Politics Audiobooks | LoveReading

The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World

With keen and original insight, Vox journalist Zack Beauchamp traces how a reactionary antidemocratic ethos born and bred in America has come to infect democracies around the world There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation's birth. The defining ideals of democracy and liberty for everyone have always existed uneasily alongside realities of slavery, widespread disenfranchisement, and other grave impediments to true democracy. How has this paradox survived for so long in the face of America's foundational claim of liberty and justice for all? In The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp explains that this tension is in fact an example of a phenomenon intrinsic to the project of democracy, what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change. The adoption of democratic rhetoric cleverly belies authoritarian ends-a development that is increasingly prevalent today, both at home and abroad. Brilliantly combining political history and reportage, Beauchamp reveals how the United States was the birthplace of this strange and harrowing authoritarian style, and why we're now seeing its evolution in diverse nations including Hungary, Israel, and India. These countries in turn provide blueprints for the reactionary spirit domestically, as with Florida governor Ron DeSantis taking pages from Hungarian president Viktor Orbán's anti-LGBT legislative playbook. The Reactionary Spirit paints a vivid, alarming picture that illuminates not only what's happening to democracy globally, but also what we must do to protect it-while we still can.

Zack Beauchamp (Author), Justin Price, TBD (Narrator)

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I've Been to the Mountaintop

Martin Luther King Jr. (Author), Dominic Hoffman, Reader Tbd 1 (Narrator)

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Lifehouse: Building Care in the Long Emergency

How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life? Using examples from the Black Panthers' 'survival programs,' the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organized polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair-a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.

Adam Greenfield (Author), Michael Butler Murray (Narrator)

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A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner: 'Of all the Kennedy books . . . this is the best.' -Time Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy throughout his presidency-from the long and grueling campaign to Kennedy's tragic and unexpected assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. In A Thousand Days, Schlesinger combines intimate knowledge as one of President Kennedy's inner circle with sweeping research and historic context to provide a look at one of the most legendary presidential administrations in American history. From JFK's battle with Nixon during the 1960 election, to the seemingly charmed inaugural days, to international conflict and domestic unrest, Schlesinger takes a close and fond, but unsparing, look at Kennedy's tenure in the White House, covering well-known successes, like his involvement in the Civil Rights movement; infamous humiliations, like the Bay of Pigs; and often overlooked struggles, like the Skybolt missile mix-up, alike. Praised by the New York Times as 'at once a masterly literary achievement and a work of major historical significance,' A Thousand Days is not only a fascinating look at an American president, but a towering achievement in historical documentation.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing & Systems Change: Reflection

How do we do effective, sustainable social change…without burning out, internalizing systemic toxicity, or replicating urgency culture? A trauma-informed anthology with contributions from 13 activists and community organizers-for readers of adrienne maree brown, Staci K. Haines, and Ejeris Dixon When your work is inextricable from your identity, your community, and your own liberation, you need a unique praxis of care to sustain it-and for mission-driven activists, organizers, and changemakers working under oppressive systems, making space to center vital needs like rest, self-care, and healthy boundaries isn't as simple as clocking out. Practicing Liberation reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care. Through frameworks like trauma-informed methodology, transformative movement organizing, engaged Buddhism, and healing justice, editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson show readers how to: - Embody healing, wellness, and beloved community - Guard against replicating systems of harm - Disrupt racist, classist, anti-queer, and anti-trans behavior and systems - Celebrate creativity and radical imagination in movement work - Center healing from intergenerational trauma, white supremacy culture, and extractive capitalism - Honor that self-care is a necessity-not a luxury-that strengthens our collectives Featuring essays from editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson and contributors like Kazu Haga, Taj James, Nkem Ndefo, Jacoby Ballard, Sará King, Kerri Kelly, and more, Practicing Liberation can be used on its own or alongside The Practicing Liberation Workbook to help readers orient toward embodied leadership, interconnected collectives, and a bold vision for transformation-the vital tools we need for collective wellbeing, healing, and long-term social change.

Tessa Hicks Peterson (Author), Henriette Zoutomou, Jazmine Williams, Tba (Narrator)

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The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart

The untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do. This social transformation didn't happed by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion and news show -- most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this groundbreaking work. In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory. The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.

Bill Bishop (Author), Graham Halstead, Reader Tbd 1 (Narrator)

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The Air They Breathe: A Pediatrician on the Frontlines of Climate Change

A timely, revelatory first look into the impact climate change has on children—the greatest moral crisis humanity faces today—by a pediatrician in the fastest warming city in America. Wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves make headlines. But what is happening in Debra Hendrickson's clinic tells another story of this strange and unsettling time. Hendrickson is a pediatrician in Reno, Nevada—the fastest warming city in the United States, where ash falls like snow during summer wildfires. In The Air They Breathe, Dr. Hendrickson recounts patients she's seen who were harmed by worsening smoke, smog, and pollen; two boys in Arizona, stricken by record-setting heat while hiking; children who fled for their lives from Hurricane Harvey and the Tubbs Fire; and a little girl whose life was forever altered by the Zika virus outbreak in 2016. The climate crisis is a health crisis, and it is a health crisis, first and foremost, for children. Children's bodies are interwoven with and shaped by their surroundings. As the planet warms and their environment changes, children's health is at risk. The youngest are especially vulnerable because their brain, lungs, and other organs are forming and growing every day, and because their physiology is so different from that of adults. Childhood has always been a risky period of life; throughout history, babies and children have met peril, from polio to famine, from cyclones to war. Yet they have never quite had to face, in quite this way, the potential loss of the future itself. The Air They Breathe is not just about the health impacts of global warming, but something more: a soul-stirring reminder of our moral responsibility to our children, and their profound connections to this unique and irreplaceable world.

Debra Hendrickson (Author), Megan Tusing, TBD (Narrator)

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Reimagining the Revolution: Four Stories of Abolition, Autonomy, and Forging New Paths in the Modern

These are the architects of the modern civil rights movement: 4 profiles of revolutionary groups making change beyond protest A radically different approach to sustaining social justice movements-4 strategies for abolition and liberation from the new architects of the modern civil rights movement Many of us think, I don't support the police. But what should take their place? Or: Prisons don't keep us safe. But what new systems could? A lot of books about racial justice ask us how we got here, but Reimagining the Revolution is different: award-winning journalist and activist Paula Lehman-Ewing presents an inside-access look at the activists redefining where we go from here. Readers will hear from: - Ivan Kilgore, an incarcerated activist who founded the 501c3 nonprofit United Black Family Scholarship Foundation from behind prison walls - Critical Resistance, one of the oldest grassroots organizations in the nation working to dismantle the prison-industrial complex - The co-founders of Greenwood, a Black-owned financial technology institution designed specifically for Black and Latino people and businesses: Michael Render, aka Killer Mike, Amb. Andrew Young and Ryan Glover - Incarcerated activist Heshima Denham on his grassroots efforts to build a society for Black and Brown people independent of the state - The Movement for Black Lives, the Alliance for Safety and Justice, BYP 100, and 8toAbolition - Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists using art to heal from trauma, connect with other incarcerated people, and amplify abolitionist change Lehman-Ewing frames each profile within two fundamental truths: The current system-built and sustained by oppression, extraction, and inequity by design-cannot be reformed. And, knowing this, we need abolition; we need creative solutions designed by the people most impacted by the systems they fight to change. Reimagining the Revolution is a call to action for each of us: if we can access the tools we have, we can dream bigger, think outside the box, and follow the paths laid out by change-making activists toward nothing short of revolution.

Paula Lehman-Ewing (Author), Jaime Lincoln Smith, Paula Lehman-Ewing (Narrator)

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What Went Wrong With Capitalism

Ruchir Sharma (Author), Fajer Al-Kaisi, TBD (Narrator)

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Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me

A college professor debunks the false liberal narratives which define much of America’s school curricula. In 1995, James W. Loewen penned the classic work of criticism, Lies My Teacher Told Me, a left-leaning corrective that addressed much of what was sanitized and omitted from American history books. But in the more than two decades that followed, false leftist narratives—as wrong as those they supplanted—have come to dominate American academia and education. Now, in the spirit of that original book, Professor Wilfred Reilly demolishes the academic myths propagated by the left. In Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, he offers fresh angles on “established” events, turning what we think we know about the nation’s history on its head. Reilly explains how there actually were communists in Hollywood; how the cultural stereotype of Native American culture as completely peace-loving is both untrue and patronizing; and how, while history was almost always bad for Black Americans, history was much worse for everyone than we realize. Smart, irreverent, and deeply researched, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me will revolutionize our understanding of America’s past while offering a refreshing way to teach and think about history.

Wilfred Reilly (Author), Mirron Willis (Narrator)

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All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

A bridge-burning, riotous memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media—from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain. After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he’s been up to for the past twenty years—and it isn’t pretty. Elwood has worked for a murderer’s row of clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar—namely, the bad guys. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public—not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career. This is a piercing look into the corridors of money, power, politics, and control, all told in Elwood’s disarmingly funny and entertaining voice. He recounts a four-day Las Vegas bacchanal with a dictator’s son, plotting communications strategies against a terrorist organization in Western Africa, and helping to land a Middle Eastern dictator’s wife a glowing profile in Vogue on the same time the Arab Spring broke out. And he reveals all his slippery tricks for seducing journalists in order to create chaos and ultimately cover for politicians, dictators, and spies—the industry-secret tactics that led to his rise as a political PR pro. Along the way, Phil walks the halls of the Capitol, rides in armored cars through Abuja, and watches his client lose his annual income at the roulette table. But as he moved up the ranks, he felt worse and worse about the sleaziness of it all—until Elwood receives a shocking wake-up call from the FBI. This risky game nearly cost Elwood his life and his freedom. Seeing the light, Elwood decides to change his ways, and his clients, and to tell the full truth about who is the worst human.

Phil Elwood (Author), Holter Graham, TBD (Narrator)

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The Boy from Baghdad: My Journey from Waziriyah to Westminster

The first memoir from Nadhim Zahawi MP Born and raised in Baghdad, Nadhim Zahawi arrived in the UK aged 11, having been forced to flee Iraq with his family, under threat from Saddam Hussein’s regime. In this candid and poignant memoir, Nadhim vividly recalls his upbringing in the Middle East, his family’s adjustment to their new life in Britain and his rise to Second Lord of the Treasury, one of the highest offices in his adoptive homeland. From his family home being repossessed in his teens to the incredible success of YouGov, and from the highs (and lows) of Jeffrey Archer’s mayoral campaign to overseeing Britain’s rollout as Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment, every setback faced and hurdle cleared have reinforced Nadhim’s belief in the power of hard work and the benefits of an open, inclusive society. The Boy from Baghdad is the full and fascinating story of Nadhim’s personal, professional and political journey from Waziriyah to Westminster.

Nadhim Zahawi (Author), Nadhim Zahawi, TBD (Narrator)

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