The Road To Now Podcast: Featured Books From RTN Guests

Dopesick

Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

By: Beth Macy
Narrated by: Beth Macy
Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

“A heartfelt narrative filled personal anecdotes and horrifying statistics, Macy gives the reader an encompassing view of the opioid epidemic. Macy is a terrific writer and her reading of the book for audio conveys the sense of devastation for the addicts and their families. Read more

Citizen Coke

The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism

By: Bartow J. Elmore
Narrated by: William Hughes
Length: 11 hours 22 minutes

Coke's insatiable thirst for resources shapes the company and reshapes the globe in this absorbing history.Coca-Cola's success in building a global empire out of sugary water drew on more than a secret formula and brilliant advertising. The real secret to Coke's success was its strategy, from the beginning, to offload production costs and risks... Read more

Back Channel to Cuba

The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

By: Peter Kornbluh & William M. LeoGrande
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 20 hours 19 minutes

Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top-secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year... Read more

The Fall of the Ottomans

The Great War in the Middle East

By: Eugene Rogan
Narrated by: Derek Perkins
Length: 17 hours 25 minutes

In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French... Read more

From Here to Eternity

Traveling the World to find the Good Death

By: Caitlin Doughty
Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty
Length: 5 hours 37 minutes

The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with "dignity." Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body.... Read more

The Liberal Redneck Manifesto

Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark

By: Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan & Corey Ryan Forrester
Narrated by: Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan & Corey Ryan Forrester
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

The Liberal Rednecks—a Southern-based stand-up comedy group known for their scathing political satire—celebrate all that’s good about Dixie while leading a progressive revolution toward a New South.

The American South is home to some of the best music, cuisine, athletics, whiskey, and weather the country has to offer, but its reputation as a... Read more

Talk Radio’s America

How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States

By: Brian Rosenwald
Narrated by: Christopher Grove
Length: 12 hours 10 minutes

The cocreator of the Washington Post's Made by History blog reveals how the rise of conservative talk radio gave us a Republican Party incapable of governing and paved the way for Donald Trump.

Radio hosts form a deep bond with their audience, which gives them enormous political power. Unlike elected representatives, however, they must... Read more

The Death of Expertise

The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

By: Tom Nichols
Narrated by: Sean Pratt
Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows... Read more

Saving America's Cities

Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

By: Lizabeth Cohen
Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
Length: 16 hours 23 minutes

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public... Read more

Floating Coast

An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

By: Bathsheba Demuth
Narrated by: Christa Lewis
Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in... Read more

A Consumers' Republic

The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

By: Lizabeth Cohen
Narrated by: Karen White
Length: 21 hours 41 minutes

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life.

Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became... Read more

How to Hide an Empire

A History of the Greater United States

By: Daniel Immerwahr
Narrated by: Luis Moreno
Length: 17 hours 25 minutes

“Daniel Immerwahr dives into a more thorough history of the United States -- filling those holes glossed over by history books. Extending beyond the Mainland or "50 States" map, he brings many lost or shadowed histories into the light. Very good listen! Read more

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

Big Questions from Tiny Mortals

By: Caitlin Doughty
Narrated by: Caitlin Doughty
Length: 4 hours 29 minutes

Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop... Read more

When the Irish Invaded Canada

The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland's Freedom

By: Christopher Klein
Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." —James M. McPherson

Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought... Read more

Impeachment

An American History

By: Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, Peter Baker & Jeffrey A. Engel
Narrated by: Fred Sanders
Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been invoked—against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton—and explain what it means today.

Impeachment is a double-edged sword. Though it was designed to check tyrants, Thomas Jefferson also called impeachment “the most formidable weapon for the purpose of... Read more

Zucked

Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

By: Roger McNamee
Narrated by: Roger McNamee
Length: 12 hours 23 minutes

One of the Financial Times' Best Business Books of 2019

The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society—and sets out to try to stop it.

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would... Read more

JFK

A Vision for America

By: Stephen Kennedy Smith & Douglas Brinkley
Narrated by: Paul Michael, Kirsten Potter & Jim Meskimen
Length: 12 hours 35 minutes

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and... Read more

American Moonshot

John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

By: Douglas Brinkley
Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
Length: 17 hours 14 minutes

2020 Audie Awards® WINNER - History/BiographyAs the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this... Read more

Temp

How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary

By: Louis Hyman
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Length: 14 hours 17 minutes

Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize
Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics
Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award

The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of... Read more

The End of Food

By: Paul Roberts
Narrated by: William Dufris
Length: 15 hours 4 minutes

The frightening truth about the modern food system.

The bestselling author of The End of Oil turns his attention to food and finds that the system we've entrusted with meeting one of our most basic needs is dramatically failing us. With his trademark comprehensive global approach, Paul Roberts investigates the startling truth about the modern... Read more