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Fault Lines in the Constitution
- The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws That Affect Us Today
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Arthur Morey, Kimberly Farr, Erin Spencer, Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
Many of the political issues we struggle with today have their roots in the US Constitution.
Husband-and-wife team Cynthia and Sanford Levinson take listeners back to the creation of this historic document and discuss how contemporary problems were first introduced - then they offer possible solutions. Think Electoral College, gerrymandering, even the Senate. Many of us take these features in our system for granted. But they came about through haggling in an overheated room in 1787, and we're still experiencing the ramifications.
Each chapter in this timely and thoughtful exploration of the Constitution's creation begins with a story - all but one of them true - that connects directly back to a section of the document that forms the basis of our society and government. From the award-winning team - Cynthia Levinson, children's book author, and Sanford Levinson, constitutional law scholar - Fault Lines in the Constitution will encourage exploration and discussion from young and old listeners alike.
Read by Mark Bramhall, Arthur Morey, Kimberly Farr, Erin Spencer, and Adenrele Ojo.
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- The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document
- By: Mike Lee
- Narrated by: Mike Lee, Tom Parks
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Senator Mike Lee tells the dramatic, little-known stories behind six of the Constitution's most indispensable provisions. He shows their rise. He shows their fall. And he makes vividly clear how nearly every abuse of federal power today is rooted in neglect of this Lost Constitution.
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Solution is a bit naive
- By Will on 08-07-16
By: Mike Lee
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Four Threats
- The Recurring Crises of American Democracy
- By: Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.
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Very informative
- By Angela Fobbs on 12-31-20
By: Suzanne Mettler, and others
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The Presidents and the Constitution
- A Living History
- By: Ken Gormley - editor
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 21 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweepingly ambitious volume, the nation's foremost experts on the American presidency and the US Constitution join together to tell the intertwined stories of how each American president has confronted and shaped the Constitution. Each occupant of the office - the first president to the 44th - has contributed to the story of the Constitution through the decisions he made and the actions he took as the nation's chief executive.
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great book about the presidency & Constitution
- By Rob on 12-27-16
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The Next Red Wave
- How Conservatives Can Beat Leftist Aggression, RINO Betrayal & Deep State Subversion
- By: Jordan Sekulow, Matthew Clark - contributor, Benjamin Sisney - contributor
- Narrated by: Jordan Sekulow
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The next red wave is coming: November 3, 2020. We face battles on many fronts. The Deep State bureaucracy will stop at nothing to undermine the conservative agenda, even when that's the agenda chosen by the American voter. The liberal bureaucracy will continue to work alongside former liberal government officials from, yes, the Obama Administration and Team Clinton. In this election, the Left's prized goal - exclusively - will be defeating President Donald Trump by whatever means necessary.
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FABULOUS AND TIMELY
- By Michael Niebuhr on 09-26-19
By: Jordan Sekulow, and others
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The Fierce Urgency of Now
- Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society
- By: Julian E. Zelizer
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Fierce Urgency of Now animates the full spectrum of forces at play during these turbulent years, including religious groups, the media, conservative and liberal political action groups, unions, and civil rights activists. Above all, the great character in the audiobook whose role rivals Johnson's is Congress - indeed, Zelizer argues that our understanding of the Great Society program is too Johnson-centric.
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Hard Driving
- The Wendell Scott Story
- By: Brian Donovan, Joe Posnanski
- Narrated by: Kiff VandenHeuvel
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The only book-length account of the life of Wendell Scott, the one-time moonshine runner who broke the color barrier in stock-car racing in 1952 and, against all odds, competed for more than 20 years in a sport dominated by Southern Whites.
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Outstanding! A must for any racing fan!
- By ThatGuyHerb on 10-17-23
By: Brian Donovan, and others
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How to Read the Constitution - and Why
- By: Kim Wehle
- Narrated by: Kim Wehle
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Constitution is the most significant document in America. But do you fully understand what this valuable document means to you? In How to Read the Constitution - and Why, legal expert and educator Kimberly Wehle spells out in clear, simple, and common-sense terms what is in the Constitution and most importantly, what it means. In compelling terms and including text from the United States Constitution, she describes how the Constitution’s protections are eroding.
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very biased
- By Anonymous User on 01-25-20
By: Kim Wehle
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Give Us the Ballot
- The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
- By: Ari Berman
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. Yet fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power - over the right to vote, the central pillar of our democracy. A groundbreaking narrative history of voting rights since 1965, Give Us the Ballot tells the story of what happened after the act was passed.
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In-Depth Blow by Blow Account of the VRA
- By Gillian on 10-25-16
By: Ari Berman
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1
- From Washington to Taft
- By: Larry Schweikart
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Back by popular demand, the bestselling Politically Incorrect Guides provide an unvarnished, unapologetic overview of the topics every American needs to know. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, Part 1 profiles America’s early presidents, from George Washington to William Howard Taft.
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Ruining History to Own the Libs
- By Dee on 11-11-20
By: Larry Schweikart
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The Constitution Today
- Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era
- By: Akhil Reed Amar
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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When the stories that lead our daily news involve momentous constitutional questions, present-minded journalists and busy citizens cannot always see the stakes clearly. In The Constitution Today, Akhil Reed Amar, America's preeminent constitutional scholar, considers the biggest and most bitterly contested debates of the last two decades. He shows how the Constitution's text, history, and structure are a crucial repository of collective wisdom, providing specific rules and grand themes relevant to every organ of the American body politic.
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Amar is a Brilliant Arguer
- By MJ Schirmer on 11-16-16
By: Akhil Reed Amar
What listeners say about Fault Lines in the Constitution
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philo
- 02-26-19
A tremendous work. Clear, thorough, thoughtful
I am in my 34th year of teaching this at the college level. At this moment I'm doing it again, and sought a refresher and some new views. I was well rewarded here. This is one of the finest works I have seen. It has plenty of sophistication for an adult. It is very well-written and edited. It gives a good sense of what the framers faced, and what constraints they were under. They cut a lot of deals (perhaps unimaginable in these times in our USA), casting big shadows across our lives today. After the basics I got in high school government class (pretty miserably delivered, actually), this book would be a first recommendation for deepening understanding. If there is a slant one way or another, there is enough distance from the subject, and enough restraint, to not be bothersome to a reasonable listener.
Of special interest to me are the seeming design flaws in the alleged democracy in our country. For example, I as a voter for the U.S. Senate have a tiny micro-sliver of the political power of a voter in some small or rural states. This allows moneyed interests to target their attention to a few backwaters (pardon me) and lap me and my fellow members of a populous and prosperous state in federal power. This allows plenty more money per capita to be lavished on those fortunate voters, or more probably, concentrated into the hands of the elites influential in those places. And this is merely a sample of the distortions laid out plainly here.
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- Eric E. Haas
- 09-12-17
Fantastic Primer, Extremely Thought-Provoking
If you could sum up Fault Lines in the Constitution in three words, what would they be?
Thought Provoking, Interesting
Who was your favorite character and why?
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Which character – as performed by the narrators – was your favorite?
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If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
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Any additional comments?
Believe it or not, I considered this book to be a real "page turner".
This was apparently intended to be a middle-school/high-school age primer on the workings of -- and problems with -- the US Constitution. The authors, a world-renowned Constitutional Law scholar and his wife, an accomplished author, describe in accessible detail the highlights of the US Constitution. Interesting background stories are liberally peppered in to make the material more relevant to the less-informed reader. However, while the book may have been targeted at those in their early teens, the issues discussed are sophisticated indeed. Fine points of the US Constitution are compared with constitutions of individual states, as well as those of other countries. We are left with the distinct impression that our Constitution was, indeed, a spectacular accomplishment. HOWEVER, it is similarly clear that some of the compromises made at the onset, as well as some of the key features, have demonstrated themselves to be problematic in many ways (and could cause serious problems in several specific circumstances which haven't yet occurred). Among the radical, but arguably pragmatic suggestions is to call a new Constitutional Convention and perhaps start again from scratch! The authors themselves have an interesting dialogue with each other at the end discussing pros and cons of this quite radical suggestion.
So -- this book should appeal to many readers:
- Young or just relatively uninformed folks who'd like to better understand how our federal government is designed to work and why,
- More sophisticated readers who enjoy studying history,
- Folks who are interested in comparing how the US constitution does things compared with how other constitutions (i.e., those of individual states and of other countries) do them.
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5 people found this helpful