The Growing Scandal of $TRUMP
May 28, 2025•Episode #770
Copy link to episode
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Author: Rick Perlstein
ISBN 13: 978-0743243032
“Perlstein...aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.” — Los Angeles Times “Both brilliant and fun, a consuming journey back into the making of modern politics.” —Jon Meacham “ Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know—American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972—into an often-surprising and always-fascinating new narrative.” —Jeffrey Toobin Rick Perlstein’s bestselling account of how the Nixon era laid the groundwork for the political divide that marks our country today. Told with vivid urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America’s turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency of the United States. Perlstein’s epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson’s historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how it all happened confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman
ISBN 13: 978-0345349576
A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.” — The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.” — The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.” —Commentary
Gretel and the Great War

Gretel and the Great War

Author: Adam Ehrlich Sachs
ISBN 13: 978-0374614249
A New Yorker best book of 2024 | One of Bloomberg 's nine best books of summer 2024 "Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." ― The New Yorker "Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." ―Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review "Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." ―Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna. Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down―and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world―soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars―was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?
by @zachbellay