THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2025

Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2025.

--Kofi Natambu, Editor 



Three Or More Is A Riot: 
Notes On How We Got Here: 2012-2025
by Jelani Cobb
One World, 2025


 

You Can’t Kill A Man Because Of the Books He Reads:
Angelo Herndon’s Fight For Free Speech
by Brad Snyder
W.W. Norton and Company, 2025


 

Injustice: How Politics and Fear
Vanquished America’s Justice Department
by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
Penguin Press, 2025


 

The Memoirs Of Robert and Mabel Williams:
African American Freedom, Armed Resistance,
and International Solidarity
Edited by Akinyele Omowale, Gloria Aneb House, and John H. Bracey, Jr.
University of North Carolina Press, 2025



Capitalism and Its Critics: 
A History From the Industrial Revolution To AI
by John Cassidy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux


 

Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays
by Eric Foner
W.W. Norton and Company, 2025


 

Karl Marx in America
by Andrew Hartman
The University of Chicago Press, 2025



Toni At Random: 
The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship 
by Dana A. Williams
Amistad, 2025



Their Accomplices Wore Robes:
How the Supreme Court Chained Black America 

To the Bottom Of A Racial Caste System
by Brando Simeo Starkey
Doubleday, 2025



We Are Internationalists:
Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation
by Martha Biondi
University of California Press, 2025



Red Scare:
Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making 
Of Modern America
by Clay Risen
Scribner, 2025



Blind Persistence: 
The History of the Before Columbus Foundation
Edited by Ishmael Reed and Justin Desmangles
Baraka Books, 2025


 

Furious Minds: 

The Making of the MAGA New Right
by Laura K. Field
Princeton University Press, 2025



Firespitter: 

The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez
edited by Margaret Busby
Nightboat Books, 2025



Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
by Mohammad El-Kurd
Haymarket Books, 2025



One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
Alfred Knopf, 2025



Black in Blues: 
How A Color Tells the Story Of My People 

y Imani Perry
Ecco, 2025


 

Mississippi’s Black Cotton
by MacArthur Cotton with John Obee
NewSouth Books, 2025



Democracy and Beauty:
The Political Aesthetics Of W.E.B. Du Bois
by Robert Gooding-Williams
Columbia University Press, 2025



Oceans Of Time: 
The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart 
(As told to Ethan Iverson)
Cymbal Press, 2025


HONORABLE MENTIONS:



The Second Emancipation:
Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness 

At High Tide
by Howard W. French
Liveright Publishing, 2025



Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza:
A Reckoning
by Peter Beinart
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025


 

My Country, Africa: 
Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria
by Andrée Blouin
Verso, 2025



Murder the Truth:
Fear, The First Amendment, And 

A Secret Campaign To Protect the Powerful
by David Enrich
Mariner Books, 2025



Water Mirror Echo:
Bruce Lee and the Making Of Asian America
by Jeff Chang
Mariner Books, 2025



Money, Lies, and God: 

Inside the Movement To Destroy American Democracy 

by Katherine Stewart
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025


Plundered:
How Racist Policies Undermine
Black Homeownership in America
by Bernadette Atuahene
Little, Brown and Company, 2025



No Race, No Country: 
The Politics and Poetics Of Richard Wright
by Deborah Mutnick
University Of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2025



One Man’s Freedom: 
Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over An 
American Ideal
by Nicholas Buccola
Princeton University Press, 2025




Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope:
A Tragic Vision Of the Civil Rights Movement
by Brandon M. Terry
Harvard University Press, 2025



Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother At Midcentury 
by Jordan Troeller
The MIT Press, 2025


 

Jean-Michel Basquiat:
The Making Of An Icon
by Doug Woodham
Thames and Hudson, 2025



Copaganda: 
How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
by Alec Karakatsanis
The New Press, 2025



The Containment: 
Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle For Racial Justice in the North
by Michelle Adams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025


 

A Moon Will Rise From The Darkness: 
Reports On Israel’s Genocide in Palestine
by Francesca Albanese
Pluto Press, 2025

NOTE: THE PANOPTICON REVIEW HAS THUS FAR PRESENTED TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS ANNUALLY FROM 2010-2025

PLEASE CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUAL LINKS TO ACCESS THE LISTINGS OF EACH PREVIOUS CALENDAR YEAR:

2024
2023
2022
2021
2020 
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Once Again Our Favorite Brilliant Journalists, Media Mavens, Public Intellectuals, Authors, Teachers, Activists and Dedicated/Resolute TRUTH-TELLERS Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moodie "Bring the Receipts" And Provide Us With the Kind of Utterly Fearless Analysis and Incisive Grass Roots Based Information and Necessary Demands For The Radical Defeat and Eradication Of Fascism in this Country and the Rest Of The World That We Sorely Need and Desire. Also: Exactly Who and What is Candace Owen, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Their Minions in MAGA and Beyond And What Does It All Mean For the Rest Of Us. NYT journalist Michelle Goldberg provides the Dirty Details in her report about How and Why the Far Right Leading American Fascists Are Engaged in Internecine·Warfare Over the Direction Of Their Movement These Daze.

HATE, HEARTBREAK, and HEROISM: One Week That Exposed Everything

Wajahat Ali

December 16, 2025

VIDEO:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYWxJHFzBP0

#brownuniversity #trump #breakingnews

Danielle Moodie joins Wajahat Ali to break down a weekend of hate, heartbreak, and heroism. From the Brown University shooting to the Bondi Beach attack and the Reiner family tragedy, they uncover the failures, spin, and cruelty in the aftermath. In Australia, a father and son attacked Jewish worshippers at Bondi Beach on Hanukkah, killing 15. A Muslim immigrant, Ahmed el Ahmed, intervened and saved lives, only for right-wing figures to twist the story into anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

Danielle Moodie and Wajahat Ali bring the context, uncover the spin, and discuss the broader implications of these intertwined tragedies, exposing the ongoing failures of leadership, media, and political accountability


http://Thelefthook.substack.com #HateAndHeroism #breakingnews #wajahatali #daniellemoodie #brownuniversity #BondiBeachAttack #TragedyAndHeroism #justicematters #politicalanalysis #currentevents #MassShootingAwareness #IslamophobiaExposed #mediacoverage #trending #politics #trump 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/opinion/candace-owens-erika-kirk.html

Opinion

Candace Owens Is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster

Credit: Jason Davis/Getty Images

Listen to this article · 7:11 minutes

Learn more

by Michelle Goldberg
December 20, 2025
New York Times

This week, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, traveled to Nashville to meet with Candace Owens, a podcaster who has become the premier purveyor of conspiracy theories about her husband’s murder. If the summit was meant to convince Owens to back off her paranoid and fantastical speculations, it failed. On Thursday, Owens had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’s telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.

Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate. On her podcast on Tuesday, Kelly said that she buys the official story that Kirk was murdered by Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the crime. But, she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our F.B.I., that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”

The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.

“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference on Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. As of this writing, she is ninth on Spotify’s podcasts charts, ahead of every other right-wing podcast except Carlson’s. (Shapiro is at 48, right behind Oprah Winfrey.) A TikTok video she posted after her meeting with Erika Kirk was viewed over 14 million times. Her fandom extends beyond political junkies; on TikTok, you’ll find Owens followers who otherwise post mostly about celebrities and wellness, both subjects she talks about often. In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.

This is partly a story about conservatives creating a monster they can’t control. Owens, after all, has been saying nutty things for a long time. In 2019, she left her job as communications director of Turning Point not long after arguing that Hitler’s real sin was globalism, not nationalism. (“If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great,” she said, it would have been fine.) Rather than ostracize her, however, powerful conservative organizations cultivated her. Republicans invited her to testify before Congress about why white nationalism wasn’t a problem. In 2020 Shapiro hired her at the Daily Wire, his media company, which is where she began her podcast. (They split in 2024 over her increasingly antisemitic rhetoric.) Having elevated her in large part for her willingness to say outrageous things about her opponents, people on the right are now surprised by her willingness to say outrageous things about them.

Owens’s rise, and the damage she’s done to her erstwhile allies, also offers a warning about the danger of the influencer politics that conservatives have excelled at. Since the 2024 election, Democrats have lamented the advantage Republicans have gained in new media, including long-form podcasts, webcasts and vertical video platforms like TikTok. Clearly, liberals should try to figure out how to become competitive in all these mediums, since many Americans rely on them to learn about the world. The problem is that the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism.

I was struck by a stray reference in Owens’s podcast this week to the “mommy sleuths and investigators” in her audience. She was announcing plans to provide these amateur digital detectives with photos of Kirk’s rental car, which somehow, in her telling, point to problems with the investigation of his death. It demonstrated one of her chief innovations: She packages her conspiracy theories in the slick conventions of true crime, allowing people following along on their screens to participate in the search for answers.

QAnon once offered its adherents a similar sense that they were taking part in solving a great mystery. Lately, however, that movement’s energy seems to have dissipated. There was always a strange optimistic streak to QAnon, since it posited that heroic “white hats” were working behind the scenes to set the world right. As one popular meme put it, “Patriots are in control.” But now, Donald Trump is firmly back in power, and no golden age is at hand. Rather than the cathartic unmasking of deep state pedophile networks, we’ve seen Trump struggling to keep the case files of his friend Jeffrey Epstein secret.

For at least some former true believers, disillusionment is setting in. Marjorie Taylor Greene mournfully referenced the QAnon movement’s tropes when she announced her resignation last month. “There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played,” she said.

If patriots aren’t in control, it raises the question of who is. Unsurprisingly, some entrepreneurial figures on the right have settled on a tried-and-true answer: the Jews. Owens especially has taken this most elemental of paranoid fixations and turned it into something between a soap opera and a live-action roll-playing game. “It’s necessary for people to recognize how greatly evil these Zionists are,” Owens said on her podcast this week, describing them as “Trotskyites” who employ Soviet techniques of mind control. The implication is that if you reject her, you’re falling into their trap.

“Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better,” Shapiro said in his AmericaFest speech, a cri de coeur against the direction of the movement he’s dedicated his career to. Unfortunately, when it comes to people trying to build an audience, he’s wrong.

More on the far right:

Opinion | David French

What Happens if You Refuse to Recognize That We Are in a Death Spiral
Dec. 14, 2025


Opinion | Bret Stephens, David Leonhardt and Jillian Weinberger
Bret Stephens on the Fight for the Future of the Right
Dec. 15, 2025


Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
On Republican Neo-Nazism, Hamas and Israel: An Epidemic of Moral Cowardice
Nov. 18, 2025



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.