Politics and Prose Presents

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians--Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class--gathered in public to feed the city.

In Nourishing Networks, historian Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs.

Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future.

Ashley Rose Young is the American History Curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. She is also a Smithsonian Research Associate and was formerly the Historian of the Smithsonian Food History Project at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A curator and public historian, she has written for the New York Times and Washington Post, among other outlets.

Young is in conversation with Corby Kummer, who is executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute, a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science, and a senior editor of The Atlantic, for which he was a longtime food columnist and originated a vertical on food, sustainability, policy, and food justice. He attended the Loomis-Chafee School and received a BA from Yale College.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780197794036?ic_referral=tVJ47dgoa3v1TNDpD7mFmzhIICsOcPTnwn83tvCK0p0wM_5Kqse1aYm3gPPxUst4erxrW6i32bITzfXObgLosvnxUS6eBwiKZ_7_VC4a8aJ-dkFGrY9-zszWzzIK3_xh_14L7ng

Zorah Sharaf could do no wrong. Zorah Sharaf brought shame upon her family. What’s the truth? Depends on who you ask.
After fleeing a war-torn Afghanistan, the Sharaf family resettles as refugees in Northern Virginia. After many years of hard work, the father has become a successful businessman. Now they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.
When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American Dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?
A kaleidoscopic, urgent narrative, told through the perspectives of those who know the family best, and those who only think they do, Good People is a riveting, provocative, and unforgettable story of community, family, and identity in our increasingly divided times.

Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When she was a month old, her family fled the conflict and became refugees in Pakistan, joining the millions of other Afghans that had sought refuge there. They later moved to the United States and she grew up in Virginia. She currently lives in Toronto.

Sabit is in conversation with Donna Hemans, the author of three novels, River Woman, Tea by the Sea, and The House of Plain Truth. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She earned an MFA from American University and an undergraduate degree from Fordham University. She serves on the PEN/Faulkner Foundation board and is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593801062?ic_referral=SM_ykxgCBdPL_kDocz_jvCBG0TI_6AAeJWgaTWBnPXMwM1AWndjCe5r97tpsd8xDdMBY6TQ7yLGAybBv7mPNn3LWYZbbLW9ZhW8UJ-TfwkwkPpSYupqjbCC2mgOCxfPbn0vKzFw

An elegant biography of a prescient author whose novels portray Black women’s experiences across the African diaspora
 
Growing up in World War II–era Brooklyn among West Indian immigrants, Paule Marshall (1929–2019) was fiercely driven to become a writer, making art from the world she knew, the life she lived, and the world she imagined. Though her novels and stories are understood by scholars as the beginning of contemporary Black feminist literature—bridging Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston to such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou—Marshall’s legacy is often overlooked. In this elegant literary biography, distinguished scholar of African American literature Mary Helen Washington draws on exclusive access to the writer’s papers, including her newly discovered unpublished memoir, and scores of interviews with family and friends to give us the first account of Marshall’s life as an artist and of the depth and brilliance of her work.
 
Beginning with her 1959 debut, Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age story set among Barbadian immigrants and African Americans in Brooklyn, and moving through her later works set in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, Marshall’s novels chart the diasporic life that Marshall herself lived, defined by Black women’s experiences, an unapologetic and sometimes queer sexuality, and the history of the African diaspora. Despite the lush and finely observed inner lives of her heroines, however, Marshall was famous for tightly guarding her own privacy, and it is this enigma—Marshall’s deeply expressive writing versus her guarded public exterior—that Washington draws out. Here is the first look at a prescient, brilliantly talented writer, a complex and fascinating woman, whose fiction single-handedly stages a reverse middle passage that extends from the United States and the Caribbean to Africa.

Mary Helen Washington began her effort to recover the work of Black writers with four landmark collections of African American literature: Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories of Black Women (1975); Midnight Birds: Stories By and About Black Women (1980); Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, (1987); and Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991). Washington continued this recovery of “forgotten histories” with her 2014 book, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, which received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition from The Modern Language Association. Recognizing Washington’s pioneering role in African American literary studies, scholar Ann du Cille wrote, “Mary Helen Washington…has been a key player in efforts to define and institutionalize the fields of African American literature and feminist studies for more than twenty years.”

Washington will be in conversation with Soyica Diggs Colbert, the interim Provost and Idol Family Professor in Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship and the author of the award-winning book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300253856?ic_referral=bhnCTLNsdBEd19hsKO4uqwpFmnoXou4T-HrULbohMqowM9l4J-JQoDoz44qUH-f-T0gxvQaBP1Ta__FWA-4fwtUC_dL-81t3mmCeWKY1W4EY5gR6C3inQAR-5WjEU60F-oO5gk0

From Well–Read Black Girl Books, a "wise and witty, unflinchingly honest and insightful" (Maaza Mengiste) novel that delves into the secret lives of three women on the eve of Eritrean independence.

The year is 1991. Eritrea is on the verge of liberation from Ethiopian rule and in Washington, D.C.’s tight-knit Eritrean community, change is in the air. Thirteen-year-old Lydia and her family are grappling with what peace after decades of war might mean for their future, just as they welcome Berekhet—a distant cousin newly arrived from Ethiopia to attend medical school in the States. With him comes a barrage of new ideas Lydia must confront for the first time, about the stories of nationhood and family she was raised on.

Meanwhile her mother, Elsa, a former rebel fighter, and the family matriarch, Mama Zewdi, must grapple with regrets long buried in the time their country has been at war. Elsa’s path from Eritrea to D.C. was paved with courage and loss, and figures from her past on the front lines of battle begin to resurface. Mama Zewdi, who runs a successful injera business out of her apartment, finds herself reexamining her place in their little family for the first time, while Lydia, emboldened by Berekhet, becomes committed to uncovering the secrets of her and her mother’s past—including the truth about her father, who was martyred in the war.

A loving ode to an immigrant community on the cusp of a new age, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For boldly asks: How does our past define our present? And what stories must we let go of to be truly free?

Bsrat Mezghebe received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Paris Review, and the anthology Well–Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Mezghebe is in conversation with Glory Edim, a literary tastemaker, entrepreneur, and advocate for diverse voices in literature. In 2015, she founded Well-Read Black Girl (WRBG), an online platform and book club dedicated to celebrating the works of Black women authors and creating a supportive online community for readers. Under Edim's leadership, WRBG has grown into a nonprofit organization, hosting events, book festivals, and author conversations that highlight the richness and diversity of Black literature. Her efforts have earned her accolades such as the 2017 Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and the Madam C.J. Walker Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. As an author herself, Edim has contributed to the literary landscape with her bestselling anthologies Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, and On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library and her recently published book Gather Me.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092490?ic_referral=w35TuygLK6dGBEunTTaOCMhMAjrAkQzlIdg1SDOrRPkwM6tpLGTRc2pjSi4Jp_F73YPlTYO7V8QoVvkqdfIshzha-dcZM_RTx1l7Yc44MCqQCoOXNFdRqmws_VcrQH8dBQJfcbM

In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens,  Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans. 
Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.

Thompson is in conversation with E.J. Dionne, Jr.,  a bestselling author, a syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Washington Post and nearly a hundred other newspapers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. His Why Americans Hate Politics won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award. He is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and on other radio and television programs. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Mary Boyle, and their three children

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593702093?ic_referral=9t-wxz5omgqjYl7OvUWKeIVABhvdnauq4YXMAzJR4xUwM-F0LfG-8gg2YdPg477ItY55uDPjXRL__I9PQmv5gbcwYWeDt3_FAfnSCxSF6Yk-2JQ8-l6V0sFbz3ZXgHaV4U-O08I

Award-winning author and journalist Wil Haygood explores how the Vietnam War became a mirror for the struggle of Black Americans—fighting for freedom abroad while demanding equality at home—and a powerful lens through which to understand the racial and political divides that continue to shape American life.
"With this book, Wil Haygood has become the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.” —Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Laureate for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
"In these masterful pages, Haygood reframes both the Vietnam War and the United States’ unfinished struggle for equality."—Mitchell Zuckoff, New York Times bestselling author of 13 Hours and Lost in Shangri-La
Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America.
Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety.
Surrounding their experiences are the cultural and political forces of the era, including Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Berry Gordy, and Lyndon Johnson, whose voices and actions shaped a decade of turbulence and transformation.
The War Within a War is both sweeping history and intimate revelation, capturing the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.

Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. His book, The Butler, was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. Haygood has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022 he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio.

Haygood is in conversation with Sheryll Cashin, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. She teaches Constitutional Law and Race & American Law among other subjects and is an acclaimed author. She writes about racial justice and democracy. Her most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, is about the role of segregation and redlining in reproducing inequality. Her books have been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction (2015), and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction (2005, 2009, and 2018). Cashin is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. A contributing writer for Politico Magazine, she has also written commentaries for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Root, and others.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593537695?ic_referral=fwNIvfGN2uZgWzKkvBUgs36w-p82wkEr5uYl-O2ltiMwM4Ly30TpO1BX7viisUOfS1NmuGh1WnmvUAHKcO1yU7vz6bCYJSOeOc2cCvNjwVAN4ZkCUKZLwHmeGibXjNO3TVWHZlc

From CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, a revelatory account of how one man, four teenagers, and a struggling city collided over race, vigilantism, and public safety . . .  exposing the fault lines of a nation
On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.
Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.
In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.
A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two children.

Williams is in conversation with Dana Bash. Dana Bash is CNN’s chief political correspondent, anchor of Inside Politics with Dana Bash weekdays at 12pmET, and co-anchor of State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the network’s Sunday morning newsmaker show. Bash is an award-winning journalist who plays a key role in the network’s political coverage, conducting high-profile interviews with candidates, serving as an anchor for CNN’s Election Night in America special coverage and frequently moderating presidential debates and town hall specials. In 2024, she co-moderated CNN’s historic Presidential Debate between President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. Bash won the Radio and Television Correspondents Association’s Joan S. Barone Award for her original reporting on a STOCK Act loophole that led Congress to pass legislation to close it. She is also a winner of the National Press Foundation’s Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism and a three-time recipient of the Foundation’s Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress. Raised in New Jersey, Bash is a 2025 inductee into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593833704?ic_referral=NbsJsPimbCpfXD_yUK1OyGLR1o2NZYRTUjStgiDRcCMwM0WF9TEZsOJweS-SD4K5v4aVg0YgLedG7dDK1lH4c_EN1k1ShKmpEwNNfbjWhlxIUpZZH8Y8KLZ7l8CgIzsBwi_Pq3w

The acclaimed economist and author of The Future of Money argues that the forces meant to stabilize the world’s economy are in fact driving global instability
Global economic power is shifting, liberal market-oriented democracies face growing domestic turmoil, and international trade and financial integration are crumbling. How did we get here?
In The Doom Loop, economist Eswar Prasad argues that the very forces that we long believed could stabilize the world order are fueling its destabilization. Rather than promoting shared prosperity, globalization has instead deepened economic inequality, stoked political backlash, and prompted escalating trade wars. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, founded to foster international cooperation, have failed to adapt to twenty-first-century realities. The rise of “middle power” countries like India, Brazil, and Indonesia once suggested a stable multipolar future, but today, such nations are increasingly forced to pick sides as the United States and China fight for global dominance.
Prasad argues that we are caught in a destructive feedback loop between economics, domestic politics, and geopolitics. The Doom Loop offers a clear-eyed and bracing account of a world spiraling into disorder, and makes it clear that old solutions cannot pull us out—we need radical new solutions to fix the world’s problems. 

Eswar S. Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Future of Money, which was listed among the best books of the year by The Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Week. Prasad lives in Arlington, Virginia, and Ithaca, New York.

Prasad is in conversation with Binyamin Appelbaum, who is the lead writer on economics and business for the Editorial Board of The New York Times. From 2010 to 2019, he was a Washington correspondent for the Times. He is the author of "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society."

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781541705937?ic_referral=jmLk6918blWCdNgnapneUxw9wMAqXq5_kco3SoSCz-swM0CtPL_GONdWBXtdyJ6YYhnRloMdX_XOzry9mrSsnvEfNoOvbBmSbiKki19h5fC1AkXs0Wc53jzoD7mMiNYnFbHA7aw

This event will be in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Alice Gerrard, an award-winning and storied folk and bluegrass musician for over 50 years, is one of the notable few women in a heavily male genre. Custom Made Woman tells Gerrard's story through the music, the folk festivals, the kids, and the relationships--both personal and professional--that defined her storied life and career. Her collaborations with Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens during the 1960s and 1970s were pivotal recordings during the decades after the American folk music boom of the midcentury; the duo produced four albums that have recently been rereleased by Rounder Records and Smithsonian Folkways. In addition to Dickens, Gerrard has worked with folks like Tommy Jarrell, Enoch Rutherford, Otis Burris, Luther Davis, and Matokie Slaughter, and founded The Old-Time Herald, based in Durham, North Carolina, serving as its editor-in-chief from 1987 until 2003.
She's also a lifelong documentarian of the folkways scene, and this book features nearly 100 rare photos--many never before seen--of key musicians, including Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Hazel Dickens, Elizabeth Cotten, Mike Seeger, and more. In telling the story of her time as a player of traditional music, Gerrard gives us a deeply personal way to understand and appreciate a quintessentially American genre that has a long history and thrives to this day.

Alice Gerrard is a Grammy-nominated old-time and bluegrass musician whose career has spanned nearly six decades.

Gerrard is in conversation with Maureen Loughran, the Director and Curator of Smithsonian Folkways. A public ethnomusicologist by training, Maureen was the senior producer for the nationally broadcast public radio program American Routes in New Orleans, producing long-feature documentaries and segments on Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith and John Coltrane, among others. As a researcher, she documented the sacred and secular music traditions of Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Folklife Program, while her doctoral research explored underground radio, soundscape gentrification and cultural community organizing in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Maureen holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Brown University.

The iconic first two albums by Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, Who's That Knocking? and Won't You Come and Sing For Me were released by Folkways Records. Smithsonian Folkways has kept the duo's legacy alive, issuing  Pioneering Women Of Bluegrass (The Definitive Edition) in 2022. Find out more by visiting their website at folkways.si.edu.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781469690360?ic_referral=rMIwMBlN5etSr2Bovnz8KdJXnjG6PFtWCokAJbz7OqowM0-34HNsQU0dp1VyVuCcRcBgB5V9kJEeOgdQhtFtZ_2Sp85juStqKU06BP0I2LuOjhRwkO0Tw2v-BRWPfgMhSbzVkMM

How did the son of a laundress for local brothels end up one of America’s most powerful politicians and the Senate’s most bare-knuckled Democrat? Political journalist Jon Ralston gives us the first full biography of Harry Reid, the five-time Senator from Nevada whose ruthlessness and tenacity produced the most groundbreaking legislation of the late 20th century, and who also invented the tactics that would keep his Democratic Party in control. For that, he inspired loyalty and derision, admiration and disdain. But his legacy of change speaks for itself.
Born in tiny Searchlight, Nevada, Harry Reid rose from a childhood in a ramshackle home in the middle of nowhere to become the Democratic leader who ensured Obamacare became law, that the nation’s banks played by the rules, and who helped rescue the American economy by pushing through a stimulus bill.
His political instincts were forged in the take-no-prisoners culture of Nevada where he was once investigated by the FBI for his ties to the mob. He persuaded a Republican senator to switch parties to gain partisan control, and he changed the Senate filibuster rules to save President Obama’s lower court nominees. That maneuver later helped Republicans to cement the appointments of three Supreme Court justices. Reid also became a formidable force in Nevada, building a political machine that turned a red state blue and left an unmatched legacy on infrastructure and the environment—including squelching a planned nuclear waste dump.
In The Game Changer, Ralston shows the endurance of his accomplishments, but also his role in the enduring dysfunction of what was once called the world’s greatest deliberative body. It is a complicated portrait of a man who would not be denied.

Jon Ralston is the founder and CEO of The Nevada Independent. He has been covering politics in Nevada for more than thirty-five years and has been a columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and most recently at the Reno Gazette-Journal, which he left in November 2016 to start The Indy. He has hosted several TV programs over the years, including Ralston Live on Vegas PBS and Ralston Reports on KSNV News 3. In 2012, Politico named Ralston one of the Top 50 “Politicos to Watch.” He frequently appears on MSNBC, and he has also appeared on NBC’s long-running Meet the Press. He lives in Las Vegas.

Ralston is in conversation with Major Garrett, who is the Chief Washington Correspondent for CBS News and the CBSN radio host of The Takeout and The Debrief. For over thirty years, his award-winning reporting and writing has tackled the nation's pressing issues. Garrett is the author of four books, Mr. Trump's Wild Ride, The Enduring Revolution, The 15 Biggest Lies in Politics, and Common Cents with former Rep. Tim Penny (D-Minnesota). He lives in Washington, D.C.

PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982194413?ic_referral=3qee-uhvK5mMXw5GuaT_QNl7GdxKZtsU-WZMgzyLg8MwM4vLvBggPiVpq39z-3sLT-PtQ7xfdSJOKVWL1mNSm70lBc8Iyyy-j921iWKOxOtq6vW4MXf17kkeTNgCXRcKBZu-6XQ