Steven Brill has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Tailspin.
Tailspin
Summary
In this revelatory narrative covering the years 1967 to 2017, Steven Brill gives us a stunningly cogent picture of the broken system at the heart of our society. He shows us how, over the last half-century, America's core values - meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself - have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction. They have isolated our best and brightest, whose positions at the top have never been more secure or more remote. The result has been an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness. By examining the people and forces behind the rise of big-money lobbying, legal and financial engineering, the demise of private-sector unions, and a hamstrung bureaucracy, Brill answers the question on everyone's mind: How did we end up this way? Finally, he introduces us to those working quietly and effectively to repair the damages. At once a diagnosis of our national ills, a history of their development, and a prescription for a brighter future, Tailspin is a work of riveting journalism - and a welcome antidote to political despair.
©2018 Steven Brill (P)2018 Random House Audio
Class Warfare
Summary
In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill’s vivid narrative, filled with unexpected twists and turns, takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachers unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform “contest”; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their children’s schools; to a Fifth Avenue apartment, where billionaires plan a secret fund to promote school reform; to a Colorado high school, where students who seemed destined to fail are instead propelled to college; to state capitols across the country, where school reformers hoping to win Obama’s "contest" push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It’s the story of an unlikely army - fed-up public-school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats - squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children. Class Warfare is filled with extraordinary people taking extraordinary paths: a young woman who goes into teaching almost by accident, then becomes so talented and driven that fighting burnout becomes her biggest challenge; an antitrust lawyer who almost brought down Bill Gates’ Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New York’s schools; a naive Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachers union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the union’s prime antagonist; a stubborn young teacher who, as a child growing up on Park Avenue, had been assumed to be learning disabled but ends up co-founding the nation’s most successful charter schools; and an anguished national union leader who walks a tightrope between compromising enough to save her union and giving in so much that her members will throw her out. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.
©2011 Brill Journalism Enterprises, LLC (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
America's Bitter Pill
Summary
New York Times best seller. A New York Times notable book. America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing - and failing to change - the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America's largest, most dysfunctional industry. It's a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time Magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more - because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about health-care “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney - and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American health care so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill: “A tour de force...a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare...persuasive, shocking.” (The New York Times) “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy.... [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.” (The New York Times Book Review) “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’” (Los Angeles Times) “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.” (The Daily Beast) “One of the most important books of our time.” (Walter Isaacson) “Superb...Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible - written an exciting book about the American health system.” (The New York Review of Books)
©2015 Steven Brill (P)2015 Random House Audio