Many Moyers & Company guests are writers of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, graphic novels and everything in between. Put together, they represent an unparalleled collection of smart ideas and breathtaking artistry — so, for your pleasure, we put many of them together.
Selected writers include Rita Dove, Jonathan Haidt, Karl Marlantes, Bruce Bartlett, Eric Alterman, Matt Taibbi, Ross Douthat, Yves Smith, Sheila Bair, Chris Hedges, Chrystia Freeland and Naomi Klein.
Browse selections from the Moyers & Company Guest Book List below, and let us know which ones moved and inspired you.
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander Bill said… “An outstanding work of scholarship on how our war on drugs, our harsh mandatory minimum sentencing, and racism have converged to create a caste system in this country very much like the one under Jim Crow segregation laws. None of us at the time anticipated the powerful impact her book would have.” |
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Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories Sherman Alexie Bill said… “How do you grapple with a long denied history? If you are Sherman Alexie, you face it down with candor and even irreverence, writing poems, novels and short stories, and even movies.” |
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The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama Eric Alterman Bill said… “Superbly tells the story of how FDR’s New Deal liberalism lost its hold on the American imagination and is struggling now to regain it.” |
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Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination Joyce Appleby Bill said… “Shores of Knowledge explains how the curiosity of Old Europe broke free of church dogma, creating the world we inhabit today.” |
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Perfidious Proverbs and other Poems: A Satirical Look at the Bible Philip Appleman Bill said… “[Philip Appleman’s] creativity spans a long life filled with verse, fiction, philosophy, science, religion and above all, moments of every day experience captured like the glint of the sun sparkling through a crystal glass.” |
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Nights Under a Tin Roof James Autry Bill said… “Jim’s first collection of poetry is still a favorite of mine, filled with recollections of a life and people now long gone. Of family reunions, church revivals and country funerals.” |
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The Short American Century: A Postmortem Andrew Bacevich Bill said… “[Bacevich’s] grounded realism makes him my favorite go-to person for separating fact and reason from fear.” |
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The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive Dean Baker Bill said… “I rarely miss [Dean Baker’s] blog, “Beat the Press,” and I’m a regular reader of his column in The Guardian newspaper.” |
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Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers James Balog Bill said… “Risking life and limb, this photographer and filmmaker, mountaineer, author and prophet has gone to the top of the world to show us overwhelming evidence of what we’re doing to the environment. His discoveries are in this magnificent new book.” |
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Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself Sheila Bair Bill said… “[Bair] is a hero to many of us for her long fight for an honest and accountable banking system.” |
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Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street Neil Barofsky Bill said… “The man who held the thankless job of special inspector general in charge of policing TARP, the bailout’s Troubled Asset Relief Plan, [Neil Barofsky] was assigned to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. The banks didn’t make it easy, and neither did the US government. Barofsky tells this story in his book.” Digital Extras: |
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The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take Bruce Bartlett Bill said… “A layman’s guide through the jungle of a tax system that, thanks to rented politicians and anti-tax ideologues like Grover Norquist, enable the 1 percent to make off like bandits while our national debt soars sky-high.” |
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The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry Bill said… Wendell Berry is a “master of the written word…” |
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This Day Wendell Berry Bill said… Wendell Berry is a “master of the written word…” |
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A Place in Time Wendell Berry Bill said… Wendell Berry is a “master of the written word…” |
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The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Right Movement Taylor Branch Bill said… “Taylor Branch wrote the extraordinary, three-volume history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The first of them, Parting the Waters, received the Pulitzer Prize. He now has distilled all that work, adding fresh material and insights to create this new book.” |
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Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power and Public Resistance Heidi Boghosian Bill said… “How do we respond to this smog of surveillance? Start by reading this book.” |
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Murder at the Supreme Court: Lethal Crimes and Landmark Cases Martin Clancy and Tim O’Brien Bill said… “This book is a lightning strike. It quickens the mind, illuminates the landscape, and guarantees you will see things differently — in this case, how the jagged edges of justice come to bear on decisions of life and death. Clancy and O’Brien are journalists at the top of their class, where facts matter and reporting can read like a novel.” |
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The Cross and the Lynching Tree James Cone Bill said… “James Cone, a longtime professor of theology at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, wrote the groundbreaking books that defined black liberation theology, interpreting Christianity through the eyes and experience of the oppressed.” |
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Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age Susan Crawford Bill said… “Read it and you’ll understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many other countries and getting much less in return.” |
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This is How You Lose Her Junot Díaz Bill said… “The life and work of Junot Díaz contains many worlds — and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His imagination travels between the old and the new, between the America that was and the America we’re becoming, straddling different cultures, yet American to the core.” |
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Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics Ross Douthat Bill said… “There’s the pious Ross Douthat, a believer in the dogma of the essential Christian experience, and the political Ross Douthat who seems, throughout this book, to be unsure about making peace with a Republican party whose base embraces an absolutist theology… The suspense of where [he’s] going to come out is worth the price of the book.” |
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The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry Rita Dove Bill said… “A banquet of language, images and ideas… I felt when I opened this book that I was diving into America’s melting pot. Everybody was in there. I mean, 176 poets swimming around with me. And I wanted to say to all the folks still on the edge of the pool, ‘Come on in, it’s a fascinating place.’” |
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So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America Peter Edelman Bill said… “For anyone who wants to understand why, in one of the richest nations in the world, millions of people, even those with jobs, are teetering just a medical bill or missed paycheck from disaster, here’s a book that’s must reading. For more than 40 years, no one has fought harder or longer to keep poor people on the political agenda.” |
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The Trouble Ball Martin Espada Bill said… “You can’t read any of his 16 books of poems, translations, and essays, including, most recently, The Trouble Ball, without discovering a man who understands life as struggle. A writer for whom the past is a living, breathing muse whispering over his shoulder, as he scribbles, the names of ancestors who once pulled the oars to get us through troubled waters.” |
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China Airborne James Fallows Bill said… “About why more than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China — and how their ambition is going to impact America’s role in the world and our lives. It’s a book I hope official Washington is reading.” |
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Pity the Billionaire Thomas Frank Bill said… “This is no time to mince words and thank goodness, Thomas Frank never does so.” |
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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else Chrystia Freeland Bill said… “Just in time — if not too late — comes this definitive examination of inequality in our time.” |
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Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality Neal Gabler Bill said… “Neal Gabler expertly interprets how movies reflect our society and politics.” |
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Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement Marshall Ganz Bill said… “Smiting Goliath might as well be Marshall Ganz’s job description. He’s an American maestro of organizing who himself, has never given in to despair or given over to fear.” |
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Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism Henry Giroux Bill said… “Talk about connecting the dots — read this, and the headlines of the day will, I think, arrange themselves differently in your head — threading together ideas and experiences to reveal a pattern. The skillful weaver is Henry Giroux, a scholar, teacher and social critic with seemingly tireless energy and a broad range of interests.” |
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With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful Glenn Greenwald Bill said… “Glenn Greenwald keeps his critical and contrarian eye on potential conflicts between national security and individual liberty.” |
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Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson Bill said… “Gross [economic] inequality didn’t just happen. It was politically engineered by powerful players in Washington and on Wall Street. Read how they did it in this book by two of the country’s top political scientists, drawn to a mystery every bit as puzzling as a crime drama.” |
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The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt Bill said… “[Haidt’s] ideas are controversial but they make you think. Haidt says, for example, that liberals misunderstand conservatives more than the other way around, and that while conservatives see self-sufficiency as a profound moral value for individuals, liberals are more focused on a public code of care and equity.” |
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Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco Bill said… “For all his power of expression, sometimes words fail even Chris Hedges, and a picture can say more in a single frame than paragraphs of explanation. That’s what makes his partnership with graphic artist Joe Sacco on their book so potent and so effective… An unusual account of poverty and desolation across contemporary America.” |
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Behind the Kitchen Door Saru Jayaraman Bill said… “These restaurant workers still believe in democracy — still believe they can undo politically what predatory capitalism has done to them economically; still believe their cry for justice will be heard. And if it isn’t, what then are their choices?” |
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein Bill said… “The main thesis of Shock Doctrine, which came out five years ago before the great crash, was that disaster capitalism exploits crises in order to move greater wealth to the hands of the fewer and fewer people… that privatization of resources, monopolization of resources by the rich, in times of crisis, further divide us as a society.” |
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End This Depression Now! Paul Krugman Bill said… “It’s both prescription and warning: our current obsession with slashing the deficit and avoiding that well-known and worn fiscal cliff is killing us, Krugman writes, getting in the way of what really needs to be done — which is dedicating government to creating jobs and getting us back to full employment. He blames not only Congress but the White House.” |
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The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted Mike Lofgren Bill said… “The growing power of the religious right is one reason my guest left the Republican Party and became an independent. As you can tell from the title, he spares no one.” |
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Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner Bill said… “Lead wars revisits a chemical menace you might have thought was behind us, but isn’t” |
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What It is Like to Go to War Karl Marlantes Bill said… “The story of a warrior, told in his own words. What he has to say is for all of us to hear, but especially those of us who have never been in combat. Read it and you will be closer than you can imagine to the mind and heart of the warrior in battle and after.” |
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Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy Gary May Bill said… “A masterful new account …You will not find in one volume a more compelling story of the heroic men and women who struggled for the right to vote, or a more cinematic rendering of the political battle to enact the [Voting Rights Act], or a more succinct telling of the long campaign to subvert it.” |
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The Condemnation of Blackness Khalil Gibran Muhammad Bill said… “Brings the past to bear on race, crime and the making of urban America, and connects today’s headlines to their deep roots.” |
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Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-media Election Complex is Destroying America John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney Bill said… “Here’s how you can prepare for the next avalanche of campaign cash: read this new book.” |
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It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann Bill said… “Mann and Ornstein argued that democracy and the economy are in a crash dive, and that congressional gridlock was largely the fault of the Republican Party and its takeover by right wing radicals. What’s more, they said, the mainstream media was adding to the problem by resorting to “false equivalency,” pretending that both parties were equally at fault.” |
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The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century Carne Ross Bill said… “His new book couldn’t be more timely — talk about anticipating the spirit of the moment. This is a call for change everywhere, by everyone convinced that governments are in thrall to the 1 percent.” |
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The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class Bernie Sanders Bill said… “You may recall what happened two years ago when Senator Sanders, having finished his usual Vermont breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, walked on to the floor of the Senate and began speaking. He spoke on for eight and a half hours, castigating the agreement President Obama and the Republicans had made to extend the Bush tax cuts for the ultra-rich, lower their estate taxes, and jeopardize the future of the Social Security Trust Fund by diverting revenue away from it to other purposes. That speech is now this book.” |
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Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America Richard Slotkin Bill said… “Richard Slotkin tells how America came to embrace a mythology of gun-slinging settlers taming the wilderness to justify and romanticize a tragic record of subjugation and bloodshed.” |
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Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis Sandra Steingraber Bill said… “As you can see, for Sandra Steingraber, there is no line between her life and her cause.” |
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Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America Matt Taibbi Bill said… Investigates “the folly and corruption of banks and government with scathing, often profane wit and perception.” |
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Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam Nick Turse Bill said… “You can’t read any of his 16 books of poems, translations, and essays, including, most recently, The Trouble Ball, without discovering a man who understands life as struggle. A writer for whom the past is a living, breathing muse whispering over his shoulder, as he scribbles, the names of ancestors who once pulled the oars to get us through troubled waters.” |
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The Devil’s Highway Luis Alberto Urrea Bill said… “No one writes more tragically or intimately about border culture. One day in May 11 years ago, 26 Mexican men set out across the murderous stretch of desert known as the Devil’s Highway… their story became a stunning work by Urrea.” |
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The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama Katrina vanden Heuvel Bill said… “Katrina vanden Heuvel has been one of those out in front, calling the president to task for orphaning his values and promises in her most recent book.” |
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Every Riven Thing Christian Wiman Bill said… “When religion is used as a bludgeon, when political campaigns duke it out over religious beliefs, descending to strident partisan shouts of holier than thou, it’s hard to remember that true faith and reason still can be part of what it means to be human. Today, a kindred spirit finds in poetry a way to face death with a graceful equanimity built on faith.” |
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Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It Richard Wolff Bill said… “Just about everyone has an opinion about the trouble we’re in — the blame game is at fever pitch in Washington, where obstinate Republicans and hapless Democrats once again play kick-the-can with the problems we face. You wish they would just stop and listen to Richard Wolff.” |
