Audiobooks by Noah Feldman

Takeover: How a Conservative Student Club Captured the Supreme Court

"Six of the nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court are current or former members of The Federalist Society—a private, conservative legal organization which has grown to dominate modern American jurisprudence. Takeover tells the story of how The Federalist Society started as a student club and grew to become the most influential legal organization in US history. Over the last three decades, they managed to shape judicial policy and secure numerous seats for its members on courts of appeals and the Supreme Court. Now at the height of its prominence, the organization faces new challenges and internal divisions threaten to splinter the group as its members debate the core founding principles of the Federalist Society. Author and narrator Noah Feldman, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, host of the Deep Background podcast, and author of several books including The Arab Winter and The Three Lives of James Madison, provides special insight and access into this organization. He takes listeners into the offices and chambers of the people who know the Federalist Society best and illuminates how the group came to power, the challenges it faces, and its future which should matter to everyone."

Lidia Jean Kott, Noah Feldman (Author), Noah Feldman (Narrator)

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The Arab Winter: A Tragedy

"This audiobook narrated by Noah Feldman reveals why the conventional wisdom about the Arab Spring is wrong The Arab Spring promised to end dictatorship and bring self-government to people across the Middle East. Yet everywhere except Tunisia it led to either renewed dictatorship, civil war, extremist terror, or all three. In The Arab Winter, Noah Feldman argues that the Arab Spring was nevertheless not an unmitigated failure, much less an inevitable one. Rather, it was a noble, tragic series of events in which, for the first time in recent Middle Eastern history, Arabic-speaking peoples took free, collective political action as they sought to achieve self-determination. Focusing on the Egyptian revolution and counterrevolution, the Syrian civil war, the rise and fall of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the Tunisian struggle toward Islamic constitutionalism, Feldman provides an original account of the political consequences of the Arab Spring, including the reaffirmation of pan-Arab identity, the devastation of Arab nationalisms, and the death of political Islam with the collapse of ISIS. He also challenges commentators who say that the Arab Spring was never truly transformative, that Arab popular self-determination was a mirage, and even that Arabs or Muslims are less capable of democracy than other peoples. Above all, The Arab Winter shows that we must not let the tragic outcome of the Arab Spring disguise its inherent human worth. People whose political lives had been determined from the outside tried, and for a time succeeded, in making politics for themselves. That this did not result in constitutional democracy or a better life for most of those affected doesn't mean the effort didn't matter. To the contrary, it matters for history—and it matters for the future."

Noah Feldman (Author), Noah Feldman (Narrator)

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Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

"A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed. Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius. They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpians tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself."

Noah Feldman (Author), Cotter Smith (Narrator)

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