Roger D. Hodge has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Texas Blood.
The Mendacity of Hope
Summary
Here is a fearless and incisive manifesto that exposes the real causes of President Obama's failure to enact liberal reform, by the former editor of Harper's magazine. Americans find themselves in genuine confusion and dismay concerning the actions of President Obama's administration, especially when it comes to the financial crisis and health care. Obama's reform packages, passed with great fanfare, ignore the most significant perils facing the United States. In The Mendacity of Hope, Roger D. Hodge makes the provocative case that substantive reform was never even on the table. Behind the euphoria of Obama's victory was in fact a business-as-usual corporate machine, a bloc of political investors, campaign contributors, and lobbyists expecting big returns on their investments. And what a return they have received: in one bailout after another, for the health insurance industry as well as for Wall Street, Obama made sure that the Democratic Party's most powerful investors made out like bandits. None of Obama's most important campaign promises - ending the Iraq war, abolishing torture, closing Guantánamo, changing Washington's culture of corruption - have come to pass. Instead, he has escalated the conflict in Afghanistan, bailed out the bankers, and institutionalized the civil rights abuses of the Bush regime. Another president might have played the forces of corporate interest differently, but Hodge argues that the fantasy of American politics is that a different kind of president is possible without a fundamental reform of our political system. Americans bought into the delusion that one man could bring change to Washington, but instead of reform we've seen a continuation of George W. Bush's assault on the Constitution. Obama's presidency has demonstrated that mere hope is never enough, that change will come only when the American people take charge of their own politics. A brilliantly crafted call to arms, The Mendacity of Hope offers an essential analysis of the American political system and the powerful interests that control our government.
©2010 Roger D. Hodge (P)2010 HarperCollins Publishers
Texas Blood
Summary
In the tradition of Ian Frazier's Great Plains, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, an intoxicating, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D. Hodge's ranching family. What brought the author's family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state - which he loves and hates in shifting measure - tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands - with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge's for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history - as piercing as it is elegiac - Texas Blood is a triumph.
©2017 Roger D. Hodge (P)2017 Random House Audio