2025 Kvetching & Books

A request and a 2025 wrap

First, a request.

Yaacov Levitan was killed at the Bondi Massacre. Our sons are friends and classmates. He leaves behind a wife and 4 kids. I would be deeply grateful if you would contribute directly to his family here.

I have never asked for any payment or a donation before. I am asking this once.

For donations of any size, I will give you a shout out in a future post.

For donations >A$300 I will give you a 1 hour video call.

For donations >A$1,000 I will try and write a kvetch of your choice — subject to appropriate discourse and it falling within my circle of competence — happy to discuss first.

Just give directly and send me proof and we’ll sort something out.

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See Kvetching & Books 2022, 2023, 2024

Well that was a miserable end to the year.

On 1 November I wrote:

You don’t want to wait for an illness or some other calamity to strike you or a loved one to realise how good you have it. And besides — at least you’re not on the Eastern Front.

For some, it may as well have been the Eastern Front.

My most popular post this year (and ever) was Ambitious Australia. An uncharacteristically optimistic kvetch perhaps, there’s a lot of pent up energy for high agency, big vision optimism for Australia.

This was followed by my chat with Tyler Cowen, then my recent spicy take on male inadequacy, then my take on WWII’s Eastern Front (that was a brutal rabbit hole). Somehow my piece on Helen Garner’s memoir and the movie Conclave did good numbers, the latter (I am told) in Catholic group chats.

I’ve noticed my Australia essays having an impact on discourse (e.g. on Abul Rizvi and Australia’s bureaucracy, Australian identity, and political stirrings). They’re a mix of reaction and a culmination of a couple years of Australian history reading. I find it odd that US institutions occasionally reach out for me to write for them and Australian ones never do. I know you guys read this :)

This year I wrote a few pieces that I decided would be best left in my drafts folder. One is ‘Sabra and Shatila was a Stitch Up’, but feels too niche and curmudgeonly even for me. Another is ‘Immigration is a Choice’ but I made my point clear enough in my Bondi massacre piece.

I wrote two more pieces on daughters. I met someone the other day who called my writing wholesome, which was a nice change. You should watch Mr Inbetween.

I published 29 pieces in 2025 vs 24 in 2024. Overall subscriber growth has been steady. I’ve never charged and don’t intend to. Thanks for sharing pieces.

What’s next? I have an advance draft of a very long deep dive on New Zealand history, with contrasts to Australia and US. I got a little overexcited about New Zealand, which really has a deeply fascinating and unique story. A couple essays on Breaking Bad. Otherwise I always have a dozen or so drafts ready to go. Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about writing right now. Feels a bit obscene to start posting about Breaking Bad given what’s going on. Let’s see what 2026 brings.

Got through lots of books this year — partly because I turned the default speed up to 3x from 2x for audiobooks.

Hold your loved ones. I wish you peace and prosperity for 2026.

Australia

• A History of Australia — by John Malony

• Australia — by W. K. Hancock

  • Very hard to get a copy of, first half is excellent, second half obsolete.

• From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories — by Mark McKenna

• How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 — by Helen Garner

• Quarterly Essay 98: Hard New World — by Hugh White

  • Under-commented on that Hugh White explicitly calls out Australia’s Chinese population as a risk factor in any conflict with China.

• Australia: A History — by Tony Abbott

  • He did a surprisingly good job. It’s a little boomer Liberal talking points vibe (e.g. free markets and immigrant nation stuff). I’m low-key jealous — I’d have written a different history, but good on him for using his post-PM time to write this.

The Americas

• Truman — by David McCullough

  • The accidental president? An ordinary man in an extraordinary position? The contrast between FDR and Truman is underrated. FDR really did do an Alexander the Great, leaving an iron-grip presidency without a political heir. Then again, Truman did oversee the implementation of the Marshall Plan, established NATO, and navigated the Berlin embargo without getting into nuclear war.

• Lincoln — by David Herbert Donald

  • Under-appreciated how looney his wife was. No wonder he had such titanic patience.

• Daniel Patrick Moynihan — by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (ed. Steven R. Weisman)

  • “Asked why he gave all his musicals Irish names, George M. Cohan said ‘The Jews come anyway.’”

  • “It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content will rise 25% by 2000…This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet.” (1969. Lol.)

  • ““On Thursday, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, looking her radiant best, threw 20,000 Trade Union leaders into prison.” I am reliably informed that it was this painful duty, plus the upcoming even more explosive concern [atomic bomb test] which prevented her accepting Harvard University’s most recent request that she give the commencement address and receive a citation for services to peace and freedom.”

• The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 — by Robert Middlekauff

  • Idea for Trump? “[E]very woman who attended the ball was presented with a fan prepared in Paris, with ivory frame, and when opened displayed a likeness of Washington in profile.”

• The Federalist Papers — by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

• Alexander Hamilton — by Ron Chernow

• Cuba — by Ada Ferrer

  • Annoying style.

• In the Arena: a Memoir of Defeat, Victory and Renewal — by Richard Nixon

  • I find the idea of presidential disgrace fascinating. A man can reach the highest peaks, accomplish much, and still end his days embittered. Also see Menachem Begin.

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York — by Robert A. Caro

• American Zion — by Benjamin Park

• My Life and Work — Henry Ford

  • “There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing.”

New Zealand

• Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States — David Hackett Fischer

• The Penguin History of New Zealand — by Michael King

Israel

• The Sword of Freedom — by Yossi Cohen

• Ben Gurion: Father of Modern Israel — by Anita Shapira

• Jabotinsky: A Life — by Hillel Halkin

• Warrior: An Autobiography — by Ariel Sharon (with David Chanoff)

  • I could not put this down.

• One State, Two States — by Benny Morris

  • Clinical evisceration of the two state delusion

• The Pity of It All — by Amos Elon

  • Deserves its good reputation.

• Arabs — by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  • (Yes this doesn’t really fit in this category.) Disappointing. Too meandering, low insight density.

• Six Days of War — by Michael B. Oren

  • Genuinely thrilling to read.

• The Six-Day War — by Guy Laron

  • A good political counterbalance to Oren’s work, but his underlying case isn’t convincing.

• Lioness — by Francine Klagsbrun

• Jerusalem — by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Scripture / Religion

• God: A Biography — by Jack Miles

  • Read this in one sitting (a long flight). Exceptional. I think about Job’s defeat of God often, and of this sublime passage every few weeks:

  • “Nothing in nature looks like cloud by day and fire by night except a volcano. The depth of the Lord God’s compelling but contradictory power is well evoked by the extraordinary image of a volcano brought into a tent… The volcano has come to live in the tent because the tent was built by the volcano’s friend.”

• Job: A New Translation — by Edward L. Greenstein

• How to Read the Bible — by James L. Kugel

• Confessions: A New Translation — by Augustine (Peter Constantine translation)

  • Unfortunately found this unbearably tedious.

• God and Politics in Esther — by Yoram Hazony

  • One of my very favourite books. Yoram Hazony is one of the most insightful writers alive today. He packs profound insights on the human condition into restrained, lyrical prose. I would have him write a book on every book of the Bible. His asides on the nature of marriage, the pride of men, the taking of property as an assault on the spirit, are magnificent.

• The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture — by Yoram Hazony

• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious — by Ross Douthat

• The Thirteen Petalled Rose — by Adin Steinsaltz

  • Unfortunately uncompelling.

• My Rebbe — by Adin Steinsaltz

• Rebbe — by Joseph Telushkin

• Faith, Hope and Carnage — by Nick Cave, Seán O’Hagan

  • Nick Cave is such an unusual figure. He breaks every Australian mold. He is the opposite of tall poppy: bombastic and self-projecting in the extreme. His music and philosophy is deeply Christian. He can be a bit much. But then again, his music can be top shelf. And his son did die.

WWII / Eastern Front / Russia

• The Gulag Archipelago — by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• Berlin — by Antony Beevor

• Russia’s War — by Richard Overy

• Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East — by David Stahel

• Blood Red Snow — by Günter K. Koschorrek

• D-Day — by Antony Beevor

• The Boys’ Crusade — by Paul Fussell

  • Fussell is seriously underrated. More on audiobook please!

• When Titans Clashed — by David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House

• War on the Eastern Front — by James Lucas

• Kiev 1941 — by David Stahel

• On a Knife’s Edge — by Prit Buttar

• A Small Town in Ukraine — by Bernard Wasserstein

• The Story of Russia — by Orlando Figes

• The Forgotten Soldier — by Guy Sajer

Fiction

• Stoner — by John Williams

• King Lear — by William Shakespeare

• Bleak House — by Charles Dickens

  • Unfortunately didn’t love this. Meandering?

• My Brilliant Friend — by Elena Ferrante

• The Netanyahus — by Joshua Cohen

Other

• The Journalist and the Murderer — by Janet Malcolm

• Abundance: How We Build a Better Future — by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

• Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life — by Agnes Callard

  • Not for me.

• The Technological Republic — by Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska

  • Too late, too shallow, written by ChatGPT?

• The Persian Expedition — by Xenophon

  • The Greeks really did like their boys.

• The Future of Truth — by Werner Herzog

• The Origins of Efficiency — by Brian Potter

  • Did you know women’s menstrual cycles can affect chip production?

• Trillion Dollar Coach — by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

  • More a tribute than a handbook. Skip.

• Breakneck — by Dan Wang

• Against Interpretation and Other Essays — by Susan Sontag

  • Is anyone more overrated than Sontag? A poor man’s Camille Paglia. Her voice is incredibly annoying and low insight density.

• Good to Great — by Jim Collins

  • Aged poorly?

• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — by René Girard

• Conservatism — by Yoram Hazony

• The First Salute — by Barbara W. Tuchman

• Super Agers — by Eric Topol

• Spice — by Roger Crowley

  • Enjoyed the detail on Magellan’s brutal journey. Overall not as good as Crowley’s Conquerors, which is riveting.

• The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean — by David Abulafia

• Music — by Ted Gioia

Beautiful photo of my dear friend Chaim with other prominent Sydney rabbis at a memorial event in Sydney.