The Road To Now Podcast: Featured Books From RTN Guests
We interview a lot of brilliant authors on The Road to Now and this is a list of our guests' books available on audio through libro.fm! It's a great deal—you can finally read that book you've been meaning to read at the same time you support the authors, our podcast, and your local bookstore! Want to go back through our list of guests? Subscribe to The Road to Now on your favorite podcast provider or check out our episodes at www.TheRoadToNow.com!
Dopesick
Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
By Beth Macy
Narrated by Beth Macy / 10 hours 16 minutes
Dopesick
“Dopesick should be required reading for ages 14 and up. Detailed, devastating, and infuriating, Dopesick tells how big Pharma, and Purdue specifically, is responsible for the addiction and deaths of thousands of Americans. If you think addication can't happen to you or those you love, this book will give you story after story of people who felt the same way, then had to say goodbye to those they love. Incredible non-fiction, read by the author whose voice conveys her passion on the subject matter.”
Mary, Anderson's Bookshop
The Half Has Never Been Told
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
By Edward E. Baptist
Narrated by Ron Butler / 19 hours 47 minutes
In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their... Read more »
Citizen Coke
The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism
By Bartow J. Elmore
Narrated by William Hughes / 11 hours 22 minutes
Coke’s insatiablethirst for resources shapes the company and reshapes the globe in thisabsorbing history.
Coca-Cola’s success in building a global empire out ofsugary water drew on more than a secret formula and brilliant advertising. Thereal secret to Coke’s success was its strategy, from the beginning, to offloadproduction costs and risks onto... Read more »
Back Channel to Cuba
The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana
By Peter Kornbluh & William M. LeoGrande
Narrated by Robertson Dean / 20 hours 19 minutes
Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top-secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year... Read more »
The Fall of the Ottomans
The Great War in the Middle East
By Eugene Rogan
Narrated by Derek Perkins / 17 hours 25 minutes
In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French... Read more »
From Here to Eternity
Traveling the World to find the Good Death
By Caitlin Doughty
Narrated by Caitlin Doughty / 5 hours 37 minutes
The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with "dignity." Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body.... Read more »
The Liberal Redneck Manifesto
Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark
By Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan & Corey Ryan Forrester
Narrated by Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan & Corey Ryan Forrester / 8 hours 26 minutes
The Liberal Rednecks—a Southern-based stand-up comedy group known for their scathing political satire—celebrate all that’s good about Dixie while leading a progressive revolution toward a New South.
The American South is home to some of the best music, cuisine, athletics, whiskey, and weather the country has to offer, but its reputation as a... Read more »
Talk Radio’s America
How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States
By Brian Rosenwald
Narrated by Christopher Grove / 12 hours 10 minutes
The cocreator of the Washington Post's Made by History blog reveals how the rise of conservative talk radio gave us a Republican Party incapable of governing and paved the way for Donald Trump. Radio hosts form a deep bond with their audience, which gives them enormous political power. Unlike elected representatives, however, they must entertain... Read more »
The Death of Expertise
The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
By Tom Nichols
Narrated by Sean Pratt / 8 hours 40 minutes
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows... Read more »
Saving America's Cities
Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
By Lizabeth Cohen
Narrated by Keith Sellon-Wright / 16 hours 23 minutes
Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public... Read more »
Floating Coast
An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
By Bathsheba Demuth
Narrated by Christa Lewis / 12 hours 30 minutes
The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in... Read more »
A Consumers' Republic
The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
By Lizabeth Cohen
Narrated by Karen White / 21 hours 41 minutes
In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became... Read more »
How to Hide an Empire
A History of the Greater United States
By Daniel Immerwahr
Narrated by Luis Moreno / 17 hours 25 minutes
How to Hide an Empire
“A hilarious sparkler of historical quirks burns down to a dangerous fuse of tampering, territory, and transnational economics in this history of the USA not as the nation you just pictured, but as the complete global network of Americans, many without the rights the Lower 48 believe in, most segregated into cells of power that occasionally overheat. Explosive. Narrator Luis Moreno delivers both bitter reality and hilarious asides with a tone of candor and clarity: A+”
Nialle, The Haunted Bookshop
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
Big Questions from Tiny Mortals
By Caitlin Doughty
Narrated by Caitlin Doughty / 4 hours 29 minutes
Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop... Read more »
When the Irish Invaded Canada
The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland's Freedom
By Christopher Klein
Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner / 10 hours 13 minutes
"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." —James M. McPherson
Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought... Read more »
Impeachment
An American History
By Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, Peter Baker & Jeffrey A. Engel
Narrated by Fred Sanders / 7 hours 54 minutes
Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been invoked—against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton—and explain what it means today.
Impeachment is a double-edged sword. Though it was designed to check tyrants, Thomas Jefferson also called impeachment “the most formidable weapon for the purpose of... Read more »
Zucked
Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
By Roger McNamee
Narrated by Roger McNamee / 12 hours 23 minutes
The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society - and sets out to try to stop it.
If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from... Read more »
JFK
A Vision for America
By Stephen Kennedy Smith & Douglas Brinkley
Narrated by Paul Michael, Kirsten Potter & Jim Meskimen / 12 hours 35 minutes
Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and... Read more »
American Moonshot
John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race
By Douglas Brinkley
Narrated by Stephen Graybill / 17 hours 14 minutes
2020 Audie Awards® WINNER - History/Biography
As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this... Read more »
Temp
How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary
By Louis Hyman
Narrated by Simon Vance / 14 hours 17 minutes
Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize
Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics
Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award
The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of... Read more »