Audiobooks by Terry Golway

I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America's Mayor, and Why He Still Matters

Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century's most colorful politicians-on the New York and national stage. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. Almost one hundred years later, America is once again grappling with issues that would have been familiar to the Little Flower, as he was affectionately known. It's time to bring back LaGuardia, argues historian and journalist Terry Golway, to remind us all what an effective municipal officer (as he preferred to call himself) can achieve . . . Golway examines LaGuardia's extraordinary career through four essential qualities: As a patriot, a dissenter, a leader, and a statesman. He needed them all when he stood against the nativism, religious and racial bigotry, and reactionary economic policies of the 1920s, and again when he faced the realities of Depression-era New York and the rise of fascism at home and abroad in the 1930s. Just before World War II, the Roosevelt administration formally apologized to the Nazis when LaGuardia referred to Hitler as a 'brown-shirted fanatic.' There was nobody quite like Fiorello LaGuardia. In this immensely listenable book, as entertaining as the man himself, Terry Golway captures the enduring appeal of one of America's greatest leaders.

Terry Golway (Author), Jon Vertullo (Narrator)

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Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance That Created the Modern Democratic Party

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Democratic Party was bitterly split between its urban machines-representing Catholics and Jews, ironworkers and seamstresses, from the tenements of the northeast and Midwest-and its populists and patricians, rooted in the soil and the Scriptures, enforcers of cultural, political, and religious norms. The chasm between the two factions seemed unbridgeable. But just before the Roaring Twenties, Al Smith, a proud son of the Tammany Hall political machine, and Franklin Roosevelt, a country squire, formed an unlikely alliance that transformed the Democratic Party. Smith and FDR dominated politics in the most-powerful state in the union for a quarter-century, and in 1932 they ran against each other for the Democratic presidential nomination, setting off one of the great feuds in American history. The relationship between Smith and Roosevelt, portrayed in Terry Golway's Frank and Al, is one of the most dramatic untold stories of early twentieth-century American politics.

Terry Golway (Author), Danny Campbell (Narrator)

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