Many of Bill’s guests are writers of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, graphic novels, and everything in between. From income inequality to money and politics to climate change, these authors go in-depth on a range of important issues discussed on Moyers & Company. In this holiday season, we thought you might enjoy this collection of some of the books we found ourselves reaching for in 2014.
Please also share your favorite books from former guests or others in the comments section below…
The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It
By Anat Admati
“The Bankers’ New Clothes underscores that there is perhaps no reform more important and central to a stable financial system than capping the ability of financial institutions to take excessive risks using other people’s money.” — Sheila C. Bair
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Book Excerpt
By Anat Admati
“The Bankers’ New Clothes underscores that there is perhaps no reform more important and central to a stable financial system than capping the ability of financial institutions to take excessive risks using other people’s money.” — Sheila C. Bair
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Book Excerpt
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander
“[An] instant classic…The New Jim Crow is a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable.” — Cornel West
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Book Excerpt
Michelle Alexander
“[An] instant classic…The New Jim Crow is a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable.” — Cornel West
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Book Excerpt
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
By Julia Angwin
“[A] startling account of how we’re all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet—and the near impossibility of evading it. I’ll never use Google in the same way again.” — Gretchen Rubin, author
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Book Excerpt
By Julia Angwin
“[A] startling account of how we’re all being tracked, watched, studied, and sorted. Her own (often very funny) attempts to maintain her online privacy demonstrate the ubiquity of the dragnet—and the near impossibility of evading it. I’ll never use Google in the same way again.” — Gretchen Rubin, author
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Book Excerpt
Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
By Andrew Bacevich
“Bacevich has written a book that precious few people in Washington will like, at least those people…who are connected in one way or another to what Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 called the ‘military-industrial complex.’” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
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Book Excerpt
By Andrew Bacevich
“Bacevich has written a book that precious few people in Washington will like, at least those people…who are connected in one way or another to what Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 called the ‘military-industrial complex.’” — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
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Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World
By Thomas Cahill
“Over the past two decades, Tom Cahill has been writing a series of books he calls the ‘hinges of history,’ critical moments in Western civilization brought to life through the stories of individuals whose words and deeds helped make us who we are today.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
By Thomas Cahill
“Over the past two decades, Tom Cahill has been writing a series of books he calls the ‘hinges of history,’ critical moments in Western civilization brought to life through the stories of individuals whose words and deeds helped make us who we are today.” — Bill Moyers
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Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age
By Susan Crawford
“A calm but chilling state-of-play on the information age in the United States.” — David Carr, The New York Times
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Book Excerpt
By Susan Crawford
“A calm but chilling state-of-play on the information age in the United States.” — David Carr, The New York Times
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Book Excerpt
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World
By Tom Engelhardt
“In his regular, incisive, and often searing columns, Tom Engelhardt has uncovered layer after layer of deceit, fraud, and distortion to reveal to us harsh truths about power and its exercise that we must comprehend, and resist, and reverse, if there is to be any hope of decent survival. Shadow Government is essential reading.” — Noam Chomsky
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Book Excerpt
By Tom Engelhardt
“In his regular, incisive, and often searing columns, Tom Engelhardt has uncovered layer after layer of deceit, fraud, and distortion to reveal to us harsh truths about power and its exercise that we must comprehend, and resist, and reverse, if there is to be any hope of decent survival. Shadow Government is essential reading.” — Noam Chomsky
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Book Excerpt
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
By Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
“The Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science, Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley, about how Washington served the rich in the last 30 years and turned its back on the middle class. They’re marvelous.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
By Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
“The Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of political science, Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley, about how Washington served the rich in the last 30 years and turned its back on the middle class. They’re marvelous.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
By Bob Herbert
“Herbert has written a terrific and important book about America. It is an incisive examination of our nation’s tragic unwillingness to address the overwhelming problems we face. We can’t go forward unless we face reality. Herbert has the courage to do that.” — Senator Bernie Sanders
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By Bob Herbert
“Herbert has written a terrific and important book about America. It is an incisive examination of our nation’s tragic unwillingness to address the overwhelming problems we face. We can’t go forward unless we face reality. Herbert has the courage to do that.” — Senator Bernie Sanders
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The Fight For the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great
By Harvey J. Kaye
“No one has ever loved a nation more or spanked it harder for straying from its premise than Harvey Kaye. Read The Fight for the Four Freedoms. It contains the historical truths that will set America free.” — Norman Lear
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Book Excerpt
By Harvey J. Kaye
“No one has ever loved a nation more or spanked it harder for straying from its premise than Harvey Kaye. Read The Fight for the Four Freedoms. It contains the historical truths that will set America free.” — Norman Lear
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Book Excerpt
This Changes Everything
By Naomi Klein
“This is the best book about climate change in a very long time — reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a liveable one.” — Bill McKibben
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Book Excerpt
By Naomi Klein
“This is the best book about climate change in a very long time — reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a liveable one.” — Bill McKibben
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935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity
By Charles Lewis
“Insightful. Original. Provocative. Charles Lewis at his best!” — Kathleen Hall Jamieson
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Book Excerpt
By Charles Lewis
“Insightful. Original. Provocative. Charles Lewis at his best!” — Kathleen Hall Jamieson
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Book Excerpt
Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
By Ian Haney López
“He’s broken the code on the racist politics of the last 50 years, as politicians mastered the use of dog whistles to turn Americans against each other while turning America over to plutocrats.” — Bill Moyers
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By Ian Haney López
“He’s broken the code on the racist politics of the last 50 years, as politicians mastered the use of dog whistles to turn Americans against each other while turning America over to plutocrats.” — Bill Moyers
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Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America
By Robert McChesney and John Nichols
“The most important book I read this year.” — Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
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Book Excerpt
By Robert McChesney and John Nichols
“The most important book I read this year.” — Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
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Book Excerpt
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
“[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.” — Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books
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Book Contents
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad
“[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.” — Darryl Pinckney, The New York Review of Books
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Book Contents
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas Piketty
“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.” — Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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Book Excerpt
By Thomas Piketty
“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.” — Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools
By Diane Ravitch
“Those who have grown increasingly alarmed at seeing public education bartered off piece by piece, and seeing schools and teachers thrown into a state of siege, will be grateful for this cri de Coeur — a fearless book, a manifesto, and a cry to battle.” — Jonathan Kozol, The New York Times
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Book Excerpt
By Diane Ravitch
“Those who have grown increasingly alarmed at seeing public education bartered off piece by piece, and seeing schools and teachers thrown into a state of siege, will be grateful for this cri de Coeur — a fearless book, a manifesto, and a cry to battle.” — Jonathan Kozol, The New York Times
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Book Excerpt
Lila
By Marilynne Robinson
“Rarely has a novel been so universally acclaimed as Marilynne Robinson’s Lila: ‘An unflinching book,’ says The New Yorker. ‘An exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love,’ reports The Washington Post.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
By Marilynne Robinson
“Rarely has a novel been so universally acclaimed as Marilynne Robinson’s Lila: ‘An unflinching book,’ says The New Yorker. ‘An exquisite novel of spiritual redemption and love,’ reports The Washington Post.” — Bill Moyers
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Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United
By Zephyr Teachout
“Teachout’s beautifully written and powerful book exposes a simple but profound error at the core of the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision. The originalists on the Court forgot their history. This is that history—and eventually it will provide the basis for reversing the Court’s critical error.” — Lawrence Lessig
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Book Excerpt
By Zephyr Teachout
“Teachout’s beautifully written and powerful book exposes a simple but profound error at the core of the Supreme Court’s McCutcheon v. FEC decision. The originalists on the Court forgot their history. This is that history—and eventually it will provide the basis for reversing the Court’s critical error.” — Lawrence Lessig
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Book Excerpt
A Fighting Chance
By Elizabeth Warren
“I recommend people read A Fighting Chance… But I tell you, I go back quite often to The Two-Income Trap, which is what we talked about 10 years ago.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
By Elizabeth Warren
“I recommend people read A Fighting Chance… But I tell you, I go back quite often to The Two-Income Trap, which is what we talked about 10 years ago.” — Bill Moyers
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Book Excerpt
