The Ezra Klein Show

And I was hoping we could start with a poem from your book The Carrying called The Raincoat.

I think another book, which I just started rereading, is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, not because it sort of answers these big picture questions ... but because it's a character portrait of one man's role in a vast machinery of horrifying political outcomes.

I got this email that Offerman had a new book coming out called Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.

and in the book, too, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, moving firewood around and rebuilding a farm and it's all there.

the first part of the book is a long hike you take with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and George Saunders, the author.

the book I started with is called Fidelity. It's a collection of short stories.

The other book, since I won't count the prize, I think many of your listeners might enjoy reading Bill Gates' How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. ... it's a lot about technology, but it's also practical in the way, it's sort of empowering ... describing ways everybody can contribute.

Victory Lab by Sasha Eisenberg. You know, it kind of talks a lot about, you know, the history of the democratic analytics industry. A lot of the stuff that these numbers that I've shared here kind of come out of that machine.

And the third I would say is a novel written by Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, which I really think is one of the best novels I've ever read. It is this epic story of generations of the descendants of two sisters from Ghana, the impact of violence and enslavement and multigenerational trauma. And it's really also a story of hope and survival.

His 2020 book, The WEIRDest People in the World, takes that argument and extends it, arguing that beginning sometime in the middle ages, certain cultural and really religious shifts radically transformed the psychologies of individuals living in Europe.

She is an expert on authoritarianism, both in its past and present forms, and the author of a new book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

The first book I'd recommend is from my friend Jonathan Karl ... it's called Tired of Winning and it's just a terrific psychological window into Donald Trump in exile after January 6th, after leaving office when he'd become a pariah.

I love Tim Miller's book, Why We Did It. Tim Miller is a longtime Republican operative who basically wrote about his journey to disenchantment in the Trump years.

Well, I'd start with All The King's Men. This is an old one by Robert Penn Warren, and there's lots in it about party conventions and all the dealmaking that goes on.