The Best UC Press Books of 2025
We’re proud to see UC Press books recognized across these best-of lists. From pandemic response and climate history to teaching, art, and the politics of equity, these books reflect the kind of publishing we believe in: books that challenge assumptions, recover overlooked lives, and bring complex ideas into public conversation. Bold, field-defining scholarship for the public good.
Fair Doses
An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity
by Seth Berkley
An Economist Best Book
"The story of vaccines, as told by an infectious disease epidemiologist. During the covid-19 pandemic, Seth Berkley fought against political resistance and nationalism to help distribute 2bn vaccines across the world."
Riding Like the Wind
The Life of Sanora Babb
by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
A USA Today Bestseller
"Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know--and who tells them--can change the way we remember history."
What Can I Get Out of This?
Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics
by Carlo Rotella
A Forbes Best Higher Education Book
"It’s inspiring when good teachers write well about their craft and their students, and Rotella comes through with just that kind of contribution this year."
Heat, a History
Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet
by On Barak
A Foreign Affairs Best Book
"In this provocative book, both witty and profoundly serious, Barak provides a human-scale history of the causes and consequences of rising temperatures in the Middle East. He brings the abstractions of carbon footprints and greenhouse gas emissions to vivid, tangible life."
Tales of Militant Chemistry
The Film Factory in a Century of War
by Alice Lovejoy
A Science News Favorite Book
"Throughout the narrative, Lovejoy deftly weaves a cornucopia of strands and recurring threads in politics, economics, history, biography and technology. The result is a compelling illustration of how fascinating and frightening the world of industrial chemistry can be."
Who Pays for Diversity?
Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It
by Oneya Fennell Okuwobi
A Greater Good Magazine Favorite Book
"Okuwobi argues for replacing performative diversity with structural change and shared responsibility for equity—and helps all of us consider what a better workplace could look like."
Humans
A Monstrous History
by Surekha Davies
A History Today Book of the Year
"Creative and deeply serious, winding a path from primordial gods to zombies and large language models. Davies shows how the concept of monstrousness helped create the categories of who is human and who is not that undergird contemporary inequality. It is a history of why we make monsters – and what might happen if we cease to."
Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York
The Making of a Transatlantic Legacy
by Ruth E. Iskin
A Hyperallergic Favorite Art Book
"I devoured Ruth E. Iskin's Mary Cassatt between Paris and New York. A voluminously illustrated new book about the artist by an important scholar . . . After Iskin, you’ll never look at Cassatt the same way again — less Madonna and Child and more Revolution Girl Style Now".