Reading clusters in 2025
Books that shaped my worldview
Throughout the year, I’ve written several posts about individual books I really liked. Here, I zoom out and look at some of the reading clusters that didn’t merit individual posts but were nonetheless influential in shaping my worldview.
War, genocide, survival
2025 was a strong year for in extremis reading. The three big clusters within this category were World War II, life under the Khmer Rouge, and the Rwandan genocide.
World War II
The first WWII-themed book I read during the year was Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid. The book made two interesting points. The first one is that during the 900-day siege, which claimed around a million lives, almost half of the deaths occurred during the first winter (1941-1942). When seeing a casualty count and a duration, it’s easy to assume that deaths happened linearly, but in most cases, they didn’t.
The second one is the order in which people within a family typically perished, and the fact that there was a typical order in the first place. As Reid writes:
Within a single family, … the order in which its members typically died was grandfather and infants first, grandmother and father (if not at the front) second, mother and older children last.1
Poland in WWII was another reading cluster. The three books I read were 1) Jan Karski’s book about his role as a courier in the Polish Underground, 2) Bernard Goldstein’s book about life in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Ghetto uprising, and life outside the Ghetto, and 3) Władysław Szpilman’s book about his own survival.
Reading these books, one inevitably asks: why did these men survive when so many didn’t?
For Jewish survivors like Goldstein and Szpilman, the baseline survival rate was very low (e.g., only 10% of people confined to the Warsaw Ghetto survived).2 Survival depended overwhelmingly on uncontrollable chance events.
This doesn’t mean that people had zero influence over their probability of survival. Thinking quickly or having many pre-war contacts (including with non-Jewish Poles) could increase people’s chances of survival, even if only by a few percentage points. When reading survivors’ memoirs, it’s easy to focus on what they did to survive, forgetting that the overwhelming majority of people who acted very similarly were murdered (and, hence, couldn’t write memoirs).
Some stories:
At the outbreak of the war, Karski was captured by the Red Army. He was an officer in the Polish Army at the time. As such, he would have most likely been murdered in the Katyn massacre. He learned that privates (but not officers) could participate in a prisoner exchange, so he found a private who was willing to swap uniforms with him, and he got away in time.3
Before the war, Goldstein was an influential member of the Bund, a Jewish labor movement. This saved his life on several occasions. For example, at a critical time, a factory guard provided him with a hiding place and food for many days; the man’s brother worked in a militia under Goldstein’s command before the war. Similarly, Szpilman had extensive contacts through his work at Polish Radio, and many of his former colleagues helped him survive both in the Ghetto and after he escaped to the “Aryan” side.
Life under the Khmer Rouge
Two books I read in this category were First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor.
There was a relatively large overlap between Ung’s and Ngor’s experience. I attribute this to the fact that life under the Khmer Rouge was much more homogeneously miserable than life in other extreme contexts. In most other contexts with a very bad average outcome, individual outcomes varied much more.
Rwandan genocide
The book that resonated with me the most was Shake Hands with the Devil, written by the head of the UN peacekeeping force, Roméo Dallaire.
Two things stuck with me from the book. The first one is how a system disintegrates and how different actors try to fill the power vacuum. Roadblocks go up all over the country. Before arriving at a roadblock, people don’t know if it will be manned by local militia, the military, gendarmes, or some other group. If it’s one group, they make it through; if it’s another, they get murdered on the spot.
The second theme is the gap between intentions and actions. Dallaire wants to help victims, but he has a limited mandate and resources, so he cannot. He can chronicle the events, improve outcomes at the margin, but that’s pretty much it. A tragic example of this intention-action gap is the Gikondo church massacre. People are massacred in a church. A few survive. Some UN soldiers go there with a vehicle, but don’t have the logistical capacity to rescue the survivors immediately. They promise to return the next day; by then, those who had survived the massacre on the first day have all been murdered.
Getting to the bottom of something
Some highlights in this category were Bad Blood, Dark Mirror, and Outlaw Ocean. Not necessarily because of my inherent interest in their topics of investigation, but because all three had interesting segments about how investigative journalism works.
The most memorable in this somewhat broad category was Red Notice by Bill Browder. It’s not strictly investigative journalism, but it has a strong investigative element, hence the inclusion here.
The relevant part of the story: Bill Browder is an important investor in the Russian market in the early 2000s. He upsets some influential people in the state apparatus by uncovering their crimes. These corrupt officials come after him, his financial interests, and the people he works with.
Browder’s local tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, lives a typical middle-class lifestyle, with a wife and two kids. The state arrests him on bogus charges. The expectation is that he would quickly fold and do everything that’s requested of him to save himself.
He does the opposite. When he is pressured to retract his testimony or sign false confessions, he refuses. He maintains his integrity despite withheld medical treatments, the corrupt and farcical process, and the increasingly inhumane circumstances. He refuses to act immorally and is ultimately murdered in custody.
Someone’s behavior during ordinary times is not a good predictor of their behavior during extraordinary times.
Another interesting story from the book is the escape of one of Browder’s other lawyers. This lawyer saved someone from a long prison sentence a decade earlier. That someone was an important businessman in the Russian Far East. Once the lawyer made his way to that part of the country, the businessman hid him, gave him bodyguards, and eventually helped him get out of the country.
Reciprocity and loyalty might come from unexpected places.
China
I visited China for the first time in 2025. I like reading about a country immediately before a visit and immediately after, when the place and its people feel much more relatable and top of mind. I picked up Other Rivers by Peter Hessler based on a strong endorsement by Dan Wang (himself an author of a great recent book about China, Breakneck).
Hessler taught English in Sichuan province twice, with a two-decade gap between the two appointments, in 1997 and 2019. The life outcomes of the two cohorts could not have been more different. I don’t know if that was the intention of the book, but to me, it showcases very vividly why economic growth and progress matter.
Another gem was Factory Girls4, written by Leslie T. Chang, who also happens to be Hessler’s wife. Set in the early 2000s in Dongguan, an industrial city close to Shenzhen, it documents the lives of rural girls as they try to establish their lives as factory workers in the city.
Beyond what I learned from the book (e.g., using a SIM card in a different province required roaming; discrimination was common, such as requiring a minimum height of 1.70 m for guards), I could feel the dynamism of the place and what it must have been like to live through rapid transformation.
The order reflected in part the design of the rationing system, in part physiology, and also social factors.
For non-Jewish Poles, chances of survival were much better, even for those who, like Karski, operated in the Polish Underground.
The man on the other side of the exchange could prove that he was a private, so the exchange didn’t mean his potential death.
I never notice the book cover, but this one stuck with me.