The year 2025 ends with a powerful list of non-fiction books addressing important social and global themes. Amid concerns about artificial intelligence changing how we read, writers focus on equality, history, and conflict. Historian Audrey Truschke’s India: 5000 Years of History presents a vast view of India’s long journey. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands highlights South Asia's history from 1928 to 1971, explaining lasting partition effects. Anand Teltumbde in The Caste Con Census argues that counting caste will not end it but maintain the system. Books also spotlight current conflicts. A collection edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, examines the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s power. Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? treats rivers as living beings with rights, studying threats to rivers in Ecuador, Chennai’s Adyar, and Canada. Macfarlane says, "Hope is the thing with rivers." Nirmala Lakshman’s The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community explores the unique history and cultural ties of Tamils, praised for blending history and emotion. Ravikant Kisana’s Meet The Savarnas harshly critiques savarna supremacy in India. Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a powerful response to the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict. He calls it a "break-up letter" to Western ideas of freedom and justice. Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me reveals her complicated bond with her late mother, activist Mary Roy, who fought for women’s rights. Sarah Wynn-Williams recounts her time at Meta in Careless People, exposing reckless leadership by Zuckerberg and Sandberg and the platform’s global impact. Ipsita Chakravarty’s Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict preserves fading stories as the government bans books about Kashmir. Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills shares life in the Himalayas with stunning watercolors. Karen Hao in Empire of AI tells the inside story of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, warning about the power and money behind AI’s rise. Gardiner Harris’s The Dark Secrets of Johnson&Johnson reveals the company’s harmful drug and product practices, hiding dangers even from regulators. Harris tells The Hindu, "J&J, early on, would find out that its product was dangerous, would hide those dangers... knowing that it could result in a number of deaths." In a year marked by war and loss, these books offer insight, hope, and tough truths about our world.