Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Lies That Bind
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWe all know how identities—notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion—are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales—from Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who became an eminent European academic, to Italo Svevo, the literary genius who changed countries without leaving home—and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us. The concept of the sovereign nation, Appiah shows us, is incoherent. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded science; the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. These beliefs, and more, are crafted from confusions—confusions Appiah sorts through to imagine a more hopeful future.
Kwame Anthony Appiah pens the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and is the author of the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism, among many other works. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah lives in New York.