Gary Rivlin
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Gary Rivlin

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I'll confess that in high school I was the type more likely to read the Cliff Notes than the assigned work. I was going to be an engineer; who cared about books? But for a requirement in college I took a literature course and I've been grateful ever since. I joke that I'm a self-taught reader, having pretty much started at age 19. Politics and social issues propelled me into journalism. I felt like I had something to say so I started to write. In college I always enjoyed reading a great alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader. I began contributing to the Reader and eventually earned a staff job there writing about Chicago politics. That led to my first book, Fire on the Prairie, in which I tell the story of race politics at work in every big city by telling the tale of Chicago during the 1980s, a particularly brutal racial time in that city’s history. Youth violence was the subject of my second book, Drive-By. In that work, I introduce readers to the range of characters and issues at work in a single drive-by shooting that left a 13-year-old dead and put three teenagers in prison for murder. With my third book, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, I returned to my early tech roots. I left the book world for about a decade. I started writing for a range of magazines, from Wired to the New York Times Magazine to GQ. At the start of 2004, I took a staff position with The New York Times. As terrific experience as that was, I’m very happy to be returning to books and talking about my latest work, BROKE, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. – How the Working Poor Became Big Business.
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Fire on the Prairie

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    • Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency
    • By: Gary Rivlin
    • Narrated by: George Orlando
    • Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
    • Release date: 02-15-13
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 40 ratings

    Regular price: $24.95 or 1 credit

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    • Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence
    • By: Gary Rivlin
    • Narrated by: Joe Knezevich
    • Length: 11 hrs
    • Release date: 03-25-25
    • Language: English
    • Not rated yet

    Regular price: $25.47 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $25.47 or 1 credit

    • From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business
    • By: Gary Rivlin
    • Narrated by: Scott Sowers
    • Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
    • Release date: 08-24-10
    • Language: English
    • 4 out of 5 stars 88 ratings

    Regular price: $25.19 or 1 credit

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