Jonathan Alter has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is The Defining Moment.
The Defining Moment
Summary
In this dramatic and fascinating account, Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter shows how Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his first 100 days in office to lift the country from the despair and paralysis of the Great Depression and transform the American presidency. Instead of becoming the dictator so many wanted in those first days, FDR rescued banks, put men to work immediately, and laid the groundwork for his most ambitious achievements, including what eventually became the Social Security Administration. Alter explains how FDR's background and experiences uniquely qualified him to pull off an astonishing conjuring act that saved both democracy and capitalism. Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek Senior Editor, has written the widely acclaimed "Between the Lines" column since 1991, examining politics, media, and society at large. For the last decade, he has also worked as an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC Broadcasting, including Today, NBC Nightly News, and MSNBC. Grover Gardner is one of the spoken word industry's most esteemed and versatile performers. He has recorded hundreds of books and has garnered an Audie Award, 18 Earphones Awards, and was deemed to have one of the "Best Voices of the Century" by AudioFile magazine. He was also named Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly.
©2006 Jonathan Alter, recorded by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc. (P)2006 The Audio Partners Publishing Corp.
The Center Holds
Summary
A narrative thriller about the battle royale surrounding Barack Obama's quest for a second term amid widespread joblessness and one of the most poisonous political climates in American history. The election of 2012 will be remembered as a hinge of history. With huge victories in the 2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party had blocked President Obama at every turn and made plans to wrench the country sharply to the right. The 2012 contest offered the GOP a clear shot at controlling all three branches of government and repealing much of the social contract that dated back to the New Deal. Facing free-spending billionaires, Fox News, and a concerted effort in 19 states to rig the election by suppressing Democratic votes, Obama repelled the assault and navigated the nation back toward the center. In The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Jonathan Alter uses his unmatched access and deep knowledge of politics and history to produce the first full account of America at the crossroads. He pierces the bubble of the White House and of the presidential campaigns with exclusive reporting and rare historical insight. More than a campaign book, this is the epic story of an embattled president facing a historic moment he considered more pivotal than 2008. Alter relates the untold story behind Obama's highs and lows, from his daring decision to raid Osama bin Laden's compound to the frustration of the debt ceiling fiasco to his run-ins with black and Latino activists he expected to be his firm allies. There are fresh details about the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist, Roger Ailes, and the online haters who suffer from "Obama Derangement Syndrome". Alter takes us inside the GOP "clown car" primaries as well as Obama's disastrous preparation for the first debate. We meet Obama's analytics geeks working out of "The Cave" and the man who secretly videotaped Mitt Romney's infamous comments on the "47 percent". The Center Holds, which follows Alter's acclaimed The Promise, will deepen our understanding of Obama's presidency, the 2012 election stakes, and the future of his second term.
©2013 Jonathan Alter (P)2013 Simon & Schuster
His Very Best
Summary
From one of America’s most-respected journalists and modern historians comes the first full-length biography of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian. Jonathan Alter tells the epic story of an enigmatic man of faith and his improbable journey from barefoot boy to global icon. Alter paints an intimate and surprising portrait of the only president since Thomas Jefferson who can fairly be called a Renaissance Man, a complex figure - ridiculed and later revered - with a piercing intelligence, prickly intensity, and biting wit beneath the patented smile. Here is a moral exemplar for our times, a flawed but underrated president of decency and vision was committed to telling the truth to the American people. Growing up in one of the meanest counties in the Jim Crow South, Carter is the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: his early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th; his presidency put him at the center of major events in the 20th; and his efforts on conflict resolution and global health set him on the cutting edge of the challenges of the 21st. Drawing on fresh archival material and five years of extensive access to Carter and his entire family, Alter traces how he evolved from a timid, bookish child - raised mostly by a Black woman farmhand - into an ambitious naval nuclear engineer, writing passionate never-before-published love letters from sea to his wife and full partner, Rosalynn; a peanut farmer and civic leader whose guilt over staying silent during the civil rights movement and not confronting the white terrorism around him helped power his quest for racial justice at home and abroad; an obscure, born-again governor whose brilliant 1976 campaign demolished the racist wing of the Democratic Party and took him from zero percent to the presidency; a stubborn outsider who failed politically amid the bad economy of the 1970s and the seizure of American hostages in Iran but succeeded in engineering peace between Israel and Egypt, amassing a historic environmental record, moving the government from tokenism to diversity, setting a new global standard for human rights, and normalizing relations with China among other unheralded and far-sighted achievements. After leaving office, Carter eradicated diseases, built houses for the poor, and taught Sunday school into his mid-90s. This engrossing, monumental biography will change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history.
©2020 Jonathan Alter. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Promise
Summary
Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery.
In The Promise, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut.
What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and in off-hours, using what his best friend called “a Rubik’s Cube in his brain"? These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office.
The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone—“feeling lucky”—who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors.
Alter takes the listener inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and bounces back after a disastrous Massachusetts election to redeem a promise that had eluded presidents since FDR.
©2010 Jonathan Alter (P)2010 Simon & Schuster