Chris Smalls — When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class - with Karen Attiah

Chris Smalls — When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class - with Karen Attiah

From one of the most electric and consequential figures to emerge from the contemporary American labor movement, the remarkable story of his battle to create the first Amazon union in the U.S. and a powerful call to arms on behalf of the working class In the early days of the Covid pandemic, warehouse worker Chris Smalls and his colleagues continued showing up as the rest of the world was shutting down. A dedicated and experienced Amazon employee, increasingly frustrated by the inner workings of the retail giant, Smalls had already felt himself reaching a breaking point. So, when coworkers around him began falling ill, and with no transparency or assurances of safety coming from those in charge, he made the only choice left available to him. He staged a walkout with friend Derrick Palmer, eventually finding himself on the picket line without a job. But what began as a demand to keep essential employees safe in a crisis would grow into a movement devoted to achieving dignity and security for the American wage worker, sparking a groundswell of organizers at the most notable companies across the nation—including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and Apple—and leading to lasting change for labor. When the Revolution Comes [https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593700631] is the riveting inside story of how a young Black man from Hackensack, NJ with little-to-no resources led a scrappy band of Staten Island warehouse workers in an improbable fight against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the U.S., and won. This epic David-and-Goliath tale traces Smalls’ dramatic story, from a childhood spent navigating his dad’s stints in and out of prison to his early pursuits of a career in music; from his years of sacrifice and economic uncertainty as a father of three, fighting a miasma of warehouse managerial politics in an effort to make ends meet, to his ascension as the leader of a new generation’s labor movement. Along the way, he details lessons learned from a life spent working paycheck-to-paycheck, advocating for those around him, and persevering in the face of adversity, and shares how those lessons helped him build the coalition that became the first-ever union of American Amazon workers. A deeply personal and eye-opening account of the creation of the Amazon Labor Union, When the Revolution Comes is both a searing exposé of what it’s like to be working class in America today as well as the empowering story of what is possible when the overworked, underpaid, and disempowered join together, a movement born in community. Chris Smalls is the co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Under his leadership, the ALU successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse: a historic victory for workers' rights in America. A Fortune “40 Under 40” honoree, he was named one of the 100 most influential people of 2022 by Time magazine, alongside his fellow union organizer Derrick Palmer. When the Revolution Comes is his first book. Smalls is in conversation with Karen Attiah, an award-winning journalist, editor, and global thought leader whose work explores the intersections of race, culture, gender, media, and international affairs. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Northwestern University, Attiah is a former adjunct lecturer at Columbia, where she brought global expertise and academic rigor to her teaching. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593700631?ic_referral=g6QbGFeZDkvz8BkdfL5gtMo0gRO7oOEnchbV3t6cGuowM3lQi1iuPdlQOGMZNdgUtJhOyaCJqYFtIXlmjEFA7g0GH6EI1xDPFaiC-JDIgfsnGFYyaWGPe3Wf7V6PFTXrYjirbxM

Senator Lamar Alexander — The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump - with Jonathan Martin

A behind-the-scenes story of the last sixty years of American politics, told with purpose and humor by a political legend who worked with ten presidents, made deals with both Obama and Trump, and believes that serving in public office is the best way to help the largest number of people and to keep our Republic from falling apart. Can we survive this?” worried friends ask Lamar Alexander. A US senator who started in JFK’s Justice Department, worked in the Nixon White House, turned down serving as GOP Watergate counsel and as Ford’s campaign manager, walked for six months across Tennessee to become governor, lost two runs for president, and served as a university president and education secretary before winning three senate terms—Lamar Alexander answers that question with a resounding, “Yes.” Over nearly six decades, Alexander saw the public arena from as many angles as any living American. With wry humor and wisdom, he reminds us that Americans have asked this question in times more troubling than today—through wars, economic panics, pandemics, and social upheaval. Alexander paints insider portraits of the ten presidents he worked with—including the one best suited to the job, the most skillful politician, most accomplished in foreign affairs, most “normal,” and another who was on his way to being the most consequential. His book is for Americans hungry for optimism and leadership. It will inspire anyone who wants to serve in public office but doesn’t know how to start. It is a blueprint for those who want to join the 519,682 Americans already elected to office and the millions who work with them. Lamar Alexander has long been known as one of America’s most principled and effective statesmen. As US Senator, Alexander shepherded major laws that today govern K–12 education, medical innovation, and maintenance of our national parks. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “For eighteen years, there was Lamar Alexander, and there was the rest of us. He was hands-down one of the most brilliant, most thoughtful, and most effective legislators any of us have ever seen.” As governor, Alexander brought the auto industry to Tennessee and made it the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well. He was chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the nation’s governors, and of President Reagan’s “Commission on Americans Outdoors.” He served as US Education Secretary and as a university president. Alexander was also known for campaigning in a plaid shirt and performing on the piano with twenty-seven symphonies and on the Grand Ol’ Opry. He graduated from Vanderbilt University and New York University Law School. He and his late wife Honey were married for fifty-four years, had four children and nine grandchildren. His parents were teachers. A seventh generation Tennessean, Alexander lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains near Maryville where he grew up. This is his tenth book, all written by the author himself. Alexander is in conversation with Jonathan Martin, the politics bureau chief and senior political columnist at POLITICO, where he writes a reported column.  Prior to starting his column in 2022, Martin was the national political correspondent for The New York Times.  Covering elections in all 50 states, he served as the publication’s top political reporter for nearly a decade.  He is the co-author This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, which spent three weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and gave readers in-the-room access to the extraordinary events of the 2020 election and its aftermath.  Martin is a contributor to NBC's "Meet the Press."  He and his wife, Betsy, live in Washington and New Orleans. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798895656488?ic_referral=VtKwg8DrRDJGWrwgYGCXeBKoxxsjbLBNOqdIh7PN0-gwM9RMH41C3qojGep5zPIc35cUpoibsOEMK-qAOS0Ehcx7AUMYB7CuesJaOHj8Ro98jBv4KQ9aKexajdlJ1PeCErTrKC8

Barbara McQuade — The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government - with Kimberly Atkins Stohr

The New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. Attorney  offers a piercing exposé on the escalating threat of far-right politics—and a clear roadmap for saving our democracy. In The Fix [https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644215555], McQuade draws on her decades of experience as a federal prosecutor to reveal how systems of organized crime and political opportunism exploit the levers of power—using corruption, cruelty, and chaos as tools to dominate institutions and eliminate accountability. With clarity, precision, and moral force, she exposes the tactics of today’s far-right MAGA system: information warfare, aggressive retribution, conformism enforced by fear, and pervasive dismantling of legal checks and balances necessary to defend the public interest and uphold justice. Weaving together courtroom stories, real-time political analysis, and cautionary lessons from history and democratic backsliding abroad, McQuade makes the case that the threats we face are not future possibilities—they’re already here. Yet The Fix is not just a warning; it is a call to action. In the book’s final chapters, McQuade outlines common-sense reforms and strategies that can reclaim the rule of law and recenter democracy with the power of the people. Accessible, eye-opening, and grounded in constitutional faith, The Fix is essential reading for everyone concerned about the future of America—and ready to work together to take a stand for it. Barbara McQuade is a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School, her alma mater, where she teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, and data privacy. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and co-host of the #SistersInLaw podcast. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. She was appointed by President Barack Obama and was the first woman to serve in her position. Earlier in her career, she worked as a sportswriter and copy editor, a judicial law clerk, an associate in private practice, and an assistant US attorney. McQuade is author of the national bestseller, Attack from Within. She and her husband have four children and live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. McQuade is in conversation with Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer and columnist for Boston Globe Opinion. She is also an MSNBC contributor, co-host of the Politicon podcast #SistersInLaw, and guest host on WBUR’s On Point. Previously, Kimberly was the first Washington, DC-based news correspondent for WBUR. She has also served as the Boston Herald's Washington bureau chief, guest host of C-SPAN's morning call-in show's Washington Journal, and a Supreme Court reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and its sister publications. She has appeared as a political commentator on a host of national and international television and radio networks, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, NPR, Sky News (UK), and CBC News (Canada). PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644215555?ic_referral=YLrZAtn1dDLg6MQGjOl_ZodZ6PVySizNqWbQ9neu-kUwM2v7E_D105ScFKLcjEoRbCrlGeYlW1vabUKWEBJ5RRJor75wFfah_L3vAOIr9s6rAvYm12-6u5Gnx5SSt1fOy2qGzjo

Melissa Murray — The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader - with Eric Holder

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Trump Indictments comes a beautiful, accessible guide on how to read the US Constitution. Think of this as the US Constitution explained by America’s favorite law professor, Melissa Murray. On her podcast, Strict Scrutiny, Murray and her cohosts, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, provide in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities. On that podcast, on MSNOW—where she is a frequent contributor—in opinion pieces, and when providing commentary as she did in a recent New York Times piece on Justice Brown Jackson, Murray spends an awful lot of time demystifying laws for everyone else. In this book, she tackles one of the founding American documents: the Constitution. Each amendment will be annotated with some historical context provided, as well as examples of how it is relevant to our present day. More necessary than ever, as we look to the Supreme Court and their interpretation of the Constitution as the last institution upholding our democracy, this book is an indispensable read for every thinking American. Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law. She is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, cohost of a top-ranked podcast, Strict Scrutiny—which is about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it—and a regular commentator on MSNBC. Her writing appears regularly in major national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The Nation. She is frequently called upon by national media outlets such as NPR and PBS to offer expert—yet accessible—commentary on the Supreme Court’s decisions and other pressing legal matters of national importance. Her academic publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Murray is a member of the New York bar. She lives in New York City with her family. Murray is in conversation with Eric Holder, a civil rights leader who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He served as the eighty-second attorney general of the United States under President Barack Obama, the first African American to hold that office. Now a senior counsel at Covington & Burling, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, and they have three children. He is the author of Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668221938?ic_referral=DHM3OZdakUPbXDraAfDRRfFf8jEMNaX68BT6EGw6rSwwM_xXIT0An_3JdEzSjUkOsYP1p2l5GegYtR7G_cef6RcY9dbRYIBBpr-8WPB4dIkzAfV_pA6rQnCyiO1L4yaPojTX1Ug

Liaquat Ahamed — 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World - with Steven R. Weisman

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family—the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century’s most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments. With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system—exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire’s slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at “Jewish finance,” a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century. 1873 [https://politics-prose.com/book/9781594204173] is a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian’s grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power. Liaquat Ahamed graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. His first book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about the lead up to the 1929 Great Depression, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. He is a trustee of the Putnam Funds, an adviser to the Rock Creek Group, and the Chair of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. with his wife Meena. Ahamed is in conversation with Steven R. Weisman, senior editorial adviser at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the leading economic policy think tank in Washington. Before joining PIIE in 2008, he was a correspondent, editor, and member of the editorial board at the New York Times. His last position at the Times was chief international economics correspondent. He is the author/editor of four books, including The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson—How the Income Tax Transformed America (Simon and Schuster, 2002), which received the Hillman Prize for the book that most advances the cause of social justice. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781594204173?ic_referral=i5ivFai3RMkD4Q1pYIGloioCo4VALPCevGyLDiv0gQAwM0EXYNpHX1BrCdiCDes77gr3SRxlTXTGlPCwBQRsNqp9Di5TEbMVhR15xWj_GYJ7tPEc8nNVwk7HK6xzXGlTeYbcxs0