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Congo Stories: Live at Politics and Prose Dec 21, 2018

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In Congo Stories, John Prendergast and Fidel Bafilemba reveal how the people of Congo are fighting back against a tidal wave of international exploitation and governmental oppression to make things better for their nation, their communities, and their families. The book contains stunning photographs taken by actor Ryan Gosling, Bafilemba's profiles of heroic Congolese activists, and Prendergast's narratives of the extraordinary history and evolving social movements that directly link the Congo with the United States and Europe. Congo Stories provides windows into the history, the people, the challenges, the possibilities, and the movements that could change the course of Congo's destiny. JOHN PRENDERGAST is a New York Times bestselling author who founded and runs both the Enough Project and The Sentry. FIDEL BAFELIMBA is a Congolese field researcher who coordinates a civil society network called GATT-RN. RYAN GOSLING is an actor and filmmaker. CHOUCHOU NAMEGABE is a Congolese journalist and activist, who founded and directs AFEM – South Kivu Women’s Media Association https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781455584642 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Live at Politics and Prose Dec 14, 2018

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Expanding on her August 12, 2017 New York Times op-ed, Ghodsee looks at all facets of American women’s lives—relationships, parenting, work, politics—showing how each is harmed by unregulated capitalism and how a socialist model could improve the situation. A skilled ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European studies, Ghodsee has spent years studying the impact of the shift from socialism on women. Her witty, engaging, and utterly serious analysis finds that socialism provides better labor conditions, leads to greater economic independence, and improves the work-life balance so many Western women struggle with. As discussion around sexual harassment and assault grows and women turn to Bernie Sanders and new kinds of leader in his wake, Ghodsee shows how adapting socialist ideas can take us all closer to a fair and equal society. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781568588902 Kristen R. Ghodsee has her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written six books on gender, socialism, and post-socialism in Eastern Europe, examining the everyday experiences of upheaval and displacement that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Ghodsee also writes on women's issues for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work-Family Balance in Academia. Her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Eurozine, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, and the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elaine Pagels: Live at Politics and Prose Dec 07, 2018

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When Pagels, author of groundbreaking studies of the Gnostic Gospels, was asked, “Why religion?" she found that her own life illuminates both why she’s made a career of studying religious texts as well as why religion itself still exists in the supposedly secular 21st-century. The daughter and wife of scientists, Pagels was taught to trust the rational, but she found herself attracted to religious music and rituals for how they engaged the imagination. After the loss of her five-year-old son in 1987, followed by her husband’s death in an accident in 1988, Pagels turned to religion for help in facing her grief and anger. Interweaving the fascinating scholarship behind books such The Origin of Satan and Revelations with her own experiences, Pagels’s memoir is as emotionally affecting as it is thought-provoking. Pagels is in conversation with Dr. Eric Motley, executive vice president at the Aspen Institute and author of the memoir Madison Park. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780062368539 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bernie Sanders: Live at Politics and Prose Nov 30, 2018

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Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign was a beginning, not an ending. In Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance, New York Times bestselling author Bernie Sanders chronicles the day-by-day struggles that he and his progressive colleagues have waged over the last two years in the fight against Donald Trump’s agenda and for a government that works for all. The good news is, progressive voices are making significant strides. Where We Go From Here shows how citizens all across America are standing up to the Trump government. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781250163264 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Gethard: Live at Politics and Prose Nov 23, 2018

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The key to success, Gethard says, is failure. He knows this from experience. While he’s now the host of his own truTV talk show and the weekly podcast Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People, he also suffered the humiliation of having his Comedy Central sitcom cancelled after just seven episodes. But he didn’t just bounce back from this and other missteps. Rather, he used the frustrations and disappointments as tools to discover who he really is, what he most wants, and how he could get it. As he shows in this engaging and funny collection of stories, failure is inevitable and it’s also empowering—a necessary, if messy, step to the better things we can be. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780062691415 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Halliday: Live at Politics and Prose Nov 16, 2018

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Halliday’s debut novel was one of the literary events of the year, earning uniformly rave reviews and a place on innumerable bestseller lists. Now available in paperback, the narrative ingeniously combines two starkly different narratives to give us a startling view of today’s world. The book starts with Alice, a young editor and writer in New York, and her relationship with an older, established novelist, a character based on Philip Roth. In the second section, Halliday turns to Amar, an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers at Heathrow as he’s en route to see his brother in Kurdistan. How these two stories are related is the subject of the book’s stunning conclusion. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501166785 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kiese Laymon: Live at Politics and Prose Nov 09, 2018

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Laymon’s novel, Long Division, was named to several Best Of lists in 2013 and his collection of autobiographical essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, showed him as a powerful social and cultural commentator. In his new memoir, he expands on the experiences he discussed in his earlier works, talking bluntly and honestly about growing up with racism, income disparity, addiction, eating disorders, and a complicated mother-son dynamic. Often directly addressing his mother—a divorced, impoverished woman who became a political science professor at Jackson State—Laymon makes his story immediate and vivid, from his problems with weight, ostracism, violence, and gambling to his views on women and politics. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501125652 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David W. Blight: Live at Politics Nov 02, 2018

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Blight, the award-winning author of histories including American Oracle and Race and Reunion, is perhaps the foremost Frederick Douglass scholar at work today. He’s edited the annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies, and he draws on this close work and on newly discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers and other documents for this definitive biography. An escaped slave, Douglass (1818-1895) became a leading abolitionist, an outstanding orator, and one of the most prominent literary figures of his time. Blight looks in detail at Douglass’s speeches and examines his complicated views of a country he both loved and severely criticized. He follows Douglass on his overseas lecture tours and illuminates the complicated thinking behind the three versions of Douglass’s autobiography. He also discusses Douglass’s two marriages, his relationships with members of his extended family, and parses his religious beliefs. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781416590316 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Traister: Live at Politics and Prose Oct 26, 2018

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Rebecca Traister is one of today’s most powerful feminist voices. She’s written about women in politics, media, popular culture, and at home, exploring the rise of single women in her bestselling All the Single Ladies and the 2008 Democratic primary in Big Girls Don’t Cry. In Good and Mad, she dives deep into the history and value of female rage, reminding us that women’s anger was a force to be reckoned with long before the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement. She tracks the importance of female anger as political fuel, and deconstructs society’s negative reactions to women who dare to get mad. Traister is in conversation with Fatima Goss Graves, the president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501181795 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Casey Gerald: Live at Politics and Prose Oct 19, 2018

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Gerald’s extraordinary memoir cuts a swath through a dizzying number of socio-cultural sectors, enacting an American dream that questions the very assumptions behind it. Growing up in Dallas, Gerald was immersed in his grandfather’s evangelical church, a source of stability when his mother’s disability checks could barely support the family. When he was recruited to play football for Yale, Gerald’s life changed. But as he moved up, earning a Harvard MBA, he was shocked by the disparity between his old life and his new one. Writing with force and eloquence, humor and outrage, he questions the meanings of power and success, illuminating the ideals that caused his Harvard Business School commencement speech to go viral and made him, at barely thirty, one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business.” Gerald is in conversation with Dr. Matthew D. Morrison, Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and former Editor-in-Chief of the music journal Current Musicology. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780735214200 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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