The Persuaders

byAnand Giridharadas

Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age

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It once seemed possible to build a political movement out of people with different ideas, different identities and different ways of looking at the world. If somebody disagreed with you, you brought them on side; convincing them of your point of view. Politics was civil and optimistic. But in our modern polarized world of cancel culture and conspiracy theory, all that seems a distant memory: it feels like we've long abandoned to the past the art of persuasion.

And yet, as bestselling writer Anand Giridharadas finds, things are changing. Journeying into the heart of some of our most contentious and urgent political battles - from Black Lives Matter to the Trump resistance, from vaccine myths to QAnon - Giridharadas discovers a diverse group of dissenters who continue to struggle for consensus, who remain committed to idea that to change the world, one must first change minds.

Combining gripping on-the-ground experience with the revelatory insights of activists, organisers, politicians and educators, The Persuaders is the book for a time in need of mending. It is the story of a new kind of politics: one that is fierce in its pursuit of justice and earnest in its desire to improve people's lives, but also open, welcoming and, above all else, persuasive.

Giridharadas proves how senseless it is to lambast ideological opponents, especially when they're actually goodhearted and persuadable. Reassuringly sane, The Persuaders shows people are often less hardline and more conflicted than they seem

The Irish Times, Books of the Year

About Anand Giridharadas

Anand Giridharadas is the bestselling author of Winners Take All. He is a correspondent-at-large for Time and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the 800-CEO-READ 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 Award.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780141996974
  • Length: 352 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 20mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 258g
  • Price: £10.99
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