The Peabody Award–winning journalist shares stories and insights into our country and the crises we face in an “eloquent selection of . . . commentaries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Millions of Americans have invited Bill Moyers into their homes over the years. With television programs covering topics from American history, politics, and religion to the role of media and the world of ideas, he has become one of America’s most trusted journalists. Now Moyers presents, for the first time, a powerful statement of his own personal beliefs—political and moral. Combining illuminating forays into American history with candid comments on today’s politics, Moyers delivers perceptive and trenchant insights into the American experience. From his early years as a Texas journalist to his role as a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, top assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent and analyst for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series, Moyers has been actively engaged in some of the most volatile episodes of the past fifty years. Drawing from these experiences, he shares his unique understanding of American politics and an enduring faith in the nation’s promise and potential. Whether reflecting on today’s media climate, corporate scandals, or religious and political upheavals, Moyers on America recovers the hopes of the past to establish their relevance for the present. “Not only a good reporter . . . a first-rate storyteller.” —The Boston Globe

People know Bill Moyers from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America's most sought-after public speakers. In this collection of speeches, Moyers celebrates the promise of American democracy and offers a passionate defense of its principles of fairness and justice. Moyers on Democracy takes on crucial issues such as economic inequality, our broken electoral process, our weakened independent press, and the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift.

A companion volume to the Emmy Award–winning PBS® series—interviews with “an essential voice in our national conversation” (Brian Williams, MSNBC anchor). This “provocative” and “absorbing” (Star Tribune) companion book to Bill Moyer’s acclaimed PBS series invites readers into conversations with some of the most captivating voices on the scene today, in what Kirkus Reviews calls “a glittering array of discussions.” From Jon Stewart on politics and media to Michael Pollan on food, The Wire creator David Simon on the mean streets of our cities, James Cone and Shelby Steele on race in the age of Obama, Robert Bly and Nikki Giovanni on the power of poetry, Barbara Ehrenreich on the hard times of working Americans, and Karen Armstrong on faith and compassion, Moyer’s own intelligence and insight match that of his guests and their discussions animate many of the most salient issues of our time. With extensive commentary from Moyers, marked by his customary “respect, intelligence, curiosity, humor, and graciousness,” here are the debates; cultural currents; and, above all, lively minds that shape the conversation of democracy (Booklist). “In an era of much instant and ephemeral talk, it is a pleasurable thing to hold this ‘book of ideas.’” —Publishers Weekly “[Moyers] has always been about something beyond the moment. Or put another way, while everyone else in the media has been exploring topography, Moyers has been exploring geology.” —Los Angeles Times

In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.