The NPR Politics Podcast

where once as a kid, I played Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

When it came out in 1843, A Christmas Carol was a sensation. And Charles Dickens became a legend. Some people would consider him the originator of Christmas or the inventor of Christmas. The past, present, and future of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

something colloquially called The Big Sort, which was a phrase coined by the author Bill Bishop... And this has only escalated since Bishop's book came out.

has a book coming out, a book about her getting into politics and her vision and all of that, pretty classic politician thing to do. It's called No Going Back.

Unfortunately for her, she included an anecdote in the book that is just like political poison.

Noem wrote a pretty graphic story in her new book about killing the family dog named Cricket. She said that it was untrainable, dangerous to anyone who came in contact with it and quote, I hated that dog.

She then writes, it was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.

She wrote about it in her book herself. She did.

Okay, pop quiz. Which Shakespearean work was that from? Oh, no. That is, I think, Hamlet.

Yeah, I'm thinking Jurassic Park, but I know that's just a, I shouldn't be thinking that because it's not like 1995.

Mothers and daughters, daughters and mothers. We explore the generational divide on our latest episode of Books We've Loved about Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

We are now in spooky season. And on this week's episode of Books We've Loved, we discuss all things Interview with the Vampire with NPR's Barry Hardiman.

He was really known for his book, The Celluloid Closet. That was really one of the first books that showed hidden gay content and hidden gay messages in mainstream cinema.

They include a book by David French called Divided We Fall.

Ezra Klein's book Why We're Polarized is about this.

have you seen the movie Leave the World Behind On Netflix, which is by the way produced by Barack and Michelle Obama

journalist Andrea Bernstein (author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power).

Fire and Fury, which was the first big one by Michael Wolff, set a template for some of these books whereby it became this contest for like who had the craziest, you know, oh my God anecdote about what Trump had said or done.

City of Thieves. I don't know this book before but apparently it's a 250 plus page novel set in Leningrad during World War II. Uplifting bedtime stories right there.

my favorite part of this was the process of reading it this book aloud, City of Thieves would take by moderate estimates five hours. Oh my god. It could even take more like seven.

There's Josh Hawley, who's written a whole book called Manhood.

the memoir comes out on Tuesday I believe it's called The Room Where It Happened shout out to all the Hamilton fans out there

what are the biggest revelations in the book?

One of the most eyecatching allegations is that Trump allegedly tried to get help from the Chinese president in the November election. Bolton says the president pleaded with his Chinese counterpart to buy American agricultural products to help him with the very important farmers in the vote.

Bolton writes that the president's relationship with foreign leaders was just transactional and most of it was based on how it could help President Trump.

He's called Bolton a sick puppy. He said that the book is both full of classified information and lies.

boosting attention for a book that's now at the top of the best seller list in Amazon

John Dickerson, who is a CBS correspondent, he also wrote a book about presidential power called The Hardest Job in the World. And he made the point that campaigning promises are very different than governing and governing is very hard.

A book like Jill Lepore's These Truths is a book that shows how failing to live up to our selfevident truths of the Declaration is a constant feature of America, is a constant shortcoming.

From Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins and based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, the new Amazon original The Underground Railroad chronicles Cora Randall played by newcomer Tuso Mbedu. When she discovers an actual network of trains and tunnels beneath the southern soil, Cora must evade a violent bounty hunter before she can find freedom.