If there was one bookshelf theme this year, it was liberals discovering the concept of abundance.
If there was one bookshelf theme this year, it was liberals discovering the concept of abundance.
T his year brought an abundance of good books, and I use the word “abundance” under advisement. After 2025, I can say with no fear of contradiction that I am fully up to speed on the topic. As a conservative, my reaction to these abundance books from liberals is akin to that of Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard when he shouts out of a shattered window at the patrolman down below in Nakatomi Plaza: “Welcome to the party, pal.”
Conservatives have been complaining for years about the oppressive nature of regulations and lawsuits and the way they make it hard for Americans to build anything, let alone compete with the rising Chinese threat. Why does the subject only gain attention when liberals recognize that it’s a problem?
The best-known of the abundance books in 2025 was Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of that same name. A second abundance book came from Atlantic editor Yoni Appelbaum. His Stuck highlights the myriad ways in which “American mobility has been slowly strangled by generations of reformers, seeking to reassert control over their neighborhoods and their neighbors.” Appelbaum takes particular aim at zoning laws, showing not only their discriminatory origins, but also how they continue to drive up housing costs, making housing increasingly unaffordable for young home-seekers.
Perhaps my favorite of the abundance books was Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works. Dunkelman argues that those things that are not working are not working because liberals have been making it that way for decades. When discussing the creation of Community Action Agencies during Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” Dunkelman observes that “many in Washington lost sight of a more fundamental dynamic: the Johnson administration was now in the business of funding the very people who most irritated the nation’s mayors and power brokers.” He recalls future Justice Stephen Bryers’ eureka moment as a staffer for Ted Kennedy about the excesses of airline regulation: “It was a cartel, a simple cartel organized by the government.” In Dunkelman’s words, “This archetypical triumph of the New Deal had turned . . . bad.”
Dan Wang’s Breakneck is an abundance-adjacent book that sees a distinction between engineers, who predominate in China, and lawyers, who have too much sway in the U.S. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, but Wang argues that the U.S. must reduce its lawyer dominance if we are going to be economically and militarily viable, let alone successful, in the years ahead. The indispensable Philip Howard also belongs in the abundance-adjacent camp with Saving Can-Do, a compilation of three essays on how America can get better in the areas of taking initiative, education, and government decision-making.
In the category of liberals mulling things over, I did not expect to pick up Obama appointee Cass Sunstein’s On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom and find warm praise for NR’s legendary founder, William F. Buckley Jr., whose centenary we celebrated this year. But it turns out that Buckley was a key part of Sunstein’s move away from his youthful sports obsessions and toward the public intellectual he became. As Sunstein writes, “Somehow, I came across Buckley, and everything changed. He was dashing and funny. He was devastatingly clever. He was full of charm. He was mischievous. He seemed to know everything. And how the man could write!” Fact check: True.
As someone who did not need the 2024 election to recognize that progressive policies were strangling American prosperity, I liked Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux’s The Triumph of Economic Freedom. This book is for those who like their defense of economic freedom unadulterated, without the hand-wringing that the abundance types brought to their analyses. Gramm and Boudreaux debunk all sorts of dangerous myths about capitalism, including the idea that the onset of capitalism hurt workers. According to Gramm and Boudreaux, “The claim that the dawning of capitalism in Britain impoverished workers is the ‘Genesis myth’ of capitalism, yet it is refuted by every major measure of material well-being. In a single century, from 1800 to 1900, wages, lifespan, and literacy expanded at rates never before experienced.”
The years after presidential elections often generate informative books about contemporary politics, and 2025 was no different. In Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf’s 2024, we learn just how bad the Biden team was at politics. According to 2024, they actually thought that they could “appropriate the name ‘Bidenomics’ and build his reelection campaign’s economic argument around it.” 2024 also reveals how badly debate prep went for Biden. Steven Spielberg, who was a participant, suggested that Biden make faces when Trump was speaking. Ron Klain, an old pro who had been doing debate prep for Democrats for decades, tried to block that idea, saying, “Mr. President, that’s not going to work. People are going to think you’re just befuddled.” Later, while Klain was watching Biden give the disastrous debate performance that ended up knocking him out of the race, Klain said to the TV screen, “We’re f***ed.” Another great debate reaction came from Tim Walz’s wife, Gwen, who told her husband after his mediocre performance in the vice-presidential debate, “You could have done better.” As Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf note, “The staff would have to talk to her about positive reinforcement.”
Alex Isenstadt’s Revenge, which focuses on the Trump campaign, reveals, surprisingly, that Trump listens to American history podcasts: “He’d recently consumed a Civil War podcast and was particularly interested in an episode about Gettysburg (‘You really need to listen to this,’ he told Wiles) and was now on a Ronald Reagan kick.”
Another Trump-focused book, this one about the early days of the Trump administration, is Scott Jennings’s A Revolution of Common Sense. More interesting than his defense of the administration is his access to it. Jennings, the breakout TV commentator of 2024, had on-the-record conversations with key administration figures, including Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Elon Musk, Chris LaCivita, and Trump himself. Trump lets Jennings into an Oval Office meeting and tells him, “Scott, I’m glad you are here. Can we have kind of a quick meeting because, as you can see, I’m dealing with a lot of sh** today?” Jennings contrasts the freewheeling Trump White House operations with not only the stiff and formal Biden operations but also the George W. Bush White House, in which both he and I served. Jennings notes that if he had “walked into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and told people that: (a) Donald Trump, the billionaire real estate developer, had just become president for the second time, and (b) his economic policy largely revolved around the kind of protectionist tariffs that were last used by President William McKinley in the late 1800s,” the reaction would likely have been “startled disbelief followed by a forced trip to the White House medical unit.” Jennings deploys his cheeky humor to good effect throughout the book. When asked if the CNN panels on which he is typically the lone conservative are “fair,” he replies, “No, not really. But if they added two or three more liberals it might be.”
As usual, I also escaped current politics by diving into history. Gabe Henry’s Enough Is Enuf opens his book on spelling with a fascinating observation and a question: “There’s a reason spelling bees are only common in English-speaking countries: English spelling is absurd. So why do we continue to use it?” Henry then explains why, despite many attempts to correct it, the illogical English way of spelling is so persistent.
Another worthy read was Jonathan Horn’s The Fate of the Generals, about the life arcs of Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright, the two top American generals in the Philippines during World War II. MacArthur, of course, got the fame and the glory while Wainwright, who is largely forgotten by history, was starved and mistreated in a Japanese prison camp. Wainwright clearly had the tougher journey, but it’s hard to read Horn’s terrific book without coming to the conclusion that Wainwright was the more honorable man.
Jews vs. Rome, by the classics scholar Barry Strauss, tells the story of the centuries-long struggle between the powerful Roman Empire and the Jewish nation. Although a short version would be that the Romans won the battle and lost the war — Jews are still here — Strauss also ably describes the larger context and, in particular, the outsized role that the Rome-Parthia rivalry had to do with the Jewish conflict with Rome.
Matthew Goodman’s Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship, and Betrayal is a captivating tale of two older women in occupied France who helped British soldiers escape the Nazis. Even after they stop rescuing the soldiers, their story was far from over. The book also has some entertaining jokes, including the following: A Parisian in occupied France asks another, “Did you hear what happened last night? At 9:20, a Jew killed a German soldier, cut him open, and ate his heart.” His friend replies, “Impossible, for three reasons: A German has no heart. A Jew eats no pork. And at 9:20, everyone is listening to the BBC.”
Caroline Fraser’s Murderland takes a disturbing look at the plethora of serial killers who seemed to have emerged from the Seattle-Tacoma area in the 1970s and 1980s and discusses some of the reasons why this may have occurred, including a proliferation of industrial sludge. Another open question is how, despite an abundance of clues and warnings, the police lagged in stopping these killers.
For those not interested in politics or history, or looking for a break from those subjects, my favorite entertainment book of the year was Lorne, by Susan Morrison. This biography of Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels uses an inventive structure, with each chapter corresponding to a day of the week leading up to SNL’s live appearance at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights. On Saturday evenings during dress rehearsal, Michaels seems to come alive, making edits, changes, and suggestions that make the dress rehearsal into the finished and often-but-not-always-funny product that we later see on TV.
Michaels toiled in comedy for years before coming to SNL. He wrote jokes for Woody Allen, including this one: “A man is obsessed with the idea that there’s no such thing as an original thought — that somewhere in the world, another guy is thinking the exact same thoughts as he is, at the exact same time. Eager to meet this mental doppelgänger, he somehow finally gets the other guy’s phone number. He dials the number . . . and the line is busy.” Michaels also worked for Laugh-In, which once invited William F. Buckley on the show. Buckley’s response: “Not only do I refuse to appear, I resent having been asked.” Buckley changed his mind, though, when the show offered to fly him to Burbank “on a plane with two right wings.”
In the sports world, I greatly enjoyed John W. Miller’s biography of Earl Weaver, The Last Manager. Weaver was a dogged competitor — Miller points out that the Orioles’ record during the Weaver era was so much better than the team record has been either before or since. Weaver also famously feuded with umpires. In one instance, umpire Rich Garcia spotted Weaver hiding from the umpires in the dugout toilet after being ejected and asked, “What are you doing in there?” Weaver replied, “I’m in here throwing up because you guys make me sick.”
Finally, the most harrowing book I read this year was Hostage, by Eli Sharabi. I knew that the hostages suffering in Hamas captivity were going through an awful ordeal, but I couldn’t understand what exactly their day-to-day life was like until I read this book. It took such physical and mental strength to survive, and Sharabi shared his techniques with other hostages, helping them survive as well. I’ve spent much of the last two years praying for the return of the hostages, and while I mourn the ones who didn’t make it, I’m relieved that 168 of them survived and are now home with their families. This book makes clear the stakes in Israel’s battle against Hamas’s barbarism, and makes me appreciate living in a free society that produces such an assortment of diverse and worthy books every year.