Politics and Prose Presents

From Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, a shocking investigation of unparalleled depth into the subversion of the Justice Department over the last decade, culminating in President Donald Trump upending this cornerstone of democracy and threatening America’s rule of law as we have long known it 
Throughout his first administration, Trump did more than any other president to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency, pressuring appointees to shield him, to target his enemies, and even to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. The department, pressed into a defensive crouch, has never fully recovered. 
Injustice exposes not only the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the department at every turn but also how delays in investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the will of voters under Attorney General Merrick Garland helped prevent the country from holding Trump accountable and enabled his return to power. With never-before-told accounts, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis take readers inside as prosecutors convulsed over Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, and FBI agents, the department’s storied investigators, at times retreated in fear. They take you to the rooms where Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team set off on an all-but-impossible race to investigate Trump for absconding with classified documents and waging an assault on democracy—and inside his prosecution’s heroic and fateful choices that ultimately backfired. 
With a plethora of sources deeply embedded in the ranks of three presidencies, Leonnig and Davis reveal the daily war secretly waged for the soul of the department, how it has been shredded by propaganda and partisanship, and how—if the United States hopes to live on with its same form of government—Trump’s war with the Justice Department will mark a turning point from which it will be hard to recover. Injustice is the jaw-dropping account of partisans and enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty and justice for all.

Carol Leonnig, a five-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of three bestselling books and an investigative reporter who has worked at The Washington Post for the last twenty-five years. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on security failures by the Secret Service. She also was part of Post teams awarded Pulitzers in 2024, 2022, 2018, and 2014. Leonnig, a contributor to MSNBC, is the author of Zero Fail and coauthor of A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It. 
Aaron C. Davis is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and has been a finalist three times. He was a lead writer and reporter on the Post’s investigative series into the January 6 attack, which won the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize, and, with other Post coverage, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2018, he was part of a Post team that won the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. Davis has reported from fourteen countries. He began at The Washington Post in 2008, after reporting for the Associated Press, The Mercury News, and Florida Today.

Leonnig and Davis are in conversation with Mary Louise Kelly. Award-winning broadcaster and author Kelly is one of the most prominent voices in American journalism today. As host of NPR’s All Things Considered, her assignments have included North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran and beyond. Kelly’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593831373?ic_referral=RGMJ7nFZQKudP75etUtXjBE9xuDhw4EOrc_nfaNV4oQwM4M1mmBTaUJYl9IR7zeTFet6ukzOVE1wpZyPmJxsiaxYcSsavMvBLNHReDTq_Y2T9I99R164JVfx_jLuQFxX2uXoRxw

This event will be in partnership with Free DC.

Amid a national housing affordability crisis with political and social implications, Washington, DC is notorious for its rapidly rising income inequality, high rates of displacement, and some of the most expensive rents in the country. Housing policy expert Rosemary Ndubuizu uncovers more than 100 years of affordable housing politics in the nation's capital to illustrate local and national trends in how various social, economic, and political forces have worked together to ensure the persistent vulnerability of low-wage Black families to housing insecurity and displacement. 
Since the 1960s, Black women have been at the forefront of combating efforts to force them out of DC. The Undesirable Many recounts the history of Black women's tenant activism and organized opposition through a Black feminist materialism framework that exposes present-day housing inequities as deeply entangled in the politics and practices of gender and racial inequity. Drawing upon extensive archival research and dozens of in-depth interviews with Black women tenant activists and affordable housing advocates, Ndubuizu uncovers how gendered stereotypes of Black tenant irresponsibility have shaped market behavior and informed political justification for different consumer treatment. Politicians, landlords, and even nonprofit housing providers often championed disciplinary housing governance such as mandatory housekeeping classes, welfare garnishment, paternal property management, and case management, contending that the problem was not housing but the Black family itself. By exposing these strategies alongside low-income Black women's political perspectives and experiences, The Undesirable Many offers valuable lessons for contemporary challenges in affordable housing advocacy and welfare politics.

Rosemary Ndubuizu is a scholar-organizer who studies the political, economic, and social forces that shape social welfare concerns like affordable housing. Ndubuizu is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is also a long-term member and volunteer community organizer with Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC since 2006.

Ndubuizu is in conversation with Sabiyha Prince. Anthropologist, artist, and filmmaker Sabiyha Prince is a native Washingtonian whose paintings and photographs are aptly represented by the phrase/brand Prince uses to describe her work - Beauty and Justice.  As an activist and educator, her work on gentrification, environmental justice, anti-racism, and anti-militarism is reflected in both her writing and artistic practice.  Her work experience is described to the right, This professional trajectory has taken her to Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.  An ardent Pan-Africanist, much of her work centers on African American experiences in the US - including generations of her own family.  With a doctorate in cultural anthropology and an undergraduate degree in communications arts, her background as a social observer also informs Prince’s filmmaking achievements. 

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781469689685?ic_referral=93Cx9_t5Pr1zst_amv7ZcViBVDicFuJ7pAUhrmeu_TUwMz5QSho82WeSblYHUR6jX1CPpcBGVtb7ijrT3WoYdzDz7iYG37REMHZcSmqHxwaLu2fu4MA3ZPvG_jC7GyYPSvLt-xY

Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?

Tim Wu--the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history--from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements--and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.

Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. He worked in the White House as special assistant to the President for technology and competition policy. The author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, he lives in New York City.

Wu is in conversation with Cecilia Kang, an award-winning technology reporter for The New York Times and best-selling co-author of An Ugly Truth: Inside  Facebook's Battle for Domination.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593321249?ic_referral=_QraFBM7jeatempU2-NNEiq1kawqlLhIGDoT-H0v99kwM3aTomURaUN_CDEEoWDPQNjbuNo0jE8Ys3ySEwBwBlysDiKEhYefphopHiknt8w7EQcne7twRlYNRtZqUjqcA71DVbw

In this revelatory and enthralling book, award-winning historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America's founding event. The American Revolution was not only the colonies' triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England; it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, Bell's narrative ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As his lens widens, the "War of Independence" manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis. Bell conveys the impact of these developments at home and abroad by grounding the narrative in the gripping stories of individuals--including women, minorities, and other disenfranchised people. The result is an unforgettable and unexpected work of American history that shifts everything we thought we knew about our creation story.

Richard Bell is a British-born, American-trained historian of the early United States. A professor of history at the University of Maryland, he has been an NEH Public Scholar and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, among other honors. His previous book, Stolen, was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593719510?ic_referral=Y2Of666Gzv_fVA_AROXCsSRLv51BjEGXP78_vWXMrbwwMwUWJBS0ADjWv5WzjMCdGLBYAMlo3NUVLDLHWakwmqI-s0nw0HISBfwws4dj6903bTnmwEGkAfO9vPrJDZeJVAMCNUQ

'One day you’ll look back and realise how hard it was, and just how well you did’
Charlie Mackesy’s four unlikely friends are wandering through the wilds again. They’re not sure what they are looking for. They do know that life can be difficult, but that they love each other, and cake is often the answer. 
When the dark clouds come, can the boy remember what he needs to get through the storm?
This beautiful paper-over-board hardcover includes a dark blue satin ribbon, textured blue quarter bind, illustrated endpapers, and cream sketchbook-quality paper.

Charlie Mackesy, British artist, illustrator and author, began his career as a cartoonist, before becoming a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. His award-winning work has been featured in books, galleries, school classrooms, hospital wards, prisons and public spaces around the world. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse was published in October 2019 and holds the record for the most consecutive weeks in the Sunday Times Non-Fiction Chart across all formats, as well as being the longest running Non-Fiction number one of all time. A number one New York Times bestseller, it is has also remained on the NYT list since publication.Charlie's beloved book is the first ever book to be awarded both the Waterstones Book of the Year and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year, and has been translated into over 50 languages. In 2023, Charlie co-wrote and directed the short animated film adaption, which won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film, the Academy Award for Best Animated Short film and five Annie Awards including Best Special Production. 

Mackesy is in conversation with Nora Krug, an editor and writer in Book World. She has worked for The Washington Post since 2007. She began at The Post writing a books column and later became a co-editor of the weekly Health and Science section. Her articles and columns have appeared in Health, Book World, Local Living and Parenting. Before joining The Post, she was an editor at the New York Times and Architectural Digest.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593994825?ic_referral=BUC2tHT9t3n-_jT14IKqkAPrlyZmDVg20TWA3HQeWtAwMwPV3OuV44OJ2l7sB2xkUapT5Bmy3tc1bC1Lmbhr8zJH0tMjY5geZPHfvwbDCZON7H6UGEG1qPn9Q1OsnURSU12eryA

The must-read new book from Jonathan Karl, the author of New York Times bestsellers Tired of Winning, Betrayal, and Front Row at the Trump Show
In Retribution, Jonathan Karl’s unparalleled access brings us behind closed doors deep inside the White House and presidential campaigns, revealing the extraordinary moments that ended one man’s presidency and brought another back to power.
This is a story of unprecedented political plot twists, showing what happened behind the scenes as political fortunes fell and rose again, and as a new team coalesced around President Trump with the goal of creating an entirely new world order. From President Biden’s shocking withdrawal and Vice President Harris’s historic run, to the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, his election, and the changes he has brought to every corner of the country, this book reveals in surprising new detail how we got here, and what we can expect from American politics in the years to come.

Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Front Row at the Trump Show, Betrayal, and Tired of Winning were instant New York Times bestsellers.

Karl is in conversation with Katherine Faulders is the Washington Managing Editor for ABC News where she oversees the daily coverage and enterprise reporting out of our Washington bureau. Katherine manages the editorial teams in Washington while also reporting and breaking news for all ABC News programs and platforms. Since starting at ABC News in 2013, Katherine has covered virtually every corner of Washington — from the White House, to Capitol Hill and the Justice Department. Katherine loves good boots-on-the-ground journalism. Most recently, Katherine along with her teams in Washington broke exclusive stories ahead of all other outlets, including the news that former FBI Director James Comey had been indicted, the return of Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. to face criminal charges, the sweeping pardons for nearly all the Jan. 6 rioters, and the Trump administration's acceptance of a jumbo jet from Qatar. 

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege--as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register--he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions: floating through the Amazon to recover a prehistorical fossil; embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea; swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. His novels, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like Wildlife in America--"key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing," says Bill McKibben--as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims.

Underlying all Matthiessen's disparate pursuits was the same existential search--to find a cure for "deep restlessness." This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen's life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer's uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation--to express, eloquently and presciently, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge."

Lance Richardson's first book, House of Nutter The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a year-long residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.

Richardson is in conversation with Carl Hoffman, the author of five books. Savage Harvest was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post notable book of the year, and has been translated into ten languages.  The Last Wild Men of Borneo was a finalist for the Edgar Awards and the Banff Mountain Adventure Book Awards.  The Lunatic Express was named one of the ten best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal.  Over three decades he has reported from some 80 countries, covering stories about technology, exploration and indigenous culture.  He is a former contributing editor at Wired and National Geographic Traveler magazines, is a regular contributor at The Washington Post Book World, and is working on his sixth book, for HarperCollins/Mariner.  He is a native of Washington, D.C.  

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781524748319?ic_referral=ApQM6gW-SjZFlD7qGnoA_ZdXWZrXpra7Y58bNnNTnXowM3Ti1lAp26FTTKQAov2FFQUcge5gzQciwfS5utGueYBwxIE4X7Mtis4nP9KKAPFL6wLgcKVpwyslzRj8_4H4GTusoGA

In the final year of World War II, Audrey is holding tightly to her dream of becoming a painter, while falling hard for a naval doctor. Not long after they marry he's sent overseas, leaving her alone in Washington, DC. Audrey rents a room to Lucille, launching an unlikely friendship that's a comfort to them both. But not everything is quite what it seems. Although Lucille's past has been a mystery to Audrey, nothing prepares her for the shock when Lucille abandons their makeshift family-- including her child-- and retreats to her orchard home in North Carolina. When the women meet again in 1973, Lucille is intent on mending the past. But Audrey is focused on leaving her unhappy marriage, and Lake, the daughter Lucille left behind, is trapped in an abusive relationship. If You Leave is an intimate, immersive story exploring motherhood, love, and art, as three women carve a wayward path toward reconciliation.

Margaret Hutton's fiction has appeared in The Sun, The South Carolina Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Antioch Review, and Abundant Grace. She graduated with honors in creative writing from UNC-Chapel Hill and holds an MFA from George Mason University. A native North Carolinian and former environmental reporter, she now divides her time between the Washington, DC, area and her art studio in Chester County, Pennsylvania. If You Leave is her debut novel.

Hutton is in conversation with Alexandra Zapruder. Zapruder is the author/editor of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category in 2002, and Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. She serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation and has been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646036417?ic_referral=0KiNgaxk1BPqFM38XMckFoLDmSUN5FzTyuw6cyRflHEwM-kTv1Gexe7s7PqL8RH29mn7314glOX9siK-boDW3U3aW1zdyTe6K-Dt-pXvab06hpBdHT7ZoFcqTR--cxCAAXuH8vw

Immortal beloveds Rebekah and Hugh are on vacation! Against a backdrop of ongoing war, this pair of chic emotional vampires from San Francisco sets off on a queer Black Sea Cruise, eager to relax, join an orgy, and feast upon their fellow passengers' desires and sorrows. When Hugh becomes enchanted by an alluring--and possibly magical--nonbinary social media influencer named Heaven, Rebekah's reality capsizes, and her true nature is unleashed.

A smutty horror-comedy featuring unbridled narcissism, Vampires at Sea is a hilarious snack!

Lindsay Merbaum is a queer author of strange tales and the founder of Pick Your Potions, a consortium of mixology and witchery. Her first novel with Creature Publishing, The Gold Persimmon, was a 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist. Lindsay lives in Flint, Michigan with her partner and cats.

Merbaum is in conversation with Vera Kurian, a writer and scientist based in Washington DC. Her debut novel, NEVER SAW ME COMING (Park Row Books, 2021) was an Edgar Award nominee, was named one of the New York Times’ Best Thrillers of 2021, and has sold in 15 countries. Her second novel. A STEP PAST DARKNESS, was published in 2024. She regularly writes on Substack.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781951971229?ic_referral=WQ6WrwnSV__pgdrNcL4BR1DesLZYlVFwoztFWwRsXWQwM7NeuLg1eACK3slzNnoMUoC1SbsRafq7LKaTKO-KL51-2cmB6OZLGql8OdOsvZLJEinS57-P0mECyaYgGsf6Srnp8wI

We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: a moment when heroic African Americans and their allies triumphed over racial oppression through courageous protest, forging a new consensus in American life and law. But what are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?

In this innovative work, Brandon Terry develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing accounts of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy. The dominant narrative is romantic. This "arc of justice" narrative is found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and even the writings of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. Despite being public orthodoxy, these romantic visions are exhausted and unpersuasive on their own terms. The breakdown of the authority of this history of justice has created space for a rival ironic mode, embodied in the political ideas of Afropessimism. While offering a sympathetic critique, Terry ultimately finds Afropessimist thought self-undermining and unworkable.

Instead, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood in tragic terms. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers an optimistic political vision without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.

Brandon M. Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is the coeditor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and editor of Fifty Years Since MLK.

Terry is in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780674271289?ic_referral=a-uXE2Eayf5ohROwRZe-wnWpGku70UVg1h0i12OtxpYwMzT5tKp-MeOvHEEBgrVDkHTDSMIN5yEaS23mzB_b3gjwrHwOPN2Ynj-Zja_U1eNU8KOm14EoC6lvewidZCNLR-skPyg