ABOUTTHE AUTHOR

Thom takes aim at the modern gun culture.

Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award winning, New York Times best-selling author of 25 books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, politics, and economics, and the number one progressive talk show host in the United States.

His daily three-hour radio/TV show is syndicated on commercial radio stations nationwide, on nonprofit and community stations nationwide, in Europe and Africa by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio, on its own YouTube channel, via podcast, worldwide through the US American Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann app in the App Store and for Android. The show is also simulcast as TV in real time into more than 60 million US homes by the Free Speech TV Network on Dish Network, DirectTV, and cable TV systems nationwide.

Thom has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of the Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP trainer by Richard Bandler, he was the originator of the revolutionary “hunter-farmer hypothesis” to understand attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

In the field of environmentalism, Thom has cowritten and costarred in four documentaries with Leonardo DiCaprio and is also featured in his documentary theatrical releases The 11th Hour and Ice on Fire. Thom’s book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, about the end of the age of oil and the inspiration for The 11th Hour, is an international best seller and used as a textbook in many schools.

One of the things that fascinate him the most is how often hidden histories have shaped—or been obscured in an attempt to reshape—modern issues and events that are so often taken for granted, while completely missing the historical context. Thom’s father, Carl Hartmann, wanted to be a professor of history, but his college education was interrupted in 1950 when his wife, Jean, became pregnant with Thom.

Carl spent most of the rest of his working life as the office manager and occasional lathe operator for a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, Michigan, but nonetheless collected more than 20,000 books, at least 3,000 of them histories or history textbooks, that became the walls and corridors of young Thom’s basement bedroom. Carl’s enthusiasm for and fascination with history—particularly largely unknown histories that nonetheless changed the world—is carried on in Thom’s life and work.

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment was particularly intriguing for Thom to research and write. He got his first cap gun around age five and his first BB gun around eight. Although he tries to minimize the neurologically destructive effects of the lead dust that sprays into the air when guns are shot, he’s enjoyed target and skeet shooting throughout his life and regularly engages in target-shooting competition with one of his brothers, who has a nice collection of handguns and a shooting range in his rural backyard.

Thom currently lives with his wife of 48 years, Louise, and their two dogs and three cats, on the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. They’re the parents of three adult children.