Kurt Andersen has narrated 7 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 120 ratings. The most-rated is Fantasyland.
Fantasyland
Summary
A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries - from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy 60s, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials - our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies - every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts. We gave ourselves over to all manner of crackpot ideas and make-believe lifestyles designed to console or thrill or terrify us. In Fantasyland, Andersen brilliantly connects the dots that define this condition, portrays its scale and scope, and offers a fresh, bracing explanation of how our American journey has deposited us here. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand the politics and culture of 21st-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must listen to this book.
©2017 Kurt Andersen (P)2017 Random House Audio
Evil Geniuses
Summary
New York Times Best Seller When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change - and charts a way back to the future. "The one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country." (Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci) During the 20th century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America's undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame - to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal "useful idiots", among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen's crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point and show the way out of this man-made disaster.
©2020 Kurt Andersen (P)2020 Random House Audio
Good Grief
Summary
The star of TLC's Long Island Medium and New York Times best-selling author Theresa Caputo provides a guide to overcoming grief, filled with inspiring lessons from Spirit and astonishing stories from the clients who have been empowered by Theresa's spiritual readings. After more than a decade of being a practicing medium, Theresa Caputo brings the powerful lessons she has learned about grief, healing, and finding happiness in the wake of tragedy. In almost every reading she gives, Spirit insists that people begin to embrace their lives again. Easily said, but not everyone knows where to begin, and putting back together the pieces of a life marked by loss is never easy. Sometimes you need spiritual guidance - that's where Theresa comes in. With her energetic, positive, and encouraging tone, Theresa uses the lessons from Spirit to guide you through grief toward a place of solace and healing. Each lesson is grounded in her clients' stories as they share the experience of losing their loved ones, their encounters with Spirit during readings, and the ways in which they've been able to heal and grow. Each chapter is filled with activities to help you find your "new normal" - including journal entries, individual and group exercises, meditations, and moments of reflection - based on the truths that Theresa has gathered from Spirit. Good Grief will help you to feel stronger and more optimistic about what the future has in store for you.
©2017 An Evening with Theresa, Inc. (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
You Can't Spell America Without Me
Summary
Political satire as deeper truth: Donald Trump's presidential memoir, as recorded by two world-renowned Trump scholars and experts on greatness generally. "I have the best words, beautiful words, as everybody has been talking and talking about for a long time. Also? The best sentences and, what do you call them, paragraphs. My previous books were great and sold extremely, unbelievably well - even the ones by dishonest, disgusting so-called journalists. But those writers didn't understand Trump, because, quite frankly, they were major losers. People say if you want it done right you have to do it yourself, even when 'it' is a 'memoir'. So every word of this book was written by me, using a special advanced word processing system during the many, many nights I've been forced to stay alone in the White House - only me, just me, trust me, nobody helped. And it's all 100 percent true, so true - people are already saying it may be the truest book ever published. Enjoy." Until Donald Trump publishes the ultimate account of his entire four or eight or one and a half years in the White House, the definitive chronicle will be You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump. Trump was elected because he was the most frank presidential candidate in history, a man eager to tell the unvarnished truth about others' flaws and tout his own amazing excellence. Now he levels his refreshingly compulsive, un-PC candor at his landslide election victory as well as his role as commander in chief and leader of the free world. There are intimate, powerful, mind-boggling revelations throughout. You are there with him during his private encounters with world leaders, a few of whom he does not insult. You are there at the genius Oval Office strategy sessions with his advisers. You are there in his White House bedroom as he crafts the predawn Twitter pronouncements that rock the world. And, of course, you are there on the golf course as Trump attempts to manage the burdens of his office. President Trump explains each of the historic decisions that have already made America great again and how he always triumphs over the fake news media. You'll learn what he really thinks of his cabinet members and top aides not related to him, of the first lady and the first daughter and the additional three or four Trump children. You Can't Spell America Without Me is presented by America's foremost Trump scholar, Kurt Andersen, as well as America's foremost mediocre Trump impersonator, Alec Baldwin.
©2017 Alec Baldwin (P)2017 Penguin Audio
Thalia Book Club: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' 50th Anniversary Celebration - Readings, Discussion and Audience Q&A
Summary
Performance playlist: Readings and conversation with Kurt Andersen, Libba Bray, Stephen Colbert, Oskar Eustis, Mary McDonagh Murphy, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Isaiah Sheffer, a discussion with the audience. Authors and actors including Stephen Colbert, Libba Bray (award winning young-adult novelist Going Bovine, winner of 2010 Printz Award), Oskar Eustis (Artistic Director at The Public Theater), Kurt Andersen (novelist and Studio 360 Host), Jayne Anne Phillips (novelist and National Book Award finalist Lark & Termite), filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy (author of the upcoming book Scout, Atticus, and Boo), and others pay tribute to the Pulitzer prize-winning classic novel about racial injustice and loss of innocence in a small Southern town. One of the most taught -- and frequently challenged -- books of the last 50 years, the book was voted the best novel of the 20th century by librarians. The evening includes readings, discussion and audience Q&A.
©2010 Symphony Space (P)2010 Symphony Space
Thalia Book Club: Studio 360 Explores Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
Summary
The Metamorphosis, first published in 1915, has captivated readers and artists for 100 years. Studio 360's Kurt Andersen leads spirited conversation exploring the classic story and its impact on arts and culture with guests Ben Marcus (Leaving the Sea), Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat), Eric Jarosinski (NeinQuarterly), and translator Susan Bernofsky. With a reading by Heather Burns (Bored to Death).
©2015 Symphony Space (P)2015 Symphony Space
The Future According to Me
Summary
Hipster aliens! Existentially aware smart toilets! Instant genital swapping! The future will be all of these things and so much more in Conan/Daily Show writer Rob Kutner's collection of "quick hits" on what could be but probably shouldn't. Includes never-before-seen primary source documents like: The official memo of the triumphant Jewish/gay/lizard-people conspiracy The diary of a time-travelling garbage man The unearthed prophecies of the great Seusstrodamus If you listen to this book, you are guaranteed to start traveling into the future.
©2011 Rob Kutner (P)2015 Audible, Inc.