Audiobooks by Alex Zamalin

Counterculture: The Story of America from Bohemia to Hip-Hop

A political and intellectual history of American counterculture and the historical figures who redefined mainstream understandings of freedom, culture, art, and politics-from The Beat Generation to Basquiat This entertaining, intellectual history fulfills the growing appetite for marginalized narratives. Counterculture brilliantly interrogates the diversity of counterculture and the interwoven relationship between each individual legacy. From Anarchism to the Harlem Renaissance, Alex Zamalin unveils the humanity behind these romanticized figures and popularized movements to capture revolutionary freedom in action. American counterculture, defined as a movement whose values are outside and oppositional to mainstream norms and whose practices fundamentally reject what is socially respectable, ultimately transformed the 20th century. With key players: - Emma Goldman - Billie Holiday - Allen Ginsberg - Amiri Baraka - Jean-Michel Basquiat And key movements: - Anarchism - Black Bohemia - The Harlem Renaissance - The Beat Generation - The Black Arts Movement - Hip-Hop Counterculture reaches new depths, tackling a wide range of historical, social, and political topics, and expanding contemporary understandings of American cultural tradition. At a time when counterculture was on the outskirts of American society, Alex Zamalin explores the reason why.

Alex Zamalin (Author), Dan Levy, TBD (Narrator)

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All Is Not Lost: 20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster

An uplifting look at how organizers in the past have successfully leveraged crises into emancipatory politics, and a plea for continued progressive movement building in our tumultuous social climate From the climate apocalypse and COVID-19 to double-digit unemployment to Donald Trump and the rise of far-right white nationalists-disasters are everywhere we look. While these disasters often leave us feeling hopeless and withdrawn, scholar Alex Zamalin argues that pessimism cannot be the only response. Silence and inaction only perpetuate mass suffering and inequality. Instead, All Is Not Lost suggests that following every crisis emerges new political opportunity for changing our politics and everyday lives. Blending intellectual history, biography, and political critique, Zamalin offers 20 specific lessons for our present moment, turning to moments in history to demonstrate how various figures in the past have successfully leveraged struggles into sources of political action and freedom. The lessons-on how to resist, organize, treat others, think politically, memorialize, dream, write, occupy, build, and act-all build toward one truth: though disaster is something we cannot prevent from arriving, we can control how we confront it and what we build in its place. Using examples from the 17th century to the present, All Is Not Lost reminds readers to not back down in the face of crisis and offers radical lessons of continued resistance and movement building to create a successful progressive coalition.

Alex Zamalin (Author), Chris Baetens (Narrator)

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Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility

The first history of racial injustice to examine how civility and white supremacy are linked, and a call for citizens who care about social justice to abandon civility and practice civic radicalism The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color. Although many progressives today are told that we need to be more polite and thoughtful, less rancorous and angry, when we talk about race in America, civility maintains rather than disrupts racial injustice. Spanning two hundred years, Zamalin's accessible blend of intellectual history, political biography, and contemporary political criticism shows that civility has never been neutral in its political uses and impacts. The best way to tackle racial inequality is through "civic radicalism," an alternative to civility found in the actions of Black radical leaders including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. Civic radicals shock and provoke people. They name injustice and who is responsible for it. They protest, march, strike, boycott, and mobilize collectively rather than form alliances with those who fundamentally oppose them. In Against Civility, citizens who care deeply about racial and socioeconomic equality will see that they need to abandon this concept of discreet politeness when it comes to racial justice and instead more fully support disruptive actions and calls for liberation, which have already begun with movements like #MeToo, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and Black Lives Matter.

Alex Zamalin (Author), Adam Barr (Narrator)

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