A Conversation with Rachel Maddow - Live at The Riverside Theater

Next Chapter Bookshop presents "A Conversation With Rachel Maddow", live at The Riverside Theater, Saturday April 21, 8:00 PM.

Next Chapter Bookshop welcomes MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, author & host of MSNBC's critically acclaimed 'The Rachel Maddow Show' to the Riverside Theater for a very special evening of conversation dealing with politics and world issues. Rachel will be LIVE in conversation with Lanora Haradon, owner of Next Chapter Bookshop. The program will last approximately 90 minutes.

Each admission ticket includes an autographed copy of Rachel's new book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Tickets on sale NOW through the Riverside Theater box office. CLICK HERE.

Rachel Maddow hosts MSNBC’s critically acclaimed The Rachel Maddow Show. The most successful show launch in MSNBC history, The Rachel Maddow Showwas named one of the top shows of the decade by the Washington Post in 2009. Previously, Maddow had been an MSNBC political analyst and regular guest host for Countdown. She first gained national prominence as a host on Air America Radio, where she worked from its inception in 2004.

There’s a war going on, argues Rachel Maddow, but it’s not the one in Afghanistan. Rather, it’s a battle between the priorities of civilian life and of the war machine, and right now the national security sector is winning—leaving the United States less strong and secure. Speaking to us in the fiercely honest, witty, piercingly intelligent voice we know from her on-air commentary, Maddow shows how deeply militarized our culture has become—how the role of the national security sector has shape-shifted and grown over the past century to the point of being financially unsustainable and confused in mission. How did this come to seem normal? From the Vietnam War through the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and on to the global “War on Terror,” Drift explores the root causes—from Reagan’s “gunslinging” presidency to the rise of executive authority to the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars—giving readers a facts-on-the-ground understanding of the dangers of our approach. Ultimately, this book is a clarion call to stop allowing the priorities of national security to crowd out other types of American power.

“One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of “privateers”; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine. Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s Drift argues that we’ve drifted away from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we’ve arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today’s war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan’s radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.

Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seriously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a “loud and jangly” political debate about how, when, and where to apply America’s strength and power—and who gets to make those decisions. Brilliant, lacerating, and provocative, Drift belongs on the shelf beside such bestsellers as What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Griftopia, and The Shock Doctrine.