In 2025 I read a handful of smart, wide-ranging non-fiction books on history and modern medicine. Poking outside your day job — into history, science, and systems — is a high-return habit: it stretches your thinking and sharpens judgment.

Here are three that stuck with me.

Danny Orbach, Fugitives: The History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (2023)

Danny Orbach is a military historian with a Harvard pedigree who studies coups, political assassinations, and military insubordination.

Fugitives traces what happened to Nazi officers after 1945. Many who avoided capture fled to Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa and reinvented themselves as military advisers, security trainers, and repression experts. They worked for states from Egypt and Syria to Iraq, the Congo, and various Latin American regimes.

Orbach’s central claim is blunt: Western priorities—chiefly fearing communism—often trumped justice. In practice, that meant experienced perpetrators were useful, and governments quietly recruited their skills. The techniques of control and the architecture of political police learned in Nazi Germany migrated and persisted.

The broader lesson is sobering and practical for anyone who studies systems: violence doesn’t vanish, it relocates to where it’s exploitable. States talk about principles, but they prioritize effectiveness. Read this book if you want a clear-eyed account of how power recycles tools of coercion.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1985)

I went on a short neuroscience binge and dug into classic casebooks. Oliver Sacks is a towering humane voice in neurology; he famously inspired the film Awakenings.

This book is a set of clinical portraits: visual agnosia, amnesia, aphasia, loss of bodily sense, Tourette’s, Parkinson’s, hallucinations, and other mind-bending syndromes. Sacks brings philosophy and literature into the clinic—he treats patients as whole people, not just broken modules.

What surprised me most was how often loss triggers adaptation. Many patients don’t seem overtly miserable; they find ways to live richly around their condition. One striking story is of a drummer with Tourette’s who loved the energy his tics gave him—medication flattened his edge and his playing. The clinical trade-offs are real: drugs can reduce symptoms but blunt personality and purpose.

Sacks models a deeply humane medicine: curiosity plus empathy, anchored in broad cultural literacy. If you care about design or product leadership, his work is an object lesson in treating users (or patients) as whole humans, not just inputs and outputs.

Rana Mitter, Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition)

This Oxford ‘Very Short Introduction’ isn’t an academic monograph; it’s a concise, readable synthesis aimed at curious readers. Mitter plays with the two terms in his title—‘China’ and ‘modern’—and spends a lot of time asking what modernity actually means for a civilization with millennia of statecraft.

I learned a crisp narrative arc: imperial China’s dynastic rhythms, the fracturing pressures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the end of the imperial system in 1911, mass mobilizations like the May Fourth movement, the civil war between nationalists and communists, the Japanese invasion, Mao’s era and the Cultural Revolution, and then the post‑Mao economic surge that produced today’s global China.

Mitter resists easy certainties. The book’s strength is making society, economy, and culture intelligible through history, not through headlines. It’s a smart primer if you want historical context without the jargon.

conclusion

All three books repay attention. Orbach sharpens your understanding of how political violence migrates; Sacks reminds you to keep the human in the center of systems thinking; Mitter supplies the historical scaffolding to understand modern China. Read any of these and you’ll come away with better filters for the world.

translated from french by GPT-5 mini --- and it took some liberty to improve my writing ;)