by Rod D. Martin
December 22, 2025
This is my end-of-year review of the best books I read this year. They weren't all published in 2025, nor are they everything I read in 2025 (not by a long shot). But I did read (or re-read) them in 2025 and hope you and your loved ones will read them in 2026 (which is why I’m sending them to you just before Christmas).
Moreover, I am leaving out the Bible (the link is to my favorite Study Bible), which is obviously my favorite book every year. You should read more about that here:
In any case, here, in no particular order, are my 10 Favorite Books of 2025:
1. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus
It is hard to think of a more consequential figure to the creation of the modern conservative movement — and thus the modern world — than William F. Buckley.
Sam Tanenhaus is Buckley’s ideological opposite. But that makes his new biography (published this summer) all the more striking. Tanenhaus earned his credibility on this terrain with his superb Whittaker Chambers (1997), a book that drew acclaim precisely because it refused to treat Chambers — and the anti-communist Right he embodied — either as a candidate for hagiography or, as his ideological comrades would prefer, as a cartoon. Buckley is that same intellectual honesty on a much larger canvas
It has been my experience that few conservatives under the age of 80 have any concept of just how nonexistent their movement was even within my 56-year lifetime. The post-war consensus was solidly Democrat: a socialist-leaning mixed economy, powerful unions, an ever-expanding technocratic welfare state, all undergirded by doctrinaire Keynesianism. Everything else was considered dangerous fringe kookery, and in both parties.
Buckley stood athwart that history and cried “Stop!” The intellectual movement he created gave rise to the political revolution ignited by Barry Goldwater, established by Ronald Reagan, and consolidated by Newt Gingrich. Countless others deserve their places in that pantheon — Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell, and many more. But there was an era in which FDR’s near-absolute political and ideological victory — lasting long after his death — meant the entire conservative “movement” could meet in a single room.
William F. Buckley changed all that. It’s time many of us learned how, and why.
2. The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, by George Friedman
Last year I featured Neil Howe’s brilliant The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. Friedman’s take is very similar, albeit argued from different premises: that America is well into a Crisis that will determine its next century, in precisely the same way that the Great Depression and World War II did nearly a century ago.
In The Storm Before the Calm, Friedman introduces a dual-cycle model of American history: one political, driven by institutional dynamics and presidential transitions; the other socio-economic, driven by broader technological and class realignments. These cycles unfold over roughly 80 and 50 years respectively. The 80-year institutional cycle neatly corresponds to Howe’s thesis. The socio-economic cycle adds depth. And for the first time, they’re ending at precisely the same time.
What does this mean? Precisely what I’ve been telling you for 25 years: that America is on the cusp of swinging strongly one direction or the other, into a Golden Age of freedom, smaller government, and innovation, or a high-tech Dark Age that looks uncomfortably like Communist China and George Orwell.
That’s not quite how Friedman says it. But his analysis is fascinating, adds meaningfully to Howe’s, and is well worth adding to your list.
3. World Order, by Henry Kissinger
People hear “Kissinger” and “World Order” and immediately append “New”. But that’s not the point of this historical analysis at all, and it’s a much-needed refresher (or for some, a vital introduction) to the vastly different ways that America, Russia, China, and global Islam view the world.
The West’s great achievement after 1648 was the Westphalian idea that sovereign states can disagree about religion and ideology yet still coexist through balance, diplomacy, and restraint. The non-European world has had to accept that idea. That doesn’t mean they agree with it, or don’t want to replace it. And therein lies the struggle of our time.
World Order is an historical tour of those competing civilizational concepts of order. Europe’s order grows out of exhaustion and balance-of-power realism. America draws from that, but with a missionary, moral, and universal hope. Russia seeks security through depth and expansion, not consensus. China understands itself not as one state among many but as the central civilization with tributaries at its edges. And in much of the Islamic world, political legitimacy is theological, transnational, and indifferent to borders.
The Westphalian system provides a basis for peace. Its competitors demand subjugation. A stable international order will require both power and prudence, specifically on the part of our own essential nation. World Order is anything but a neocon manifesto. But it understands the centrality of America to any future you’d want to live in.
4. The Art of the Comeback, by Donald J. Trump
I have marveled unendingly at the legions of “experts” who claim Donald Trump acts “incoherently”. Our 45th and 47th President has written 19 books, given countless speeches, and starred in 15 seasons of America’s top-rated show, The Apprentice, a masterclass in negotiating and decision-making.
Few men have ever more thoroughly telegraphed how they view the world. His critics are just too lazy to do the homework.
Donald Trump’s comeback in 2024-2025 is like nothing in American history. But it’s not his first. Beginning in 1990, the celebrity billionaire’s empire nearly fell apart. His steep climb back is, or ought to be, the stuff of legends. He chronicles it in this now out-of-print 1997 volume The Art of the Comeback, which in my view is a far better, far more useful entry than his also good, much talked-about The Art of the Deal.
Perhaps the most interesting part? The book’s final chapter, in which we discover that Trump’s thoughts on politics and foreign affairs are almost entirely unchanged and unwavering (aside from abortion) over all these many years. Incoherent? Hardly.
As Rush Limbaugh might have said, he told you so.
5. Discourses on Livy, by Niccolo Machiavelli
I have previously encouraged you to read Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, by Ryan Holiday. If you did, you know that one of Peter’s favorite books is Discourses on Livy. There’s a reason.
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is not a manual for tyranny: it’s an X-ray of republican politics — how free peoples stay free, how elites decay, how factions form, and why and how power always seeks to consolidate. His thesis is blunt: republics are either renewing themselves or rotting. Virtue means civic muscle — habits of self-government, willingness to fight for a good system, laws sturdy enough to restrain demagogues, oligarchs, and the mob.
Moreover, in Machiavelli’s telling, conflict isn’t automatically a disease, which is certainly good news for our current Crisis. When properly channeled, it’s the engine of liberty: it forces accountability and blocks the emergence of a permanent ruling class. When it’s improperly channeled, of course, it becomes the excuse for “emergency” powers — and the republic quietly becomes a tyranny.
Machiavelli is not Moses, and his thoughts did not come down on tablets. But they’ve survived five centuries for a reason. The Prince is interesting. Discourses on Livy is essential.
6. The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich A. Hayek
While we’re mining received wisdom — and especially in light of my Buckley recommendation — it’s worth remembering one of the true classics of the mid-century, Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
Written in England during the War, Hayek critiqued a rising Socialism as few ever had (or have). But due to wartime censorship, he was prevented from comparing British “Democratic Socialism” to the sort practiced in the USSR, which would have cast an ally in a most ugly light. So Hayek compared the Western left to National Socialism — Naziism, or Fascism — instead. The result is staggering even today.
Hayek conclusively demonstrates three things: that Fascism and Communism are two branches of the same tree, that Democratic Socialism is just a less-violent form of the same (which, with ever-increasing state power, need not remain less violent), and that the threat it poses not just to prosperity but to liberty is dire. Socialism does not exist to improve economic outcomes. It exists to transfer power to its own leaders. It pretends “democracy”: it creates aristocracy and dictatorship, by design.
Hayek’s book is a short, highly readable masterpiece. And it has rarely been more timely than now.
7. Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, by David Chilton
“Christian” Socialism, “Social Justice”, Critical Theory, and Liberation Theology are hardly new ideas. Among Christians prior to the modern “Woke” era, these poisons were perhaps best popularized in America by Ron Sider, in his genuinely awful (and ever-changing) Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
David Chilton masterfully dissects Sider and the “Christian” Left in this hilarious romp. He not only exposes the follies and fallacies of Socialism, he also systematically outlines the biblical alternative, laying the groundwork for real justice, progress, prosperity, and freedom. Productive Christians is a must-read.
8. The Israel Test, by George Gilder
In a time of growing controversy (and I would say confusion) about Israel, it is well worth taking time for this new edition of George Gilder’s The Israel Test, a test which too many in the West are manifestly failing.
The Israel Test chronicles the Jewish state’s rise under Benjamin Netanyahu from perpetual Socialist basket case to free-market powerhouse, a transformation I’ve described at length.
But it does far more than that. George frames Israel not as a “regional issue,” but as a civilizational tell: the hatred aimed at “the Zionist entity” is inseparable from the broader war on liberty, excellence, and the entrepreneurial spirit that built the modern world. Israel sits at the fault line where the West either remembers what it believes or succumbs to an alien system.
Or to put that another way, it’s no accident that the same people making bogus “land acknowledgements” are chanting “Globalize the Intifada”. It is America, and Western civilization, they seek to delegitimize. Israel is just in the way.
This new edition is sharpened by the post–Oct. 7 world. Gilder correctly re-centers the argument where it belongs — on freedom vs. the ideologies that can’t tolerate it, and on Israel as the inconvenient proof that freedom works, but only if we have the courage to defend it.
9. Primeval Saints: Studies in the Patriarchs of Genesis, by James B. Jordan
Primeval Saints is the kind of book that makes you realize how much modern Bible reading has been flattened — turned into isolated “stories” instead of the tightly reasoned covenantal metanarrative God actually gave us. Jim Jordan treats Genesis correctly: as deliberate, patterned revelation, rich with typology, liturgical echoes, and priestly symbolism, the first chapter in a much longer book ending in Revelation.
What you get is a guided tour through Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, as well as the early genealogies most people skim but which Jordan shows not to be filler. The result is bracing: Genesis stops being “Sunday school” and becomes God laying down the grammar of history. Jim also draws some remarkable conclusions from his careful, text-driven approach, including the shocking conversion of Pharaoh and all Egypt under Joseph, which puts Exodus in a much sharper, different light.
If you want a deeper, more integrated way to read Scripture — one that makes the Old Testament feel like a living, coherent whole — Primeval Saints is a serious, rewarding read you’ll come back to again and again.
10. The Man Who Sold the Moon, by Robert A. Heinlein
For most of my life, the Space-Industrial Complex stole our future. We were promised Moon bases, Mars colonies, commercial flights to orbiting space stations. What we got was…not that.
SpaceX has changed all that. The future is within reach again. But it could have been all along, if post-war America had embraced the pre-war lessons of commercial aviation. A hundred years ago, the government sparked a highly competitive race to create globe-girdling airlines by paying commercial contractors to deliver the mail, rewarding innovation and price competition instead of setting up a tiny oligopoly of favored contractors with cost-plus contracts.
The market took us from Kitty Hawk to the DC-3 to the 747 in just 66 years. How different our equivalent time in space!
Robert A. Heinlein understood this. In 1950 he told the gripping story of D.D. Harriman, “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, and how he transformed the human future through competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Along with its epilogue “Requiem”, it’s one of the most compelling novellas of the modern era. And as you read it, you can’t help but see the prototype for today’s Elon Musk.
This edition contains other Heinlein stories that are also worthwhile. But for pure inspiration, hope, and even a grand moment of sacrifice and brotherly love, it’s hard to top the title tale of The Man Who Sold the Moon.
BONUS: Essays on the Counterrevolution, by Rod D. Martin
Expected to be in stores in 2026, this preview copy of my latest book is ONLY available when you become a Premium or Inner Circle Member! In it, I lay out the historical forces driving the current Crisis, the soft coup against our Constitutional order 90 years ago, and how Donald Trump is attempting to forge a restoration of the American system.
Join today, and get this preview copy of my book plus countless other bonuses. Or give a Membership for Christmas! It’s not too late: delivery is instant.
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That’s it! Now go do your Christmas shopping! Your family and friends need these books. So do you.
Merry Christmas,
Thank you for this book list. My political science degree should have required more of this !