Timothy W. Ryback — 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy - with Margaret Talbot

Blockers. It wasn’t a compliment. In the new Washington, it was the worst thing you could be—especially if you worked in the federal government and wanted to keep your job. A Blocker was a holdover, an impediment, someone who didn't get the message—and, most of all, someone who didn't belong. Michael Lewis found seven of them. Blockers is the story of people who believed they had a calling, who were convinced they were doing something the country couldn’t do without, and then discovered they were no longer wanted. One kept Americans’ most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands and another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods, another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. It should come as no surprise that the writer who made subprime mortgages gripping (The Big Short) and who turned baseball statistics into poetry (Moneyball) could transform the first two years of the second Trump administration into a thriller about federal employees. But he does. And he does something else. He puts before us a clear question: If these public servants can’t survive in government today, then what does that say about us? New York Times best-selling author Michael Lewis has published many books on subjects ranging from politics to Wall Street to sports. Lewis’s most recent book, the #1 New York Times bestseller Going Infinite, told the story of FTX’s collapse and the enigmatic founder at its center, Sam Bankman-Fried. More recently, Lewis edited Who Is Government?, an anthology by an all-star team of writers exploring the consequential work of government workers. Lewis is the creator and host of Apple’s #1-rated podcast Against the Rules, a searing look at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. He grew up in New Orleans and lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

The story that inspired the acclaimed motion picture Worth, told by the man behind the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a moving saga of national tragedy and healing. Now with the author’s reflections on how today’s hyper-partisan America needs to unite to face our greatest challenges. Just days after September 11, 2001, attorney Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Congress to administer the federal 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a unique effort to compensate families victimized in the terror attacks. He was given an unlimited budget and total authority over how to spend it. Feinberg soon found himself under attack and mired in controversy. Traumatized and angry, some families threatened to sue over awards they considered skimpy; others were insulted by the very idea that a dollar value could be placed on the lives of their loved ones. Feinberg spent three years meeting 9/11 survivors and families, hearing their stories and absorbing their grief. Gradually, Feinberg earned the respect and support of the 9/11 families, over 97 percent of whom chose to participate in the fund rather than sue. What Is Life Worth? shares the lessons Feinberg learned about the power of compassion and the limits of any effort to place a value on human life. Kenneth R. Feinberg has played a key role in resolving many of our nation’s most challenging and widely known disputes. He is best known for serving as the Special Master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, in which he reached out to all who qualified to file a claim, evaluated applications, determined appropriate compensation, and disseminated awards. Mr. Feinberg shared his extraordinary experience in his book What Is Life Worth?, first published in 2005 by PublicAffairs, and in his follow-up book Who Gets What, published by PublicAffairs in 2012. Mr. Feinberg has been appointed to two presidential-level commissions because of his experience and expertise, and has had a distinguished teaching career as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Columbia University Law School, New York University Law School, and the University of Virginia Law School. Feinberg is in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos, the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. His most recent book is LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, he spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Bethesda, MD. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781953943828?ic_referral=XwehrH_n7dHHsfyxreLVuYQ8MnsdWCxc-DucYBiKv50wM9TBCBk0l4yKx5reFxcyt2Em4i2snlw8_DIYBGkIeI7NH6j7D4hA4fdJQbaLDhlv-YskyrOofh2MXjJjE3dO4IKnpbA

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the untold story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington “Chatelain teaches us how to tell fuller, truer stories. This is the model for recovering what we have been quick to forget.”—Caleb Gayle, author of Black Moses There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom. In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program; and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work. How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before. Marcia Chatelain is a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls (Duke University Press, 2015) and Franchise (Liveright, 2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award, the Hagley Medal for Business History, and the Lawrence Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Chatelain is in conversation with Ashley Preston, an author and tenured Associate Professor of History at Howard University. Her past positions include serving as director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Foundation-National Historic Landmark at Bethune-Cookman University while she also was an archives technician for the National Archives for Black Women’s History at the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House-National Historic Site. She is the author of Mary McLeod Bethune in Florida: Bringing Social Justice to the Sunshine State and Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist. Dr. Preston's research interests focus on the activism of Black women during the early twentieth century and the ways in which they uplifted their communities, created institutions, and stood against systemic racism. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780553387254?ic_referral=a_HCAHeSgTc6GBlFyGXKvCROVYuoFze2CVtm96AH9fcwMxnXs0sEOdfPsgSMJSrAW40UanZtuWv7NVyb9I2Y9JbyLG0bx8xz0NaNC_vPIUme6MrohDrcYU0qoDKBfolBJAx3KOc

The chilling and revelatory story of how Russia’s confrontation with the West went global. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a rupture with the United States and Europe not seen since the Cold War. As a result, Russia refocused its entire state machinery on one purpose: To outlast the West. Russia foreign policy analyst Hanna Notte uncovers how Russia reinvented itself, outmaneuvering sanctions, forging surprising alliances, charming the Global South, and sowing fear in Western societies. Putin is the one pulling the strings, but he is not the only player: Propagandists, diplomats, businessmen, and rogue agents have done Russia’s bidding. From civilian shelters to military bases, presidential palaces to tense borderlands, Notte chronicles the untold stories of those waging Russia’s battles—and of everyday people swept up in Putin’s agenda. Blending analysis with reportage from more than a dozen countries, We Shall Outlast Them paints a sweeping picture of Putin’s wartime adaptation and illuminates how Russia has fostered enduring appeal around the globe. Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and has written about Russian foreign policy in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs, among others. She lives in Berlin. Notte is in conversation with Anton Troianovski, a New York Times reporter based in Washington, reporting on U.S. foreign relations and the impact of American policy on other countries. He works closely with his colleagues who cover the White House, the U.S. military and diplomacy to understand President Trump’s efforts to reshape the world order and how they are reverberating across the government. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324117018?ic_referral=utUnT-TJ4M4mvG1aG-zlGdEnerNzBLiSMfkcg35k6dkwM02bLCOgVTzoe0zrgARkfbFyGh57nVjUtob5yBjHjaA2pjvz5NOl5vzs08Ao0YQ4Jxcq0PJiDRuMRkzFTNmZfP0ryPY

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer. Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family. Lee is in conversation with Clint Smith. Clint Smith is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book, Just Beneath the Soil (Knopf, May 2027). He is also the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021, and the bestseller, How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers), with Sonja Cherry-Paul, (Little, Brown, 2025). He wrote the New York Times bestselling poetry collection Above Ground as well as the award-winning poetry collection Counting Descent. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781538752036?ic_referral=ARLUFeCNgzMQ-YQQF2m3MnmXewp1xL8S9T5VdbyVq70wMwK5eJc_YH7te2wdZluwCpB0qUoj_hPqH1Xfognt299bMrd9psbolnHsBbOKiIRsyQxZKll04fMcuYi_yBMiyzIQXeo