The New Republic’s Books of the Year 2025 |
Some of the books we chose this year touched familiarly big themes: the place of the United States in the Americas; the weakness of democracy in the U.S. and what it would take to shore it up. And some are close-up, intimate studies of the subtlest changes in the relationships between just three people, as in Katie Kitamura’s Audition. What they all share is intellectual ambition and precision. These are books that contemplate motherhood in the digital age and motherhood amid grief, the machinations of private equity and the strange deterioration of the internet, the legacy of the 2000s and the future of democracy. Our critics didn’t always agree with the arguments of some of books below but found all of them worth arguing, and thinking, with.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) by Colette Shade
Dey Street Books, 256 pp., $29.99
The new millennium promised a more peaceful, more stable, and more prosperous world. What happened? “Beginning in 1997 with the introduction of Netscape Navigator—a pivotal moment in the career of the internet—and ending with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the Y2K era seemed to bear out Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis,” Paul M. Renfro writes in his review. “Its rampant techno-optimism, evidenced by the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s and early 2000s, joined with hyper-consumerism and a steadfast belief that ‘the West’ had transcended politics to forge an ‘ecstatic, frenetic, and wildly hopeful’ decade. Yet as Shade persuasively demonstrates, this hopeful energy masked not only the failures of global capitalism … but also the political vacuity and cultural rot of the period.” While the New Democrats continued the “punitive, deregulatory, and market-centric policies” of the 1980s, the “bubblegum glam of Y2K pop culture … reflected and advanced the profound misogyny and fatphobia of the period. We are still living with the consequences.”
Read our full review.
America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin
Penguin Press, 768 pp., $35.00
“There is a tendency to draw sharp lines of civilizational difference between ‘North’ and ‘Latin’ America,” Patrick Iber writes. “People in the United States tend to think their peer countries—if they admit that they have any—are in Europe, not Latin........