his work, was developed through a series of writing workshops—empowering everyday people to, as Wolf says, “add their stories to a collective American autobiography.” Coyotes and Stars will transport you to a vanishing piece of the quiltwork of cultures that makes up our nation.