The Ezra Klein Show

The Art of the Deal.

Walk, Ride, Paddle is Tim Kaine's book about when he walked the Appalachian Trail, paddled the James River, and then did some other bike ride across Virginia. Tim Kaine, your Senate colleague, did all that? It's a very fun book. And he's just such a lovely man.

It's like a travel book, but it's, you know, it sort of intersperses what was happening at the time, politically, including, you know, two impeachments and the rest of it.

I'm reading The Very Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Sar. Very interesting book.

And then maybe it's just me nostalgic, whatever as a young guy, Razor's Edge. I still go back to Mom's Razor's Edge.

So it starts, there's a book which I preview, will recommend later by a political scientist named Samuel Popkin, and it's called The Reasoning Voter.

The Reasoning Voter goes through a huge amount of evidence and data and kind of a theoretical way to think about people who don't think about politics much, which no listener to this podcast are members of that club.

It's a book called Finding Freedom, The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Freedom Seeker, by Ruby West Jackson and Walter McDonald.

It tells the story of a man who escaped slavery in Missouri, came to Wisconsin on the Underground Railroad, was detained in Milwaukee, then rescued in a riot, escaped to Canada, and led to a state Supreme Court decision that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional.

The second book ... is a book by Elizabeth Newman called Kingdom of Rage and Elizabeth, who's a former counterterrorism official, she writes really beautifully and eloquently about the threat of domestic terrorism and specifically looking at rightwing Christian nationalism.

I've been reading Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography... it's phenomenal. So The Path to Power by Robert Caro would be one.

And finally, for those with kids, a wonderful bedtime read aloud called The Green Ember... it is about rabbits fighting with swords.

if you read Chip Wars, which is I think the best book on this, the semiconductor supply chain is just extraordinarily complicated and fragile.

Since I just sort of alluded to Hubert Humphrey, I'm going to recommend first a great book, Into the Bright Sunshine, Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. It's by Samuel G. Friedman. And it is basically a biography of Hubert Humphrey up until the 1948 Democratic Convention, when he maneuvers with the Americans for Democratic Action to put a civilrights plank into the Democratic Party platform.

A second book is Wide Awake, The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. This is about the Wide Awakes, a kind of quasimilitary force of young men who were ardent Lincoln partisans in the 1860 election. And it's a book very much about the Republican Party of that era, by John Grinspan, and it's a lot of fun to read.