HOW to EAT an ELEPHANT: ONE VOTER at a TIME (audiobook) by Sarah Longwell.

Published in September of 2026 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by the author, Sarah Longwell.
Duration: 8 hours, 29 minutes.
Unabridged.

Sarah Longwell is the publisher of The Bulwark media group. It started as a group of Never Trump Republican insiders who were looking to successfully primary Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election. Most of them had worked campagns or been in Conservative print or broadcast media.

They looked at the resources they had on hand and noted that one of them was a website that collected and reposted Never Trump-related articles and editorials. Someone got the bright idea to create their own content and that blossomed into a media empire with nine different podcasts/YouTube shows, eleven regular newsletters, an overloaded Substack page and more. 

But, that wasn't the original purpose of The Bulwark. They originally wanted to primary Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election. However, no one would step up to be an alternative to Trump in the 2020 primary unless they could see proof that Republicans were actually interested in an alternative. 

Sarah Longwell decided to do a series of focus groups, complete with the one way mirrors, to figure out if an alternative candidate to Trump was plausible.

Quickly, she found out that her visions of taking down Donald Trump from within the Republican Party were complete fantasy. But, now she had a new mission - use the focus groups to get a handle on how the GOP went from being the party of Reagan and Bush to being the party of MAGA.

During Covid, she turned these focus groups into Zoom meetings and she was able to crank them out in quantity in service of the theory that a single focus group might not be so accurate when it comes to getting a handle on the mood of the MAGA voter, but 50 of them should be enlightening. She has the results of hundreds and hundreds of focus groups, almost all of them discussing an aspect of the MAGA-verse.

The book is many other things besides the story of the focus groups. It's a history of The Bulwark, it's a mini-biography of the author. It's the story of her political journey from a tiny politically conservative think tank in Delaware to heading up one of the leading anti-MAGA media outlets.

Sometimes it's very personal, such as how her decision to come out of the closet. At the time she was working with the previously mentioned think tank to promote a book by Rick Santorum. The book tour included a lot of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in his "defense of marriage" arguments and she really began to feel that she had to decide if she was for this type of specious argument designed to spook the voters or for people that just wanted to live their lives without government harassment.

It turns out that moment of crisis was great preparation for the arrival of Donald Trump.

Longwell goes on to detail what she has learned and how anti-MAGA politicians can use this information to make the 2026 and 2028 campaigns successful.

I enjoyed the book, but I should - I am a fairly regular listener to Sarah Longwell's two podcasts (one is about the focus groups, one is with a rotating crew of attorneys that discuss the legality (or illegality) of various Trump Adminstration actions. If you are a Never Trumper and into political discussions, this will be of interest to you and comes highly recommended.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time by Sarah Longwell.

THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Brad Meltzer

Published in 2018 by Grand Central Publishing.

The Escape Artist features Jim "Zig" Zigarowski, a man who works at Dover Air Force Base. Dover is where many of America's soldiers who have died are brought back to America. Zig is a mortician - the best on the base. He skillfully prepares all but the most damaged bodies for open casket funerals. No one beats his sense of dedication because no one else is dealing with his own personal grief by throwing themselves into their work to try to help others with their grief like Zig does.

One day, Zig notes that the name of an incoming body from a plane crash in Alaska: Nola Brown, a soldier he knew as a girl in his daughter's Girl Scout troop. When he goes to prepare the body he discovers that this is not the same person. And, once he starts to look into things, he quickly finds that no one wants him to find out anything about Nola Brown and are willing to make sure that he doesn't...

The setting of this book was informative and interesting. But, the thriller aspect felt like it was rushed. There are some intriguing twists to the conspiracy that Zig uncovers, but it gets hokey and forced. For example, the inclusion of a bad guy with a special claw weapon that shoots electricity into its victims was more like a kid's comic book character than a story aimed at grown-ups.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Escape Artist by Brad Meltzer.

Note: I received a pre-publication copy of this book from the publisher so that I could write an honest review.