Stay Tuned with Preet

It's called In Hoffa's Shadow, A Stepfather, A Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth.

And what makes it fascinating, we'll get into it in some detail shortly, is that it's a book about law and about crime, but also personal to you.

It's a book about law and about crime, but also personal to you.

So, Jimmy Hoffa was the leader of the Teamsters Union, truckers, warehouse workers and others which was the largest union in the nation, almost a couple of million people in the 50s and 60s.

And then very famously and very mysteriously on the afternoon of July 30th, 1975, he was in a parking lot outside a suburban Detroit restaurant waiting for a meeting with a few mobsters and he disappeared and nobody knows what happened to him.

But I came to a book party of yours back in Washington, I guess in 2005? Seven, I think. The Terror Presidency.

Bernstein and Woodward would go on to chronicle their search for truth and the end of the Nixon presidency in the bestselling books All the President's Men and The Final Days.

And then you wrote a shorter book called This America, the case for the nation.

We think of that as these little truths around my house. Yeah. Yeah, one could be... is one a sequel of the other? This America is in some ways a digest of an argument that's implied and These Truths, it's not an excerpt of it, it's a standalone. It was not your way of getting around the 1,000 page limit.

In this little book, This America, I talk about the long history of liberal nationalism and the tendency of nationalism always to become illiberal.

And I read quite fascinating biography of Bryan called A Godly Hero that Michael Kazin, who's the editor of Dissent, wrote a few years ago.

And Lippman kind of got to the heart of what he saw as the problem with the Scopes trial.

Josh Green had just published a book on Bannon, Devil's Disciple. I read that too. More Problems Because of Literacy.

I learned from Joshua Green's book that Bannon's favorite movie was Twelve O'Clock High, which I had never seen.

It's called The Art of Being Right.

So Schopenhauer in his first paragraph kindly tells us, there are two ways to win an argument. There's logic and there's dialectic. Well, everybody knows you can never win an argument through logic, so let's move quickly on to dialectic. And he proceeds to give you 36 ways to win an argument any way you can. And they're really, really funny.

There's this wonderful novel, Motherless Brooklyn, written by Jonathan Lethem, who was coming up in Brooklyn as a writer when I was coming up as an actor in New York.

And I said, look, I, I feel like your book, it feels like the 50s. And what would you think about putting it in the 50s?

He's a person who has enormous capacities. He's smart. He's loyal to his family. But he has a real flaw, which is he's dominated by his rage.

I think that to me, the political dimensions of this to me, ultimately, you've always got to know what you're actually trying to say emotionally.

And when you create that effect, you can take people on a journey in which they're rooting for this person. They are enjoying watching them navigate the world within their unique kind of, you know, in this character.

It got to the point where I was a heroin addict.

It got about as bad as it could get. I honestly thought that I was not put together correctly and I lost hope for myself. I thought something was intrinsically wrong with me.

I sort of was living my life like, unfortunately I'm broken and I'm going to live my life and come what may. But somewhere along the way that changed. And if it can change for me, it can change for anyone.

I can't go back in time and change what's happened. The choices and decisions I've made are what they are. But what I can do is try to take all that and turn it into something useful for people and families that are struggling with addiction, that feel like they've lost hope.

I feel that my family is included where their lives affect mine. Really, the purpose was not to write a book about my family. It was to write a book about, you know, my journey and what I've taken from it. And hopefully by laying it out in the way that I have, honestly, I feel like that's the best way to connect with people that are also going through some difficult times.

You remember maybe from my true American book that was one of the striking observations that race made about his employee, his colleagues at the Olive Garden.

And it took me to, just the reporting took me to parts of this country that shocked me. And these were not, you know, urban communities that we hear about on the news. These were not inner cities. These were not black and brown people. These were not the kinds of communities that we are told in our media are supposed to be failing.

I was writing a book, doing the research for a book that became The Bridge, which is a biography of Obama.

Her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, catalogs a journey from Ireland to America, how she became a journalist, then a full-time humanitarian activist and ended up at the White House.

Congratulations on your book. Was it hard?

So hard. But that's not your first book. You've written other books, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Samantha Power, thank you for being on the show and thank you for this important and powerful book, The Education of an Idealist, a Memoir.

Thank you, Preet. Thank you for your ongoing service.

I said to McConnell that I had a book coming out it's called The Land of Flickering Lights and that he wouldn't like it because it was pretty tough on him.

And then I said come to think of it Mitch you're the only person in the Senate that will actually like my book because I write things in it like Mitch McConnell is immune to give and take unless he's taking action.

He's also an author of several books, including a volume on presidential rhetoric, the history of the Second Amendment and the fight for voting rights.

He's also an author of several books, including a volume on presidential rhetoric, the history of the Second Amendment and the fight for voting rights.

And read from the book. And read from the book. Story about a goat, I think.

His most recent book is The Conservative Sensibility and does not mention the current president at all.

I've been thinking about this stuff since--well, all the time in Washington since I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Princeton on the problem.

It was called Beyond the Reach of Majorities.

And I grew up in central Illinois where we worried about Lincoln and the Kansas-Savraska Act and all the rest.

So I thought it's time to put this down also, obviously, to speak about the elephant in the room. Conservatism has lost--at least as I understand it, has lost the allegiance of the party which was the vessel of conservatism for--actually since Goldwater when it became an ideologically conservative party.

At about that time, in 1962, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom.

Frederick Hayek had just published through the University of Chicago Press his great book, The Constitution of Liberty.