Politics and Prose Presents

Politics and Prose
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Calling all book lovers: experience our renowned author talks in podcast form. Politics and Prose Presents allows you to visit our legendary independent bookstore from anywhere in the world. Listen to top authors and journalists discuss their latest books- ranging from topics like biography, politics, science, poetry, fiction, and everything in between. Make sure to like and Subscribe and visit us at www.politics-prose.com

  1. 2d ago

    Barbara Kingsolver — Partita

    Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime. Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life. With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063577541?ic_referral=1Pxrngk4se0goDPeFNNZkTzCu5H1q7-dDyRIKmRd2qwwMwFrkFpdiDU_e-QrpJie-kRylBsOaJ0ueszVShP83lHzFTDjkvwWV2HcHD2mNauPpWqEX1RMge0sZ455iabejoSrvSQ

  2. 3d ago

    Richard Kurin — History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery - with Steve Inskeep

    The definitive account of how a discarded strand of hair found in Thomas Jefferson’s Bible led to a sweeping, multi-year genomic investigation, drawing on technological advances in DNA to finally resolve a 200-year national controversy.“Written with the gravitas of history and the pace of a thriller, Richard Kurin’s landmark account is vital and compelling.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of PowerIn 2011, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History discovered what appeared to be a hair—light red, possibly human—pressed between the pages of the Thomas Jefferson Bible. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: determining if modern genomics could recover Jefferson’s DNA and finally resolve the most divisive and enduring question surrounding his life—the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.For over two centuries, the Jefferson–Hemings controversy has shaped American debates about race, power, slavery, and the mythology of the Founding Fathers. Historians have argued fiercely. Descendants have lived with uncertainty. DNA technology in the 1990s brought us closer, but not all the way; the evidence remained incomplete. Until now. In this riveting narrative—part scientific detective story, part historical epic—Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and museum official, leads readers through the fifteen-year-long genomic investigation conducted with leading DNA scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts, and Jefferson and Hemings’ descendants across the country.The result is the first conclusive, scientifically validated answer to a question that has reverberated since the eighteenth century—an answer that settles the historical record, deepens our understanding of Jefferson, honors generations of family oral history, and asks America to confront the full complexity of its origins. Richard Kurin is the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large and previously served as Under Secretary overseeing all museums and scientific centers. An author of several popular books on American history and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Kurin has led major national cultural initiatives and produced award-winning public history. Kurin is in conversation with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep is a cohost of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and of NPR’s Up First, one of the nation’s most popular podcasts. His reporting has taken him across the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Pakistan, and China. His search for the full story behind the news has led him to history; he is the author of Instant City, Jacksonland, and Imperfect Union, and now Differ We Must. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217088508?ic_referral=794ycoLUGLq6wWO4PAo81qUtxKpplmwrtSEig1NimhQwM_sWRWBn6T_3IrOo3lKAdz4a8fvGYuwR-XBGRtYPRImkj9TVWYILBjIqIkSW9c8xiuc8hiuEW1pNtBhZbocXe70Y5wA

  3. 4d ago

    Jorie Graham — Killing Spree: Poems - with Jamie Raskin

    A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions—ecological, political, technological—set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance? Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers. Jorie Graham is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Her poetry has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and is Boylston Chair Emerita at Harvard University. Graham is in conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George's County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 6, 2025. Rep. Raskin was chosen by the Democratic Caucus to be the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the 119th Congress. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374618025?ic_referral=XWe5fCvkWKd0WPlG3yd1AzeNIacjETcVJa_1pax_3MQwMx_k2WfHvCzJ0HnE6i-sW76LVqLElO8LmPEhuX6UGtMiBhFdOxeYuiDqCdKdvfc40Mo60sbzRVPt-_1BNJTywJeAQTs

  4. 5d ago

    David Treuer — The Savage Mind: An American Legacy

    A searing exploration of American violence, interweaving memoir, history, and reportage to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation—and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most personal and powerful work of his storied literary career. How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish—quite the opposite. Today, Treuer explains, America’s frontier—and all its violent pathologies—has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament—one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind, and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth. New York Times bestselling author David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780316599436?ic_referral=-iOLtfL-9me-AfKuTPSfk2iRfUbo4LaHXeXIoGvRaPowMyNbD1ai4ELGpmhG0t2Hmj_6XVYDtEjGMTDNCLuMXBJN6jmFq3gH5LbAEWcM4nnMSd9wcZhIbHoK7fIs5od17-zCUrk

  5. Oct 23

    Devon Rodriguez — Work in Progress - with Elizabeth Méndez Berry

    As a child, Rodriguez wondered why he lived in a single cramped room with his family, where he was beaten often and never felt safe. But despite difficult circumstances, he always believed he was going to be a successful artist.When he was in the ninth grade, his art teacher invited him to ride the New York City subway, with one destination in mind: the development of his craft, by drawing the commuters sitting across from him. A blank page in his sketchbook was something Rodriguez could control in an otherwise chaotic life.In this astonishing memoir, he explains how his art, his grandmother, and his own relentless drive saved him from heart-wrenching circumstances and led him to redefine out-of-fashion realist portraiture as fresh and magical.Rodriguez writes with rhythm, verve, and an artist’s POV, painting a vivid picture of his native Bronx, the tattoos and rooftop graffiti that mesmerized him as a kid, and the teachers who saw his potential and nourished it.Painting regular people in all their complexity is Rodriguez’s gift and his offering to the world, an old-school act that has made him a new-school star. Work in Progress delivers Rodriguez’s most precise and moving portrait yet: of himself. Devon Rodriguez is a Bronx-born portrait artist of Puerto Rican and Honduran descent. He rose to notoriety for drawing realistic portraits of commuters on the New York City subway system. He has also portrayed such luminaries as former President Biden, Oprah, and more. The most-followed visual artist on TikTok, he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times. He was named a 2025 Time100 Creator and a Forbes Top Creator the same year. He lives in New York City. Rodriguez is in conversation with Elizabeth Méndez Berry (She/Her), Vice President & Executive Editor One World. Elizabeth’s career has been led by curiosity, from her own award-winning journalism to her work as an editor and grantmaker. She started out as an assistant music editor at Vibe magazine where she wrote and edited music criticism; in his book Decoded, Jay-Z cited one of her essays as an inspiration for the line “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex / I never claimed to have wings on” in his iconic track “Public Service Announcement.” Before joining One World, she invested in the arts and journalism as a funder at the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She cofounded Critical Minded, an initiative that supports cultural criticism. At One World, she acquires nonfiction and works with authors including Yaba Blay, Eve L. Ewing, Jeneen Interlandi, Devon Rodriguez, Guadalupe Rosales, and Adam Serwer. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593734483?ic_referral=zXYM0-yqH_J9TrI_xEO4Y1L39OeROMw1pqzQlFOnrPYwMwQZ3gLLFsTT2HLDN5LRN-GAwchB0vBjqCBUmkszI1w-ZyHJvYqUw8gsOuqWCF6FawN09LZibieAWBISHyaLolur290

  6. Oct 22

    Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg — Blockers and Profiles in Cowardice - with Andrew Sullivan

    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.   It may be scant solace, but history will be particularly harsh to a subset of Trump enablers with a few key things in common: They have money and power. They represent intuitions that are central in determining whether America remains a free, functioning democracy or not. And they absolutely know better. History starts now.In Profiles in Cowardice, Jacob Weisberg has written one of the first defining books of the Trump Era—how this pitch-black political moment happened, why so few resisted, and what it reveals about the character of American leadership.Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Big Tech. Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone, and Wall Street. Brad Karp, Paul, Weiss, and Big Law. Mitch McConnell and the United States Senate. Eight individuals in all, together forming an entwined network of power in America, and a new way to understand how authoritarianism can take root in an open society—not by overthrowing institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission. Jacob Weisberg is the author of books including Ronald Reagan (2016), The Bush Tragedy (2008), and In an Uncertain World (2003), co-written with former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin. A native of Chicago, he is the former longtime editor of Slate and the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He serves as Chair of The Committee to Protect Journalists and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.   Lewis and Weisberg are in conversation with Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder and editor of The Weekly Dish, a site launched in 2000, and former editor of both Michael Lewis and Jacob Weisberg at The New Republic. PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/lewis-weisberg-100826

  7. Oct 21

    Kenneth R. Feinberg — What is Life Worth? - with Peter L.W. Osnos

    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

  8. Oct 21

    Marcia Chatelain — How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington - with Ashley Preston

    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 MosesThere 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

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About

Calling all book lovers: experience our renowned author talks in podcast form. Politics and Prose Presents allows you to visit our legendary independent bookstore from anywhere in the world. Listen to top authors and journalists discuss their latest books- ranging from topics like biography, politics, science, poetry, fiction, and everything in between. Make sure to like and Subscribe and visit us at www.politics-prose.com

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  • Creator
    Politics and Prose
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    831
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © Politics and Prose
  • Show Website
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