Best-Selling Author Thomas Frank Reads From His New Book, “Pity the Billionaire”

Thomas Frank, formerly an opinion writer for The Washington Post as well as a current monthly columnist for Harper’s, is the founder of the journal The Baffler and the author of a new book, “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.”

Frank says in an interview that his book is about the social construction of reality, writing that the right’s political revival is due to their offering of “an idealism so powerful that it clouds its partisan’s perceptions of reality.” He writes about the importance of the raw need to raise one’s voice against things like the glorification of the free market as the very essence of freedom itself despite, as Frank believes, the issue that “free market theory had proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.”

Frank says his book seeks to explain hard-times conservatism and to help his audience “understand the enthusiasm for an anything goes economic arrangement that persists in spite of all the failures and bank-breaking catastrophes that our previous efforts to achieve such an arrangement have inflicted upon us.”

“Pity the Billionaire” is available as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio, read passionately by Frank himself, complete with various voices. Readers and listeners will be able to absorb this important information in an entertaining way, all while continuing to execute their daily activities without having to give up reading simply because they can’t find the time to sit down and read a book.

-Martha Sorren