Audiobooks by Jonathan Alter

His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life Audiobook

From one of America's most-respected journalists and modern historians comes the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth president of the United States and Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure—ridiculed and later revered—with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision who was committed to telling the truth to the American people. Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the nineteenth; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the twentieth; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the twenty-first. Drawing on fresh archival material and five years of extensive access to Carter and his entire family, Alter traces how he evolved from a timid, bookish child—raised mostly by a black woman farmhand—into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer writing passionate, never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights, and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-nineties. This engrossing, monumental biography will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.

Jonathan Alter (Author), Michael Boatman (Narrator)

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The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

Jonathan Alter's The Promise compared Obama's first year in office to the early months of FDR's famous "100 days," which Alter profiled in The Defining Moment The Promise was praised for its fast pace. In this sequel, Alter digs into the hurly burly of the campaign and Obama's performance as president. It is the story of how he won or lost the election, describing the forces arrayed against him—a sinking economy, obdurate partisan opposition, his own Administration's faulty communication policy. Obama's enemies paint lurid and often untrue stories about him. After emerging in 2008 as the vessel of so many hopes, he is now a receptacle for the fears of those who despise him, as well as average Americans who are simply scared. Short of a more robust recovery than anyone expects, Obama's prospects for reelection depend on his success in stripping off the labels ("socialist," "Muslim," "terrorist-coddler," "Kenyan anti-colonialist"). Alter follows the President from the shellacking of the 2010 midterm election through the end of this term and the next term. Obama had hesitated in countering obstinate resistance of GOP congressional leaders, the tea party, and other haters; he had failed to communicate over their heads to the public. But this is the climactic clash between Obama's citizens' army and the moneyed clique. The first incumbent president to raise less money than his opponent, his campaign has placed a huge bet on digital technology to create an innovative network for contacting voters. His ground troops are arrayed against the other side that uses voter suppression and sheer money. We'll see if that is enough. Alter is in the best position of any writer to chronicle the inside-the-White House story of how Obama tries to salvage his presidency. He has deep contacts within the campaign and the Administration. Obama, Alter writes, always believed he could hit the three-point shot at the buzzer. Alter takes us on the court with Obama as he tries to hit the last big shot of his political career.

Jonathan Alter (Author), Jonathan Alter (Narrator)

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The Promise: President Obama, Year One

Barack Obama's inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of 'Change We Can Believe In' was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama's historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery. In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country's most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama's difficult debut. What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called 'a Rubik's Cube in his brain?" These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office. The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone''feeling lucky''who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that 'I begged him not to do this.' Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and bounces back after a disastrous Massachusetts election to redeem a promise that had eluded presidents since FDR. In Alter's telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more 'points on the board' than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount. This brilliant blend of journalism and history offers the freshest reporting and most acute perspective on the biggest story of our time. It will shape impressions of the Obama presidency and of the man himself for years to come.

Jonathan Alter (Author), Jonathan Alter (Narrator)

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The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

In this dramatic and fascinating account, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter shows how Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his first one hundred days in office to lift the country from the despair and paralysis of the Great Depression and trasform the American presidency. Instead of becoming the dictator so many wanted in those first days, FDR rescued banks, put men to work immediately, and laid the groundwork for his most ambitious achievements, including what eventually became the Social Security Administration. Alter explains how FDR's background and experiences uniquely qualified him to pull off an astonishing conjuring act that saved both democracy and capitalism.

Jonathan Alter (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

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