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Best Business Books of the Year / December 2025
For December 2025, here are 12 books from the longlist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year for 2025 that you can borrow from JMU Libraries. Stephen Witt won the £30,000 prize for The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (Hill, 2025).
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The Thinking Machine
WINNER: Nvidia is as valuable as Apple and Microsoft. It has shaped the world as we know it. But its story is little known. This is the definitive story of the greatest technology company of our times.
Abundance
FINALIST: The history of the twenty-first century so far is one of unaffordability and shortage. This book traces the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance.
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
FINALIST: A riveting, firsthand investigation of China's seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America. Blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China.
Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War
FINALIST: A former top State Department sanctions official explains how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis - Russia, China, and Iran.
House of Huawei
FINALIST: A remarkable portrait of Huawei's reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire -- one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting.
How Progress Ends
FINALIST: Spanning the past 1,000 years, this book explains why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change, from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI.
Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic
Over the past seventy years, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and other consumer goods makers have harnessed single-use plastics to turbocharge their profits.
Empire of AI
From a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, this is an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history.
The Genius Myth
You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. How this one word has shaped (and distorted) our ideas of success and achievement.
How Things Are Made
An illuminating tour through the manufacturing world and its seismic influence on our lives. It races the surprising paths taken by everyday items to reach consumers, from design to creation to delivery.
No More Tears
Covers multiple disasters, lies and cover-ups regarding the link of Johnson's Baby Powder to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, and a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics that have cost countless lives, rivaling the deceptive marketing of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.
Outclassed
An urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the United States.