Saving Grace

Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered, and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts

By: Kirsten Powers

Narrated by: Tanis Parenteau, Kirsten Powers

The CNN senior political analyst and USA Today columnist offers a path to navigating the toxic division in our culture without compromising our convictions and emotional well-being, based on her experience as a journalist during the Trump era, interviews with experts, and research on what leads people to actually change their minds.

“Bracing, elevating, and essential.... Kirsten Powers has given us a great gift at an urgent hour.” (Jon Meacham)

For years, New York Times best-selling author Kirsten Powers has been center stage for many of our nation’s most searing political and cultural battles as a columnist, TV analyst, and onetime participant in the thunderdome of Twitter. On a good day, there will be civil disagreement. On a bad day, it’s all-out trench warfare - nothing but a cycle of outrage and self-righteousness. More and more, Powers finds herself wondering, along with countless Americans: How are we to cope with this nonstop madness?

In Saving Grace, Powers writes with wit and insight about our country’s poisonous political discourse, chronicling the efforts she’s made to stay grounded and preserve her sanity in a post-truth era that has driven many of us to the edge. She draws on lessons offered by faith leaders, therapists, theologians, social scientists, and activists working for change today. She dismantles the widespread misconception that grace means being nice, letting people get away with harmful behavior, or choosing neutrality in the name of peace. Grace, she argues, is anything but an act of surrender; instead, it is a kinetic and transformative force.

Saving Grace offers a template for a different kind of America, one where we can engage with people who hold opposing views without sacrificing our values or our passionate beliefs in the causes we care about. It’s a culture that embraces repentance and repair, a process through which those who have caused harm can take responsibility and work toward righting the wrongs in which they have participated. It’s a place where we’re empowered to see the possibility in other people, even people who are driving us nuts.

Provocative, original, and filled with deep wisdom, Saving Grace is an essential listen for anyone engaged in the struggle to live compassionately in an era of relentless demonization and division.

©2021 Kirsten Powers (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“In this deeply felt, compassionate, and sensible book, Kirsten Powers makes a case for opening ourselves up to the transformative power of grace and of goodness. Rooted in history, theology, and the lived experience of our fragmented time, Powers’s book is bracing, elevating, and essential.”—Jon Meacham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of The Soul of America

“Powers brings clarity and a fresh understanding to an idea that has been too often invoked to maintain the status quo. She shows grace to be a powerful force for inner and outer transformation, and an essential companion to anyone working for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world. Saving Grace is a light on the path during this dark time in American history.”—Don Lemon, host of CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight, author of This Is the Fire

“True to form, Kirsten Powers refuses to allow the culture wars to cost us our shared humanity. This book is a courageous call to truth and love existing side by side.”—Kate Bowler, author of No Cure for Being Human