Politics and Prose Presents

This event is in partnership with The Atlantic.

What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch--a lifelong atheist--reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.

Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.

In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300273540?ic_referral=OpqVxPnD7alNfvGLDDX3Ruzwo5763SSDmXmvgXKibFUwMy2WoMVvosvRqdBeT-HiBdEKNrPWxJ24vVO7tKNZRUP-3udMpkVUN5x4ze3CIXkHAJ1fbIKTLlhcKDyv1R-rLok9gw

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award. His books include The Constitution of Knowledge, The Happiness Curve, and Gay Marriage. He lives in northern Virginia.

Rauch is in conversation with McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2019, he received the Aldo Beckman Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association for his coverage of the Trump presidency; in 2021, he received a Wilbur Award for religion journalism. He is the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney.

*recorded 2/7/2025

In the 1950s Tropical Republic, a boy lives amid opulence and privilege, spending days at the beach or in the cool hills above the sweltering capital, enjoying leisurely Sunday lunches around the family compound's swimming pool. That is, until the reign of The Mortician begins, unleashing unimaginable horrors that bring his childhood idyll to an end. Narrowly escaping the violent fate visited on so many of his fellow citizens, he and his brother follow their parents into exile in the United States where they must start a new life. But as he grows, he never feels at home, and leaves his family to travel across Europe and outrun the ghosts of the past.

A searing novel of a life lived in the shadow of history, The Delicate Beast portrays the persistent, pernicious legacy of political violence.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781954276369?ic_referral=jdEpGRi3QHgMPbFsLUgBURr6YAGNxEMpjcSV4oNoX7swM-qR4E2zdUby79MGnHRfjku0gsqZrPMkJxJOV16-ewOnoxlpavcPUQePZa_xRKyw1UyNTuHUfGy5P37p3034x1KdrQ

Roger Celestin was born in Haiti, emigrated to the United States at the age of eleven, and is Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. The Delicate Beast is his first novel. He lives in Manhattan.

Celestin is in conversation with Peter Constantine. Constantine is a literary translator, writer, and activist for a diversified linguistic ecosystem in our world. Among his recent translations into English are works by Augustine, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. He is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Connecticut and Publisher of World Poetry Books.

*recorded 2/7/2025

Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she's thrust into a conflict and history she's tried to avoid all her life.

Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter--introducing Arabella to the very eligible grandson of an old flame and stirring up buried family history.

Naya is keeping a secret from her family that will change all their lives.

Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic (that might garner international attention) in the West Bank. Her grandmother, Zoya, plots to make a match between her and Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster.

Arabella and Aziz's instant connection reminds Zoya of the passion she once felt for Aziz's grandfather, a man she desired desperately, even after her father arranged another husband for her. In turn, Zoya would later marry off her youngest daughter, Naya, who aspired to date the Jackson 5 and wasn't ready to be a wife or mother to Arabella at sixteen. Now that Naya's children are grown and she's arrived at an abrupt midlife crossroads, it's time to settle old scores...

With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family's epic journey from fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. Too Soon joins the stories that seek to illuminate our shared history and ask, how can we set ourselves free?

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668046548?ic_referral=SBxu9CfQl9jJPqol2H25G4PAXtV4IjDnXYOhw4FW3jYwM-c_eg_IaK8TBguIlzSqVzdaYZMddbeZUviq28-EH2Ql8WOWL-J7xTazXd6M2onSWWEFEojVP5U05MetT-Kq7BXx0Q

Betty Shamieh (she/her) is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic's Picks. Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.

Shamieh is in conversation with Morgan Menzies, the creator and host of Pretty Little Bookshelf, a book club focused on discussing the significant themes and experiences explored in literary fiction by people of color. She is an avid reader empowering bookworms to diversify their bookshelves through online initiatives on Instagram – the Black Resilience Booksta Tour and in-person collaborations with independent bookstores like Politics and Prose – Reading Black Beyond February. Morgan currently splits her time between New Jersey and Maryland.

*recorded 2/6/2025

The early 2000s conjures images of inflatable furniture, flip phones, and low-rise jeans. It was a new millennium and the future looked bright, promising prosperity for all. The internet had arrived, and technology was shiny and fun. For many, it felt like the end of history: no more wars, racism, or sexism. But then history kept happening. Twenty-five years after the ball dropped on December 31st, 1999, we are still living in the shadows of the Y2K Era.

In Y2K, one of our most brilliant young critics Colette Shade offers a darkly funny meditation on everything from the pop culture to the political economy of the period. By close reading Y2K artifacts like the Hummer H2, Smash Mouth's "All Star," body glitter, AOL chatrooms, Total Request Live, and early internet porn, Shade produces an affectionate yet searing critique of a decade that started with a boom and ended with a crash.

In one essay Colette unpacks how hearing Ludacris's hit song "What's Your Fantasy" shaped a generation's sexual awakening; in another she interrogates how her eating disorder developed as rail-thin models from the collapsed USSR flooded the pages of Vogue; in another she reveals how the McMansion became an ominous symbol of the housing collapse.

Perfect for fans of Jia Tolentino and Chuck Klosterman, Y2K is the first book to fully reckon with the mixed legacy of the Y2K Era--a perfectly timed collection that holds a startling mirror to our past, present, and future.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063333949?ic_referral=Rj5iYs8MjMgaD36N2PY4vLcDcxEUShiteqhI_IPxxMYwM267U-7fH-jQYxv7dSC8gSLVNUhtI_UDLiT89uBohphbD1nz3lakCego62VayvoRTeq1bq6KwRNkoCAh7DfAbQnhJQ

Colette Shade's work has appeared in The New Republic, The Baffler, Interview Magazine, The Nation, and Gawker. Y2K is her first book.

Shade is in conversation with Rachel Vorona Cote. Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She has written essays and criticism for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Poetry Foundation, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Washington Post, and a number of other publications. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

*recorded 2/1/2025

During the civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, an estimated 20,000 children were forced to join the fighting. As villages were raided and youths rounded up, it was not uncommon for a child to be ordered to kill a friend, relative, or neighbor under threat of being killed themselves. The goal was to make it impossible for the captives to return home and be accepted back into their communities.

But when the conflict ended, many of the children did find their way home. Could they reintegrate after such extreme trauma? Theresa Betancourt and her collaborators in Sierra Leone launched a study of more than 500 boys and girls who had been pulled into the war, tracking them for over two decades. The results were surprising: despite everything they had suffered, this was not a lost generation. In fact, the most dominant trend over time was one of healing and increasing acceptance. The lives of the former child soldiers were shaped not just by their personal ordeals but also, crucially, by the responses of their families, peers, and broader communities. Filled with vivid personal stories, Shadows into Light describes heartbreak and despair but also remarkable triumphs made possible by layers of social support and encouragement.

Betancourt's study provides unparalleled insight into the long-term psychological and developmental effects of family separation, war, and exposure to violence. The lessons go far beyond Sierra Leone's tragedy, suggesting that we should, in general, think of children's risk and resilience more as products of the post-trauma environment than as individual traits.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780674251052?ic_referral=AZCl-dVmYuvW6t3QaSWVunt9ErZyVgiKBjfiwCxQOt4wMxx2uJ9bPuj7VKvfXMd7MfiRscCZtRvZwMYT2ZdG90Xo2NFgXZi7NXfRPZlia_7beBpiOtwTrVhOVe5NKtWLREdkzw

Theresa S. Betancourt is the inaugural Salem Professor in Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work and Director of the Research Program on Children and Adversity. She has been an advisor for UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, Amnesty International, the US Institute of Peace, and the World Health Organization, and served as an expert of the International Criminal Court.

*recorded 1/31/2025

In 1945 the United States and Japan fought the largest and most devastating land battle of their war in the Pacific, a month-long struggle for the city of Manila. The only urban fighting in the Pacific theater, the Battle of Manila was the third-bloodiest battle of World War II, behind Leningrad and Berlin. It was a key piece of the campaign to retake control of the Philippine Islands, which itself signified the culmination of the war, breaking the back of Japanese strategic power and sealing its outcome.

In The Battle of Manila, Nicholas Sarantakes offers the first in-depth account of this crucial campaign from the American, Japanese, and, significantly, Filipino perspective. Fighting was building by building, with both sides forced to adapt to the new combat environment. None of the U.S. units that entered Manila had any previous training in urban warfare--yet, Sarantakes shows, they learned on the fly how to use tanks, flamethrowers, air, and artillery assets in support of infantry assaults. Their effective use of these weapons was an important factor in limiting U.S. casualties, even as it may also have contributed to a catastrophic loss of civilian lives.

The battle was a strategic U.S. victory, but Sarantakes reveals how closely it hinged upon the interplay between a series of key decisions in both U.S. and Japanese headquarters, and a professional culture in the U.S. military that allowed the Americans to adapt faster and in more ways than their opponents. Among other aspects of the conflict, The Battle of Manila explores the importance of the Filipino guerillas on the ground, the use of irregular warfare, the effective use of intelligence, the impact of military education, and the limits of Japanese resistance.

Ultimately, Sarantakes shows Manila to be a major turning in both World War II and American history. Once the United States regained control of the city, Japan was in a checkmate situation. Their defeat was certain, and it was clear that the United States would be the dominate political power in post-war Asia and the Pacific. This fascinating account shines a light on one of the war's most under-represented and highly significant moments.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780199948857?ic_referral=svGD_Q9Dfkdjs8LrxqaJufQcizSssAjN4k5FB2URbvowMyraF8VVFGwwvJukiBFJe7YrX5xg5KoH3933eKlb3e6MReUeKp7sFJaJbkHMl-UvjIkVwGxsfsmHSLaLSgSnKWjkrA

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War. 

*recorded 2/6/2025

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller's Doctored shows that we've quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along--led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Piller begins with a whistleblower--Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag--whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize-rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller's revelations of Schrag's findings stunned the field and the public.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, Doctored exposes a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer's research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field's institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. It is a shocking tale with huge ramifications not only for Alzheimer's disease, but for scientific research, funding, and oversight at large.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668031247?ic_referral=iEoa5x2Y547-37zxPJcAwZgoSu6wS6oVvxzOYTMX9dYwM5Uqq9DgoXS_ieKHI56CyDIcKxN_pRLmn0k973YfNhRgsNe4MOmuHERffw7O4MkiL9pvOIIA4XSg8Dx419ASZjX2kg

Charles Piller is an investigative journalist for Science magazine and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Sacramento Bee, and more . Piller has been honored with many national journalism awards, and is the author of Gene Wars, The Fail-Safe Society, and Doctored. He has reported on public health, biological warfare, infectious disease outbreaks, and other topics from the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central America. Follow him on X @CPiller.

Piller is in conversation with Jenn White, an award-winning journalist and podcast host since 1999. White hosts 1A, a nationally syndicated daily news program from WAMU and NPR. She is also a familiar voice on several public radio podcasts, including Making Oprah, Making Obama and 16 Shots, which chronicled the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.”

In 1979, Loretta Ross was a single mother who'd had to drop out of Howard University. She was working at Washington, DC's Rape Crisis Center when she got a letter from a man in prison saying he wanted to learn how to not be a rapist anymore. At first, she was furious. As a survivor of sexual violence, she wanted to write back pouring out her rage. But instead, she made a different choice, a choice to reject the response her trauma was pushing her towards, a choice that set her on the path towards developing a philosophy that would come to guide her whole career: rather than calling people out, try to call even your unlikeliest allies in. Hold them accountable--but do so with love.

Calling In is at once a handbook, a manifesto, and a memoir--because the power of Loretta Ross's message comes from who she is and what she's lived through. She's a Black woman who's deprogrammed white supremacists, a survivor who's taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism. With stories from her five remarkable decades in activism, she vividly illustrates why calling people in--inviting them into conversation instead of conflict by focusing on your shared values over a desire for punishment--is the more strategic choice if you want to make real change. And she shows you how to do so, whether in the workplace, on a college campus, or in your living room.

Courageous, awe-inspiring, and blisteringly authentic, Calling In is a practical new solution from one of our country's most extraordinary change-makers--one anyone can learn to use to transform frustrating and divisive conflicts that stand in the way of real connection with the people in your life.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781982190798?ic_referral=tA0vPSfb1GjbqQBIg9YltU7fwtCRPD8gsj9ffysnvYYwM99JfQghA5t_gWRT9nnWHcN4bUBB_IUNRnlfJAEBQ8mZFrKhYvmt-t2hxijz-wQ5pLXI19qhRe9gjDpgVjVxseRDJA

Loretta J. Ross is an activist, professor, and public intellectual. In her five decades in the human rights movement, she’s deprogramed white supremacists, taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism, and organized the second-largest march on Washington (surpassed only by the 2017 Women’s March). A cofounder of the National Center for Human Rights Education and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, her many accolades and honors include a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2024 induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Today, Ross is an associate professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is the founder of LoRossta Consulting, with which she  runs “Calling In” training sessions online and for organizations around the country.

Ross is in conversation with Adriane Fugh-Berman MD. Fugh-Berman is a  Professor in the Department of  Pharmacology and Physiology and also  the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. Trained as a physician, Dr. Fugh-Berman co-directs the M.S. program in  Health and the Public Interest, which aims to train advocates for a better health care system,  and directs PharmedOut, a research and education project at Georgetown that promotes rational prescribing and exposes unethical pharmaceutical marketing practices. She has a long history with the women's health movement, primarily with the National Women's Health Network. 

Certain as I've never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna--these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a "pious mama" donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister--who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years--in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781644453193?ic_referral=dOU6-E-o2D92pOyJOraiEgc7VFoxBzqn1enrKJ_2D9IwM3gB4fTKt1mNdxlXynGEiyM97z0uXikLIJZI8B_wH2jv2e4iPO9Q4S62vIJT0cfh7fpO9OCcM0GQdWfbtQH_JYjPdg

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

Rakha is in conversation with Eman Quotah, the author of Bride of the Sea, winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her next book, a folklore inspired horror novel, is forthcoming in the US and the UK in fall 2025. She serves on the board of RAWI, an organization that supports writers of Southwest Asian and North African heritage.

It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms "carceral apartheid." Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. 
Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques, including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists, to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781469683409?ic_referral=lnITWR70V93OOgz1B_kcpwSkw5-63v5eHsCOXJ0J9OgwM5OhNR5H5zl64ysB8cQ9Qq-0J3hhDtPalyoi61WLWV5cU6KtiBPglviqbJjBxYLYD21DEEMA7PtM5oNZY86JAC1Xjg

Brittany Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.

Friedman is in conversation with DeRay Mckesson, the Executive Director of Campaign Zero, a social justice organization leading nationwide structural change to create equity and justice in our criminal legal system. Born and raised in Baltimore, MD, he is a key leader in the Ferguson Uprising in 2014 and a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter Movement and frequently appears on national and cable programs and a range of publications to advocate for commonsense policies and tools that ensure and scale equity. 

*recorded 2/2/2025