Smells Like Dead Elephants
Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
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Narrated by:
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Peter Johnson
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By:
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Matt Taibbi
About this listen
Smells Like Dead Elephants is a brilliant collection from Matt Taibbi, "a political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke so much fun" (The Washington Post).
Bringing together Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his "Road Work" column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders.
Taibbi has plenty to say about George W. Bush, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, but he doesn't just hit inside the Beltway. He gets involved in the action, infiltrating Senator Conrad Burns' birthday party under disguise as a lobbyist for a fictional oil firm that wants to drill in the Grand Canyon. He floats into apocalyptic post-Katrina New Orleans in a dinghy with Sean Penn. He goes to Iraq as an embedded reporter, where he witnesses the mind-boggling dysfunction of our occupation and spends three nights in Abu Ghraib prison. And he reports from two of the most bizarre and telling trials in recent memory: California v. Michael Jackson and the evolution-versus-intelligent-design trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Equally funny and shocking, this is excellent work from one of our most entertaining writers.
©2007 Matt Taibbi. Excerpt from “The End of the World,” from Collected Poems, 1917–1982 by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright 1985 by the Estate of Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization - a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.
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Undercover in Trump's America
- By David Larson on 09-06-17
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Rick Mercer Final Report
- By: Rick Mercer
- Narrated by: Rick Mercer
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Rick Mercer can always be relied on to provoke a strong reaction - but what he said one fall day in 2017 truly shocked Canada. In a rant posted on social media, the great Canadian satirist announced loud and clear that the 15th season of the Rick Mercer Report - the nation's best-watched and best-loved comedy show - would be the last. This volume brings together never-before-published rants from the last five seasons of the show, plus a selection of the very best rants from earlier years.
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Mercer Hits It Out Of The Ballpark
- By Wade Lancaster on 11-11-19
By: Rick Mercer
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Madame President
- The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
- By: Helene Cooper
- Narrated by: Marlene Cooper Vasilic
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the harrowing but triumphant story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, leader of the Liberian women's movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first democratically elected female president in African history.
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Enlightening
- By Jean on 04-28-17
By: Helene Cooper
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Bobby Kennedy
- The Making of a Liberal Icon
- By: Larry Tye
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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History remembers Robert F. Kennedy as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that had its beginnings in the conservative 1950s. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to paint a complete portrait of this singularly fascinating figure.
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Absorbing
- By Jean on 01-18-17
By: Larry Tye
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Witness to the Revolution
- Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul
- By: Clara Bingham
- Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 18 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed 9,000 protests and 84 acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching 50,000, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of American society.
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great perspective on an era
- By james on 04-02-18
By: Clara Bingham
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The Man Without a Face
- The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
- By: Masha Gessen
- Narrated by: Masha Gessen
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world.
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A Preview of Authoritarianism in the USA
- By Jimmy O on 06-08-19
By: Masha Gessen
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The Truth (with Jokes)
- By: Al Franken
- Narrated by: Al Franken
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Al Franken reveals the alarming story of how Bush (barely) beat Kerry with his campaign of "fear, smear, and queers", and then claimed a nonexistent mandate; Republicans decided that Terri Schiavo would make "a great political issue"; Conservatives sought to undermine Social Security by using a strategy borrowed from...Vladimir Lenin; and more.
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The Truth Hurts!
- By A. Best on 09-06-10
By: Al Franken
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Shortest Way Home
- One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future
- By: Pete Buttigieg
- Narrated by: Pete Buttigieg
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Once described by The Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of", Pete Buttigieg, the 36-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a "dying city", and transformed it into a shining model of urban reinvention.
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Reveals a Person Wise & Experienced & Literate
- By dbbks3 on 03-17-19
By: Pete Buttigieg
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Insane Clown President
- By: Matt Taibbi
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy's uncertain future, by the country's most perceptive and fearless political journalist.
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Slow Motion Horror
- By Rick on 01-20-17
By: Matt Taibbi
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What listeners say about Smells Like Dead Elephants
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Manny Navarro
- 04-16-16
Great synopses of our leadership woes during the Bush era.
I thoroughly enjoyed the audio book, shined a light - and brought closure to, many issues that I was not quite familiar with during the Bush years.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 08-29-21
How the Hell Did We Get Here?
If you were wondering how we got to the Trump era, this is a quick trip down memory lane to clarify it for you. Remember Bush, Cheney, Gingrich, Rumsfeld, DeLeigh and the Iraq War? This is a distilled version of the poison Congress has been feeding us for at least 20 years.
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- Christian R. Unger
- 04-09-17
Takes a long time to get to a point
Taibbi's books are focused on shining a light on an injustice, but this book lacks focus and the beam scatters as the narrative touches on disjoint and (at best) loosely connected aspects. Unlike his more recent books here is a discussion of culture and politics, rather than just politics, and while the two are intertwined, the focus seems off. Broadly this is because it is the culture of the people vs the politics of the governing, and although there is a point to be mad, I am not sure that Taibbi ever gets there, leaving behind a sensation like Jon Ronson's: interesting but what is your point?; and unlike Ronson where the point is the absurdity, here one wonders which aspects of the absurd world we should focus on.
Overall this title is not up to the standard of his later books, in that it deals with a deeper issue, which really is a positive, but also has not arrived at the anger that makes the more superficial works more illustrated or animated. This in turn means the title is less engaging, although really it tries for more contemplation from the audience.
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1 person found this helpful
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- John E Cao
- 08-10-15
Story decent but narration too fast
Given the topic of the story (political buffoonery by out esteemed electorate), the narrator is reading way too fast. Need to slow down to I can digest the irony in the story. I've read (listened) to many other Taibi books, so imagine if you're not familiar with this author. You'd be lost by chapter 2.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Matey
- 06-02-16
A MUST READ FOR EVERY AMERICAN
A sobering picture of the so called American democracy. We can delude our self's all we want, but we do not live in a democracy. Everything is for sale to the highest biter and '' Fuck the poor '' is our national philosophy. I hope that people will read this book and be at least informed, about what's going on in America today.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Deeanna Bunton Tribbey
- 05-05-17
Talks very fast, can be a tad dull
But the hilarious moments make it worth listening to. It is disturbing how the U.S. Congress has fallen so hard.
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- Saul Kravitz
- 11-28-16
laughed and cried
great book. i alternated laughing at Taibbi's great writing and crying over the state of US institutions.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Wil Dredge
- 04-18-17
Very Informative!
If you want to understand more about how our government cane to be disfuntional, you should read this book!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jay James
- 05-23-19
Before Trump and beforeI knew Mr. Taibbi
If you think you live in a democracy just listen and digest the utter obliteration of that thought.
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- Philip Savva
- 12-14-20
Storyteller
A great story as every medium sing praise of stories. This writer had me laughing and rolling into follow up laughs. Interleaving this guy with behavior science books 📚
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