Live at Politics and Prose

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Asma T. Uddin: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 19, 2019

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A religious liberties lawyer, founding editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com, and executive producer for the docuseries, The Secret Life of Muslims, Uddin has devoted her career to defending people of all faiths. In recent years, however, along with a trend toward secularizing and politicizing faith in general, she has seen an increase in attempts to criminalize Islam. In this timely and important book, Uddin intertwines legal arguments with her own experience, showing how a loss of religious liberties for one group affects all the rest, and proposing ways individuals and communities can preserve this valuable constitutional right. Uddin is in conversation with Michelle Boorstein, religion reporter for The Washington Post.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781643131313

Michael Bennet: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 12, 2019

Show notes

Bennet has represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate since 2009, earning a reputation as an independent thinker and a pragmatic centrist. In his closely observed analysis of today’s dysfunctional political landscape, he focuses on five key issues: the process for appointing judges, the recent tax cuts, the demise of the Iran nuclear agreement, the role of big money in politics, and immigration policies, examining each to illustrate exactly how and why partisan gridlock is undermining government. As he shows how much we’ve lost due to hyper-partisan politics, Bennet proposes specific ways we can re-establish a collaborative approach geared to helping all Americans rather than to benefiting one political party.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780802147813

Carl Hulse: Live at Politics and Prose Jul 05, 2019

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Chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Hulse has covered legislative and judicial events for more than three decades. His important new book is a deeply reported account of the struggle over the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016. Drawing on exclusive interviews with key figures including MitchMcConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, Hulse traces the polarizing political battle that began with Senate Republicans’ refusal to grant a hearing to Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and concluded with the confirmation in April 2017 of Trump’s candidate, Neil M. Gorsuch. Putting this episode in the larger context of governmental paralysis, Hulse traces the judicial wars of the last twenty year and charts the loss of bipartisan procedures across all three federal branches.

Hulse is in conversation with Maureen Dowd, op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780062862914

Anna Fifield: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 28, 2019

Show notes

Fifield, Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post and former Seoul correspondent for the Financial Times, has visited North Korea a dozen times, becoming one of our most knowledgeable journalists on that cryptic nation. In her new book she draws on her experience and connections to penetrate the layers of myth and propaganda surrounding Kim Jong Un. Granted exclusive access to Kim’s inner circle—including the aunt and uncle who posed as his parents while he was growing up in Switzerland, members of the entourage that accompanied Dennis Rodman on his visits, and the Japanese sushi chef who pointed to Kim as the most likely successor to his father—Fifield gives a detailed and insightful portrait of one of the world’s most secretive dictators.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781541742482

Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 21, 2019

Show notes

In his debut collection of stories, the creator and executive producer of the hit show BoJack Horseman—named by Thrillist magazine Netflix’s best original show ever—applies his distinctive dark humor to the mysteries of love. Combining romance, whimsy, and sharp cultural commentary, Bob-Waksberg plunges into the world of lonely commuters looking for—and failing to find—connections; follows a couple whose wedding plans founder on their relatives’ argument over how many goats to sacrifice; and maps a woman’s history of romantic failure by the sites she visited with her exes. Quirky and surreal, these pieces are as wryly insightful as they are hilariously entertaining.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524732011

Ocean Vuong: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 14, 2019

Show notes

Like the stunning poems of his collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong’s kaleidoscopic first novel speaks from the heart of multi-generational PTSD, charting the fate of a Vietnamese-American family struggling to settle into life in Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong frames his novel as a letter from Little Dog, a young gay writer, to his mother. The only one of his family fluent in English, Little Dog sees language as the key to belonging in America, and his determination to record all he knows of his relatives’ lives infuses his every word with life-or-death urgency. Along with stories of his mother and grandmother, he recounts his own coming-of-age as a gay man, becoming a moving elegy to his first lover—dead of an overdose at 22. Vuong is in conversation with Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525562023

Eve Ensler: Live at Politics and Prose Jun 07, 2019

Show notes

Ensler is a Tony-award winning playwright, author, performer, and activist, best-known for The Vagina Monologues, which examined consensual and nonconsensual sex, reproduction, sex work, body image, and other issues from the perspectives of women of various ages, races, and sexualities. Premiering in 1996, this groundbreaking performance piece has been published in nearly fifty languages and performed in more than 140 countries. Its popularity helped Ensler found V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. In her powerful new memoir, Ensler writes the apology she never received from her abusive father, attempting to transform the experience into a revolutionary call for courage, honesty, and forgiveness.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781635574388

Simon Tam: Live at Politics and Prose May 31, 2019

Show notes

Tam founded his Asian-American dance rock band, The Slants, in 2006. Known for their community activism, the band dedicated itself to overturning stereotypes—a mission that started with the name, which refers not only to individual perspectives and guitar chords, but to Asian ethnic identity. Seeking to reclaim this derogatory term as a badge of pride, Tam applied to register “Slant” as a trademark. When the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected his application, Tam pursued his case to the Supreme Court—where he won a unanimous victory in 2017. In this spirited and inspiring memoir of his fight for free speech, Tam reflects on questions of identity as he moves from anime conventions and cultural festivals all the way through the U.S. legal system.

Tam is in conversation with Robert Barnes, reporter for The Washington Post covering the U.S. Supreme Court.

Casey Cep: Live at Politics and Prose May 24, 2019

Show notes

After writing To Kill a Mockingbird and helping her lifelong friend Truman Capote research In Cold Blood, the late Harper Lee set to work on a true-crime book of her own. Never completed, the work was based on the case of Willie Maxwell, a rural Alabama preacher accused of killing five members of his family in the 1970s. Lee spent a year in Maxwell’s town reporting on the story, which took a further turn when Maxwell was shot at the funeral of his last victim, and his killer, despite many witnesses, was acquitted. Drawing on Lee’s research papers and some fifty of her unpublished letters, Cep offers a detailed portrait of the reclusive writer’s working methods, including her struggles with drinking; recounts a fascinating real-life Southern Gothic; and gives us a tantalizing glimpse of the book that might have been.

https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/casey-cep-furious-hours-murder-fraud-and-last-trial-of-harper-lee

George Packer: Live at Politics and Prose May 17, 2019

Show notes

Packer’s biography of Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) is also the story of the United States from the Vietnam War, where Holbrooke gained his first experience as an advisor, to the conflict in Afghanistan, which Holbrooke, by then a seasoned diplomat, sought to end. For both the man and the nation, the period was a series of crises, frustrations, and victories that showcased both strength and heedless self-confidence. Drawing on Holbrooke’s journals and letters, diaries of key government officials, and interviews with figures including Hillary Clinton, Hamid Karzai, David Petraeus, and Bosnian war criminals, Packer, an Atlantic staff writer and author of the National Book Award-winning Unwinding, not only portrays a brilliant and complicated man but shows how his ideas and temperament helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780307958020

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