Harvard Book Store Presents:

Anand Giridharadas

presenting

The Persuaders:
At the Front Lines of the Fight
for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

in conversation with DEVAL PATRICK

Harvard Book Store welcomes internationally bestselling author ANAND GIRIDHARADAS for a discussion of his new book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. He will be joined in conversation by DEVAL PATRICK, Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School.

A Return to In-Person Events

Harvard Book Store is excited to be back to in-person programming. To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone in attendance, the following Covid-19 safety protocols will be in place at all of our Brattle Theatre events until further notice:

• Face coverings are required of all staff and attendees when inside the venue. Masks must snugly cover nose and mouth. At venues where refreshments are served, attendees may briefly unmask when actively eating or drinking.
• Attendance is capped so as to allow for some social distancing in the venue.

For the time being, we will not be holding author signings at these events, in order to limit close contact. When possible, we will have pre-signed books available for purchase on-site.

Ticketing

Each ticket includes one hardcover copy of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.

About The Persuaders

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice build barriers to entry, instead of on-ramps. Political parties focus on mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. And leaders who seek to forge coalitions are labeled sellouts.

In The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. We meet a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans’ fatalism about one another.

As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

Praise for The Persuaders

“The Persuaders is the book we need right now. Giridharadas gets unmatched access to some of today’s most important movement-builders, and then explains how they’ve gotten more people to buy in to their movements without selling out. Persuading in a time of extremes is not easy, but Giridharadas proves it’s possible. Readers will walk away more optimistic and more capable of forging coalitions in their own lives and in the world.” —Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us

“Anand Giridharadas shows the way we get real progressive change in America – by refusing to write others off, building more welcoming movements, and rededicating ourselves to the work of changing minds. If you sometimes despair at America’s capacity to achieve the common good, this book is a welcome and inspiring tonic.” —Robert B. Reich, author of The System

“Giridharadas has already established himself as a major chronicler of one of our great divides — the disparities of income and opportunity that undergird American plutocracy. Now he turns his attention to another kind of gulf, one that’s just as endemic and dangerous: ideology. It’s one thing to diagnose and quite another to offer real solutions, but in this wide-ranging and profound book, Giridharadas explores real strategies for bridging these divides by finding a language in which we can speak to one another, and persuade. Reading The Persuaders I felt something I hadn’t in quite a while: a tremor of hope.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain

Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas is the author of the international best-seller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar

Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick is Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership and a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Senior Advisor to Bain Capital and co-chair of American Bridge 21st Century Foundation. He is the founder and, from April 2015 to December 2019, was Managing Partner of Bain Capital Double Impact. From January 2007 to January 2015, he served as Governor of Massachusetts. He has been a senior executive in two Fortune 50 companies, a partner in two Boston law firms, and by appointment of President Bill Clinton, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the United States Justice Department. He is a Rockefeller Fellow, a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and the author of two books.He earned his AB cum laude from Harvard College and his JD from Harvard Law School.