
When the Clock Broke
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
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Narrated by:
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Eric Jason Martin
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By:
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John Ganz
About this listen
National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, 2024
Long-listed, Boston Globe Best Books of the Year, 2024
Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2024
"John Ganz is the most important young political writer of his generation—just the one our dark moment needs."—Rick Perlstein
"Lively and kaleidoscopic."—Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
"John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct . . . When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times."—Jeet Heer
A lively, revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today.
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.
In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.
In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 John Ganz (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Lucid and propulsive . . . [When the Clock Broke is] woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary . . . Ganz's dry with is ever-present . . . This is a revelation."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With his combination of immense erudition, independence of mind, clarity of expression, and honesty in reckoning with the terrifying weight of history, John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct. To place him in his proper category, you have to rope in James Baldwin, Garry Wills, and Joan Didion. When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times."—Jeet Heer, national affairs correspondent for The Nation
"When the Clock Broke locates the origins of our strange political age in the crack-up of conventional wisdom at the end of the Reagan era and the Cold War. Ganz's clock sounds the alarm on some of the most ominous and entrenched aspects of the American political condition. Unlike many observers these days, he also finds absurdity and humor in our national pageant. Sometimes we need to laugh as well as cry—Ganz's book helps us do both."—Beverly Gage, Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University and author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
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Story
On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protesters wearing bell-bottom jeans hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young Americans—National Guardsmen sporting gas masks and rifles. At half past noon, violence unfolded with chaotic speed, as guardsmen—many of whom had joined the Guard to escape the draft—opened fire on the students. Kent State meticulously re-creates the divided cultural landscape of America during the Vietnam War and popular anxieties around the country.
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Disappointed
- By Elwood Sulzer on 09-21-24
By: Brian VanDeMark
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The Achilles Trap
- Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq
- By: Steve Coll
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 17 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved.
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From the Saddam’s Point of View.
- By philip on 03-08-24
By: Steve Coll
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Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
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Time of research
- By ChiChi's Rule on 05-06-25
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Beautiful Days
- Stories
- By: Zach Williams
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.
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Needs more edge
- By Jeffrey A Horler on 12-15-24
By: Zach Williams
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Nixon Agonistes
- The Crisis of the Self-Made Man
- By: Garry Wills
- Narrated by: Adam Barr
- Length: 24 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this acclaimed biography that earned him a spot on Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Garry Wills takes a thoughtful, in-depth, and often "very amusing" look at the thirty-seventh US president, and draws some surprising conclusions about a man whose name has become synonymous with scandal and the abuse of power (Kirkus Reviews).
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Writing as Smooth as drinking milk on a sunny afternoon
- By RColby on 12-06-23
By: Garry Wills
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Before the Storm
- Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
- By: Rick Perlstein
- Narrated by: Kiff VandenHeuvel
- Length: 28 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.
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Ok for Conservatives
- By Chris Corsini on 07-15-19
By: Rick Perlstein
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Stories Are Weapons
- Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
- By: Annalee Newitz
- Narrated by: Alexandra Cohler
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America's deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War-era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online.
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The Forever Wars
- By idrissa35653 on 12-27-24
By: Annalee Newitz
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Creep
- Accusations and Confessions
- By: Myriam Gurba
- Narrated by: Myriam Gurba
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Creep is “sharp, conversational cultural criticism” (Bustle), a blistering and slyly informal sociology of creeps (the individuals who deceive, exploit, and oppress) and creep culture (the systems, tacit rules, and institutions that feed them and allow them to grow and thrive). In eleven bold, electrifying pieces, Gurba mines her own life and the lives of others—some famous, some infamous, some you’ve never heard of but will likely never forget—to unearth the toxic traditions that have long plagued our culture and enabled the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes.
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(Should Have Been) Great
- By Abstraction on 12-28-24
By: Myriam Gurba
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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
- The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
- By: Jonathan Blitzer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Blitzer, André Santana
- Length: 18 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey much farther away. Some flee persecution, others crime or hunger. They may have already been deported, but the United States remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. They will take their chances.
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How America Created its Own Border Problem
- By Amazon Customer on 04-19-24
By: Jonathan Blitzer
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The Children of the Dead
- By: Elfriede Jelinek, Gitta Honegger - translator
- Narrated by: Christa Lewis
- Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria's scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident.
By: Elfriede Jelinek, and others
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Who Killed Truth?
- A History of Evidence
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Many historians and cultural observers argue we live in a post-truth world—but if truth is dead, who killed it? And how did it die? Join celebrated historian Jill Lepore as she cracks the case by examining key moments in the history of truth, doubt, and evidence across the last century.
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Been waiting for this
- By Terry W. on 07-14-23
By: Jill Lepore
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The Hollow Parties
- The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
- By: Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld
- Narrated by: Tom Beyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.
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Too arcane
- By James Larimer on 07-18-24
By: Daniel Schlozman, and others
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Crack-Up Capitalism
- Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
- By: Quinn Slobodian
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism.
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Insightful read/listening
- By Ernie on 04-17-25
By: Quinn Slobodian
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Memory Piece
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Ko
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier.
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Maybe it's the narrator, but I could not continue
- By Judy in Salt Lake on 10-22-24
By: Lisa Ko
Amazing history of the early 90s
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Brilliant
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Sad reminder
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There’s David Duke’s mainstreaming of Nazism, John Gotti making NY gangsterism fashionable, right wing police thuggery in LA and NY, Ross Perot building a populist movement on the basis of POW-MIA conspiracy theories and a billionaire’s cash, and more. Honestly the best book on the MAGA phenomenon yet, with its creatively assembled mosaic of the movement’s prehistory. Should be a model for studies of contemporary American politics moving forward.
The best book about Trumpism to date barely even mentions Donald
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Either an exercise in trust of the reader or bathetic petering out
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Brilliant.
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Best Rise of Trump Book
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Interesting perspective
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Provides a bridge from Prequel (or Ultra podcast) by Rachel Maddow to the present day
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The voice of the reader!
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