List $29.95

Written by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose - Audio book narrated by Liz Smith - Unabridged Nonfiction - 6 COMPACT DISCS - 7 hours

Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (October 2007)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

Throughout her long career of “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” the cause closest to Molly Ivins’s heart was working to protect the freedoms we all value. Sadly, today we’re living in a time when dissent is equated with giving aid to terrorists, when any of us can be held in prison without even knowing the charges against us, and when our constitutional rights are being interpreted by a president who calls himself “The Decider.”

Ivins got the idea for Bill of Wrongs while touring America to honor her promise to speak out, gratis, at least once a month in defense of free speech. In her travels Ivins met ordinary people going to extraordinary measures to safeguard our most precious liberties, and when she first started writing this book, she intended it to be a joyous celebration of those heroes. But during the Bush years, the project’s focus changed. Ivins became concerned about threats to our cherished freedoms–among them the Patriot Act and the weakening of habeas corpus–and she observed with anger how dissent in the defense of liberties was being characterized as treason by the Bush administration and its enablers.

From illegal wiretaps, the unlawful imprisonment of American citizens, and the undermining of freedom of the press to the creeping influence of religious extremism on our national agenda and the erosion of the checks and balances that prevent a president from seizing unitary powers, Ivins and her longtime collaborator, Lou Dubose, co-author of Shrub and Bushwacked, describe the attack on America’s vital constitutional guarantees. With devastating humor and keen eyes for deceit and hypocrisy, they show how severe these incursions have become, and they ask us all to take an active role in protecting the Bill of Rights.

In life and on the printed page, Molly Ivins was too cool to offer a posthumous valedictory (or even to take a victory lap for her many triumphs over inane, vainglorious, and addle pated politicos). But in Bill of Wrongs, her final and perhaps greatest book, the irrepressible Molly Ivins really does have the last word.

About the Authors: Molly Ivins began her career in journalism as the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. In 1970, she became co-editor of The Texas Observer, which afforded her frequent fits of hysterical laughter while covering Texas legislature. In 1976, Ivins joined The New York Times as a political reporter. The next year, she was named Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, chiefly because there was no one else in the bureau. In 1982, she returned once more to Texas, which may have indicated a masochistic streak, and always had plenty to write about after that. Her column was syndicated in more than three hundred newspapers, and her freelance work appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Harper's, and other publications. Her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?, spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books with Lou Dubose on George W. Bush--Shrub, Bushwhacked, and Who Let the Dogs In?--were national bestsellers. A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she claimed that her two greatest honors were that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M. Molly Ivins died in the Winter of 2007.

Lou Dubose was editor of The Texas Observer and politics editor for The Austin Chronicle. and he currently edits The Washington Spectator. He is the co-author of Shrub and Bushwhacked (with Molly Ivins), as well as The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress (with Jan Reid) and Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (with Jake Bernstein).

About the Narrator: Liz Smith was born in Fort Worth Texas, and began her media career in the 1950s as a pioneering news producer with Mike Wallace at CBS Radio in New York City. Known as the highest-paid female print journalist in the world, Liz's daily column is now syndicated nationally to millions of eager readers in over 70 newspapers.