DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Dee's best-reads list for 2025
I'm a bit late with my 2025 list of best books, in part because I's still reading a couple of the books in my list. As for the past few years, my list is weighted toward non-fiction, not because I don't read novels and short stories but because most of the recent fiction I've read is not outstanding. However, there are a few exceptions:
My favorite fiction
1. Trip, by Amie Barrodale, is a novel about the bardo, the period in Tibetan Buddhist doctrine (Tibetan Book of the Dead) which follows death prior to rebirth. Trip is the third outstanding American novel set in the bardo during the past decade. The other two novels are George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and J. Robert Lennon's, Subdivision (2021). All three novels are supremely intelligent and artful, brilliantly conceived. Trip is about the bardo experience of a documentary film maker who dies from a fall in the bathroom of a hotel in Nepal where she plans to film the deliberations of an academic conference on death and ideas of the afterlife. Per a common theme of books and movies on the bardo, she is initially unaware that she has died. Much of the humor of this novel concerns the efforts of the deceased main character to occupy and operate the body of a person who has left his body while under the influence of dental anesthesia. It turns out to be a difficult skill, harder than learning to ride a bike or skateboard! The art of Barrodale's novel is in making experiences in the bardo seem as real as everyday life, and everyday interactions among academics and others seem as weird and fragmented as the bardo. If Trip has a message, it is that the mind's deepest purposes and preoccupations shape the projections in the bardo before the deceased person is stripped of memory, prior to rebirth. In Trip, the deceased filmmaker is desperate to save her autistic son who has ended up with an alcoholic, rich, entitled, nutcase in the Atlantic Ocean. Barrodale's novel suggests the possibility that human life itself is a bardo of sorts, an imaginative experience with a biological substrate.
2. The Human Scale by Lawrence Wright. I was reluctant to read this novel, which is about the relationship of an American Palestinian detective and an Israeli police officer as they attempt to solve a murder in the months prior to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel. I was skeptical that any writer of fiction or non- fiction could do justice to the perspectives and attitudes of both Israelis and Palestinians, given the war in Gaza, and the desire of partisans on both sides to justify heinous actions that include mass murder and torture, and other egregious human rights abuses. I read this novel only because it was highly recommended by someone I greatly respect. The novel is a tremendous achievement due to Wright's ability to fairly and deeply articulate the perspectives of all parties, including different factions and groups of Israelis and Palestinians, without morally equating the actions of multiple parties to the conflict. The Human Scale is the most courageous book of 2025 I've read, by far. Wright's novel has been left off of most lists of the year's best books; too much painful truth. One of the lessons of the novel is that militants on both sides feel justified in committing any and all acts of murder, torture and dehumanization, to the point of blaming their enemies for making them commit immoral acts. In these circumstances, the concern of Israeli security services with finding who actually murdered the head of a local Israeli police force on the West Bank is minimal. The murder is viewed as an opportunity to justify the killing of enemies.
3. the Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. The novelist, Ann Patchett chose Desai’s novel as the best book of 2025. I’m still reading the novel which is about two young people from India who come together in the U.S. despite a ham-fisted attempt by their families abroad to arrange their marriage. Desai has a sharp eye for cultural mores and cultural estrangement between the upwardly mobile adult children of traditional Indian families, in which family members who live in the same household are rarely alone, and their families abroad, and between these young adults and their intimate others in the U.S., where extended periods of loneliness are a common experience of all social classes. Desai’s novel comes alive and is most vivid in her stories of affluent Indian families and their servants, full of resentment, suspicion and their own kind of estrangement. She is highly attuned to abusive relationships in both India and the U.S. and to cultural changes that have freed women in both India and the U.S. from having to tolerate the mistreatment of male lovers and spouses. The most impressive feature of Desai’s voice is her descriptions of outrageous characters and behavior which are unsparing but without malice.
Non- fiction
1. Life on A Little- Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert. This book is a collection of articles about the natural world published in The New Yorker over almost a couple of decades (2007-2025). Kolbert writes beautifully and with admirable clarity on a wide variety of subjects, including attempts to understand the language of sperm whales, the melting of Greenland’s glaciers, Bee Colony Collapse, and much more. Most of her chapters are about particular scientists attempting to figure out a scientific puzzle. They all contain enough information about specific scientists to draw in readers with limited interest in specific scientific subjects. The possibly unintended large theme of this collection is the refusal of societies around the world to make serious efforts to combat global warming, and the consequences of that refusal on the destruction of many species, which have become more apparent in recent years. Following the publication of her book, I watched an interview of Kolbert by Jon Stewart who asked her opinion of what can be done to reduce the increase and impact of climate change. She replied without hesitation, “I don’t know,” and added that it’s “interesting” that American society and much of the rest of the world has decided to allow global warming to continue unabated, and bet the bank on adaptation and potential technological fixes, none of which appear close to being used effectively at scale. Kolbert’s chapters, which often seemed too long in The New Yorker, seem just right in book form.
2. So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levinson. Levenson’s history of the toll of infectious diseases and the 200-year process following the discovery of microbes required to develop germ theory is my choice for best non- fiction book of 2025. It is difficult for modern humans to grasp the toll of infectious disease before the scientific understanding of germ theory and before vaccines and antibiotics. One of the surprises of Levenson’s outstanding history is his account of the stubborn determined resistance of medical establishments in Europe to hypotheses and reforms that linked microbes to infectious disease such as smallpox, cholera and hospital gangrene. Physicians who were innovators in the treatment of various infectious disease often paid a heavy price in ridicule, ostracism and loss of jobs. The scientific opposition to various applications of germ theory led to huge numbers of deaths around the world. Levenson’s book is an insightful discussion of how and why there was such strong resistance to applications of germ theory that, considered as a whole, have greatly lengthened human life span by limiting the number and impact of pandemics.
3. There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone. This outstanding and painful book follows five working families in Atlanta who end up homeless despite working long hours at difficult jobs. Goldstone’s book is an analysis of the economic forces that exercise an iron grip on low-income families struggling to maintain housing in a market designed to exploit their lack of choice and lack of a cushion against reversal of various types, e.g., job loss, eviction, depression, periods of substance misuse. What makes this book so painful to read is that each of these families experience periods of hope that create the possibility of a brighter future, only to be economically crushed after years of struggle by events and forces beyond their control, as well as their own bad choices. Goldstone’s narratives of families are painful and relentless, but they also suggest multiple avenues for policy reform.
4. An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe by Will Kinney. The first five chapters of Kinney’s book are a concise and lucid discussion of Big Bang theory and the theory that the hot Big Bang was preceded by a cold inconceivably rapid cosmic inflation of a tiny particle, an inflaton, which some cosmologists believe was created spontaneously in the cosmic void. These chapters are accessible to readers who are not physicists or cosmologists. The last three chapters are an argument that the theory of cosmic inflation is testable, and has been shown to make accurate predictions. They include a highly technical, hard to follow (for me) discussion.
This book which is worth careful reading by anyone interested in cosmology. Kinney insists that the characteristics of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), e.g. the homogeneity of the CMB) often asserted to be the main evidence for the Big Bang, cannot be understood without including a brief period of cold cosmic inflation prior to the Big Bang. Kinney acknowledges that the physics of cosmic inflation, especially the transition from a cold cosmic inflation to a hot Big Bang, is not explained by current physics, whereas the physics of the Big Bang has been articulated to a tiny split second after the cosmos’ creation. Nevertheless, Kinney maintains that Big Bang theory cannot adequately explain detailed analysis of the CMB, which he argues is explained by cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang.
I look forward to reading other cosmologists’ and physicists’ responses to Kinney’s arguments. His book suggests that the story of the origin of the cosmos in a big bang may be open to substantial revision.
5. The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War by Robert Cowley. Cowley’s engrossing history of W.W. I during the fall and early winter of 1914 places great emphasis on the First Battle of Ypres during late October when (Cowley believes) Germany had an opportunity to break through weak British and French forces in Belgium and potentially win the war. Much of The Killing Season is a detailed account of Ypres 1, when the war was still a fluid war of movement, before becoming a defensive way fought from trenches. Cowley cogently describes the carnage of an unnecessary war in which 27,000 French soldiers died on a single day, August 22, 1914, and 90,000 French soldiers died during September, the month of the Battle of the Marne. Cowley views W.W. I as an unmitigated disaster for European societies and Russia whose citizens fervently supported the war at its beginning, and which was widely viewed in Germany and other countries as a purification through patriotic sacrifice. Ypres 1, a slaughter fought in the mud by half- starved, poorly led armies, mocked the ideal of martial valor and patriotic sacrifice.
6. Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries by Abigal Leonard. Four Mothers follows mothers in Japan, Finland, Kenya and the U.S. during their infant’s first year of life. Leonard clearly describes how public policy in these four countries supports or fails to support mothers as they raise these infants on their own, with little help from fathers. Leonard does an exceptional job of revealing the impact of public policy on the capacity of mothers to care for and nurture babies. Her book leaves no doubt why the U.S. has such high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Four Mothers is a model of how to write policy analysis that makes evident the impact of public policy on individuals. She outlines what needs to be done to support low-income mothers in the U.S. as well as they are supported in Japan and Finland.
7. Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is an analysis of the inability of liberal West Coast cities to get things done, e.g. reduce homelessness, build high speed rail, despite decades of ambitious initiatives and billions of dollars in public expenditures. These authors argue that liberal cities and states have tied themselves in knots with self-defeating regulations designed to make big projects hard to do from start to finish. The implicit theme of Abundance is an admiration for political leaders who cut through red tape to get things done, which may inspire a liberal post- Trump authoritarianism.
-- Dee Wilson