Audiobooks by Frye Gaillard

A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

'There are many different ways to remember the sixties,' Frye Gaillard writes, 'and this is mine. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer's reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era-one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.' With A Hard Rain, Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller's eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times: civil rights, black power, women's liberation, the war in Vietnam, and the protests movements against it. Gaillard also examines the cultural manifestations of change in the era-music, literature, art, religion, and science-and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers. As Gaillard remembers these influential people, he weaves together a compelling story about an iconic American decade of change, conflict, and progress.

Frye Gaillard (Author), Chris Abernathy (Narrator)

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The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance

Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect on the role of the South in America's long descent into Trumpism. In 1974, Southern author John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They explore the 'birtherism' of Donald Trump and the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on the capital-all of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too, a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacy Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South might lead the way on the path to redemption. They bring a multi-racial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.

Cynthia Tucker, Frye Gaillard (Author), Diana Blue, Paul Heitsch (Narrator)

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