When Rachel Maddow burst on the national scene four years ago with her own MSNBC show, she hit the country by storm. The first openly lesbian anchor of a prime-time news program in the U.S. had started her broadcast career on a small, western Massachusetts radio station only nine years earlier, the same year that she connected with her partner, artist Susan Mikula. Five years later she moved to the now-defunct Air America, a liberal radio network.
Maddow gained even more fame last spring with her new book, Drift, a must read. In this informational book, she shows how the United States has continually been at war for the past four decades despite objections from the public, Congress, and sometimes even the Pentagon. Margaret Heilbrun describes the book as “highly recommended to all readers engaged in the world today and with how we got here.”
Anyone who watches Maddow’s MSNBC program with her name knows that she is fascinated by politics. In a LJ interview, she has one recommendation for a book to read about this year’s general election: Gail Collins’s As Texas Goes…: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, with “great insights on where conservative policy ideas are coming from these days.”
More information about Drift is available in an interview with Powell’s Book Store (Portland, OR) and at Nel’s New Day.