The Ezra Klein Show

Smith's life's book is Bread of Angels, which, like Just Kids, is a memoir, but spans a much wider range of her life. And it's much more personal in a way, much more experiential.

We waged the fever of disappointment, the realization that yesterday's crumbling tower was not a fantasy, that like the Prince of Aquitaine, one is hurled and drawn like a human tarot card.

My first memory of a book was I was fascinated with this red book my mother had. It had red silk binding and gold stamping. And I was about three and I hid it under my pillow because I thought if I slept on it, it would come into my head what was in it.

And it was my grandfather's book called Fox's Book of Martyrs.

Pinocchio was very important to me because I knew I was a wayward kid. I wasn't always doing what I was supposed to do. I wasn't evil, but I didn't always do what I was supposed to.

So I'm still working on it [writing a book as good as Pinocchio].

And I love Peter Pan, of course, because I didn't want to grow up. And so that was hope of a new place, Neverland, where you didn't have to grow up.

When I wanted to write, but really wasn't sure if I could ever write, reading Little Women, of course, Joe March was an early hero, a girl who wrote. A girl like me was sort of a tomboy who didn't like the fuss and feathers of being a girl and wanted to be a writer.

Yes, like you, there was the German versions of Grimm's fairy tales that were very grim. That is literally the book I'm talking about. Very grim, very dark. But I also accepted them as what they were, fairy tales.

One is Furious Minds. It's a new book by Laura K. Field, which is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right, and how they justify, explain, rationalize things that are going on, give arguments for it.

And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It's called Prophets of Deceit, Techniques of the American Agitator. And it's by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. And it's an extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of anti-Semitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States.

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively, they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do.

This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties.

The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining.

In 1962, Bernard Crick, a political theorist and a Democratic Socialist, published this strange little book called In Defense of Politics.

Politics for Crick is something precious and specific. It, quote, arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under common rule.

In my favorite line of his book, Crick writes, Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people. Not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy. Genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people.

He calls it a pearl beyond price. It writes, the moral consensus of a free state is not something mysteriously prior to or above politics. It is the activity, the civilizing activity of politics itself.

It built towards Liberalism's great insight, what Edmund Fawcett in his book, Liberalism, The Life of an Idea, calls Liberalism's first idea. Conflict of interests and beliefs was to the liberal mind inescapable. If tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order, conflict could nevertheless bear fruit as argument, experiment, and exchange.

He is the author of the newsletter, It's Noon in Israel, and of a new book recently published in English, A Call at 4 a.m., 13 Prime Ministers and the Crucial Decisions that Shaped Israeli Politics.

The first is The Accidental President about President Truman's first four months by A.J. Bame, I think. Great book.

And the third is a book in Hebrew and it's a book written by my father. It's called Messiah in Sdebo Kerr. It's about David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was the founding father of Israel, a mixture of George Washington and I don't know, Thomas Jefferson.

And then I'd also recommend A Grief Observed, which is by him also. It's like a really nice read on grief.

Susan Morrison has a book called Lorne, which is about Lorne Michaels in the history of Center Live, which is great

This book by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol called Rust Belt Union Blues, which talks about the hollowing out of associational life and in the Rust Belt and the ways that's affected the move to the right in those areas.

Another one is this beautiful book that's a few years old now called We're Still Here by Jennifer Silva, which looks at working class life in Northeast Pennsylvania and just shows the utter disillusionment that working class people have with all institutions.

And then I guess for something different, I just read a fantastic tour de force history of the 500 years of Latin American and U.S. political and economic development by the historian Greg Grandin. It's called America America.

You mentioned that the floodgates on this open up with Trump...and the Grossman Hopkins book, The Diploma Divide, which is great.