Joyce Vance issues a clarion call to her fellow Americans: Help save our democracy.

On this episode of Fully Booked, Joyce Vance joins us to discuss Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy (Dutton, October 21). “A look at the wreckage wrought thus far by the present administration, and what can be done about it,” Kirkus writes in a review of this “hopeful manifesto for a renewed democracy.”

Vance served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017. She is a distinguished professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama School of Law, a legal analyst for MSNBC, the author of the popular Substack Civil Discourse, and the co-host of two podcasts, #SistersInLaw and Cafe’s Insider. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, Bob, a retired judge, and a menagerie of children, chickens, cats, and dogs.

Here’s a bit more from our review of Giving Up Is Unforgivable: “[F]ormer U.S. attorney Vance—she resigned the day before President Trump’s first inauguration—opens with the realization that, in the first salvos of his second term, she had been focusing on all that was wrong and not with all that was right: ‘The rule of law was being bent, but it was not broken.’ She then exhorts readers, ‘Don’t be the frog,’ the one in the pot that’s being slowly heated and will thus cook to death without complaint. The metaphor is useful to the extent that, as she notes, that’s how dictators come to power, in ‘a slow slide toward tyranny, easily dismissed for far too long by far too much of the populace’.…Vance, it should be said, is no Pollyanna.… [She] offers useful pointers on how to avoid the pot and exercise one’s constitutional rights, most important of them voting, reminding us—optimistically—that ‘the way to challenge the bully is at the ballot box.’”

Vance and I discuss our Constitutional rights, the Civil Rights movement and the power of collective action, voter ID laws, the importance of ongoing civic education, creative ways to help defend democracy, and much more.

Then editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, and John McMurtrie share their top picks in books for the week.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr (Amulet/Abrams)

This Is Orange: A Field Trip Through Color by Rachel Poliquin, illus. by Julie Morstad (Candlewick)

Letter From Japan by Marie Kondo with Marie Iida (Crown)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Mt. Forgotten by Kevin Abrams

The Ghost Writer by Brian Warner

Stormbringer by G.R. Boden

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.