Politics Audiobooks | LoveReading

Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

“The immutable fact of politics in America is this: liberals hate conservatives.” Ann Coulter, whose examination of the Clinton impeachment was a major national bestseller and earned widespread praise, now takes on an even tougher issue. At a time when Democrats and Republicans should be overwhelmingly congenial, American political debate has become increasingly hostile, overly personal, and insufferably trivial. Whether conducted in Congress or on the political talk shows, played out at dinners or cocktail parties, politics is a nasty sport. At the risk of giving away the ending: It’s all liberals’ fault. Cultlike in their behavior, vicious in their attacks on Republicans, and in almost complete control of mainstream national media, the left has been merciless in portraying all conservatives as dumb, racist, power hungry, homophobic, and downright scary. This despite the many Republican accomplishments of the last few decades, as well as the Bush administration’s expert handling of the country’s affairs in the wake of the worst attacks on American soil and of the war that followed. With incisive reasoning and meticulous research, Ann Coulter examines the events and personalities that have shaped modern political discourse—the bickering, backstabbing, and name-calling that have made cultural mountains out of partisan molehills. She demonstrates how the media, especially, are biased—and usually wrongheaded—and have done all in their power to obfuscate the issues and the people behind them, bending over backward to villainize and belittle the right, while rarely missing an opportunity to praise the left. Perhaps if conservatives had had total control over every major means of news dissemination for a quarter century, they would have forgotten how to debate, too, and would just call liberals stupid and mean. But that’s an alternative universe. In this universe, the public square is wall-to-wall liberal propaganda. Refreshingly honest and unerringly timely, Slander continues where Bernard Goldberg’s number one bestselling Bias left off.

Ann Coulter (Author), Ann Coulter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right

The hottest and most controversial book of the year! Find out who really controls the media in America. “[Ann Coulter] is never in doubt. And that, along with her bright writing, sense of irony and outrage, and her relish at finally hitting back at political opponents (especially in the media) is what makes Slander such refreshing and provocative reading.” —Los Angeles Times “[Ann Coulter] is a fluent polemicist with a gift for Menckenesque invective . . . and she can harness such language to subtle, syllogistic argument.” —Washington Post Book World “The most popular nonfiction book in America.”—New York Times “The real value of Slander . . . is not in the jokes or devastating exposés of liberal politicians and their allies, but the serious and scholarly study of just how entrenched the media prejudice is against anyone whose politics are even faintly conservative.” —New York Sun “Written with a great deal of passion . . . the real source of its strength—and its usefulness—was its painstaking marshalling of evidence . . . More important than [High Crimes and Misdemeanors] because it addresses a much broader issue, and one of lasting significance.”—National Review

Ann Coulter (Author), Kathe Mazur (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cell

In New York City, a a handful of veteran FBI agents, police officers and investigative journalists had known for years that a terrorist event on the scale of 9/11 was likely. Ironically, one of the men who had been most aware of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden had recently left the FBI, where he had been following the movements of bin Laden and al Qaeda, to become Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. John O'Neill died on that awful day. The FBI's O'Neill, along with Neil Herman, reporter John Miller and very few others, had been on bin Laden's trail for years. To them, he had long been considered the most dangerous man on the planet. In The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, John Miller, an award-winning journalist and co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, along with veteran reporters Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell, takes us back more than ten years to the birth of the terrorist cell that later metastasized into Qaeda's New York operation. This remarkable audiobook offers a firsthand account of what it is to be a police officer, an FBI agent or a reporter obsessed with a case few people will take seriously. The Cell contains a first-person account of Miller's face-to-face meeting with bin Laden and provides the first complete treatment to piece together what led to the events of 9/11, ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: why, with all the information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks?

John Miller, Michael Stone (Author), John Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Afghan Views/American Visions

After listening to callers on a morning radio talk show urging that Afghanistan be nuked or otherwise destroyed on September 12, 2001, Tamim Ansary wrote an e-mail that changed the course of his life. Ansary received unexpected international fame after sending this e-mail to twenty friends comparing the Taliban to Nazis and his Afghan people to Jews in concentration camps.

Tamim Ansary (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson – Volume 3

Book Three of Robert A. Caro’s monumental work, The Years of Lyndon Johnson—the most admired and riveting political biography of our era—which began with the best-selling and prizewinning The Path to Power and Means of Ascent. Master of the Senate carries Lyndon Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnson’s experience—from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine—came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term—the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate’s hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the “unchangeable” Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnson’s political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust—or at least the cooperation—of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson’s ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson’s amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate is told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro’s peerless research—years immersed in the worlds of Johnson and the United States Senate, examining thousands of documents and talking to hundreds of people, from pages and cloakroom clerks to senators and administrative aides. The result is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself—the titan of Capitol Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing—and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings of personal and legislative power. It is a work that displays all the acuteness of understanding and narrative brilliance that led the New York Times to call Caro’s The Path to Power “a monumental political saga . . . powerful and stirring.”

Robert A. Caro (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III (Part 2 of a 3-Part Recording)

Master of the Senate, Book Three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson's story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. At the heart of the book is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works in America, how the Senate works, and how Johnson, in his ascent to the presidency, mastered the Senate as no political leader before him had ever done. It was during these years that all Johnson's experience-from his Texas Hill Country boyhood to his passionate representation in Congress of his hardscrabble constituents to his tireless construction of a political machine-came to fruition. Caro introduces the story with a dramatic account of the Senate itself: how Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun had made it the center of governmental energy, the forum in which the great issues of the country were thrashed out. And how, by the time Johnson arrived, it had dwindled into a body that merely responded to executive initiatives, all but impervious to the forces of change. Caro anatomizes the genius for political strategy and tactics by which, in an institution that had made the seniority system all-powerful for a century and more, Johnson became Majority Leader after only a single term-the youngest and greatest Senate Leader in our history; how he manipulated the Senate's hallowed rules and customs and the weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues to change the "unchangeable" Senate from a loose confederation of sovereign senators to a whirring legislative machine under his own iron-fisted control. Caro demonstrates how Johnson's political genius enabled him to reconcile the unreconcilable: to retain the support of the southerners who controlled the Senate while earning the trust-or at least the cooperation-of the liberals, led by Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, without whom he could not achieve his goal of winning the presidency. He shows the dark side of Johnson's ambition: how he proved his loyalty to the great oil barons who had financed his rise to power by ruthlessly destroying the career of the New Dealer who was in charge of regulating them, Federal Power Commission Chairman Leland Olds. And we watch him achieve the impossible: convincing southerners that although he was firmly in their camp as the anointed successor to their leader, Richard Russell, it was essential that they allow him to make some progress toward civil rights. In a breathtaking tour de force, Caro details Johnson's amazing triumph in maneuvering to passage the first civil rights legislation since 1875. Master of the Senate, told with an abundance of rich detail that could only have come from Caro's peerless research, is both a galvanizing portrait of the man himself-the titan of Capital Hill, volcanic, mesmerizing-and a definitive and revelatory study of the workings and personal and legislative power.

Robert A. Caro (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Plutocracy, Globaloney, Populism and Democracy

Jim Hightower (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the Great New Game in Central Asia

In this enormously insightful book, correspondent Ahmed Rashid brings the shadowy world of the Taliban, the world’s most extreme and radical Islamic organization, into sharp focus. He explains the Taliban’s rise to power, its impact on Afghanistan and the region, its role in oil and gas company decisions, and the effects of changing American attitudes toward the Taliban. He also describes the new face of Islamic fundamentalism and explains why Afghanistan has become the world center for international terrorism. “The broader story here is powerful…A great deal from Mr. Rashid’s book [is] about the nature of local Central Asian politics and the consequences of interference by outside powers…Valuable and informative work.”—New York Times

Ahmed Rashid (Author), Wanda McCaddon (Narrator)

Audiobook

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; The Arabs in History; and What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, among other books. Lewis is internationally recognized as one of our era's greatest historians of the Middle East. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indonesian. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Bernard Lewis (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

Audiobook

Humanity With Heart: The New Global Paradigm

Hold on to your seats! You are about to depart on a global reality tour with world lecturer and co-founder of Global Exchange, Kevin Danaher. In this 'ear-opening' dialogue, Danaher addresses the three major pieces of society that influence every aspect of our life: our government, our education and our public airwaves, all of which have been colonized by corporations.

Kevin Danaher, Phd (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House

Barbara Olson was a trenchant critic of the Clinton White House, which she considered to be the home of two of the slickest kleptocrats ever to disgrace the Oval Office. In THE FINAL DAYS, Olson depicted the excesses and outright crimes she claims took place as the Clintons prepared to leave office. These include the granting of pardons to people of dubious legal status, such as the shadowy financier Marc Rich, and the last-minute signing into law of thousands of executive orders, a feat comparable only to John Adams’s appointment of the "midnight judiciary." Olson’s indignation knew no bounds when it came to the Clintons, and if you feel the same way, you’ll relish every minute of this book. Barbara Olson was killed in the hijacked plane flown into the Pentagon during the terrorist attack on America. "Olson was a pundit superstar…fighting the culture wars on a wide range of fronts." (The National Review)

Barbara Olson (Author), Kimberly Schraf (Narrator)

Audiobook

No Such Thing as a Bad Day

Surviving non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer, former White House chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan shares his personal and political reflections--from his experiences with the Civil Rights movement to his civilian volunteer tour in Vietnam, from his years of scrutiny under the Carter administration to his agonizing, yet triumphant times battling cancer. Quickly motivated to accept cancer as a fact in his life, Jordan deals with the stages of the disease, "Denial? Deny what? I've got a mass in my chest the size of an apple ... Angry? At whom? I have lived a great life and have been blessed with much more than I deserve ... 'Why me?' but 'Why not me?' ... Bargaining with God? The God that I believe in has all the cards ..." Serving as an inspiration to others, Jordan stresses the importance of becoming proactive and maintaining a positive attitude in the face of a terminal disease. The warm voice of narrator Tom Stechschulte gives us an intimate portrait of this tireless public servant and crusader.

Hamilton Jordan (Author), Tom Stechschulte (Narrator)

Audiobook