Episode
The Book Club: Anand Gopal – Days of Love and Rage
- Podcast
- Best of the Spectator
- Published
- Sep 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1846
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/best-of-the-spectator-45373/episodes/the-book-club-anand-gopal-days-of-love-and-rage/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/best-of-the-spectator-45373/the-book-club-anand-gopal-days-of-love-and-rage.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this week's Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The New Yorker writer Anand Gopal, whose new book, long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize, is Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution. What does freedom mean once the dictator has gone? Anand explains why he spent eight years reporting on Manbij, a city of 150,000 that pushed out the Assad regime and set about building a democracy from scratch – and how the argument over what came next split the revolution in two. They discuss the bubblegum seller who became a protest leader, the police chief who quietly stopped shooting at the crowds, how six outsiders talked their way into control of the city, and why the manuscript was handed in three days before Assad fell. Produced by Henry Lloyd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.