Is there an audiobook of All the Worst Humans?

Yes. All the Worst Humans has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Holter Graham.

How long is the All the Worst Humans audiobook?

The All the Worst Humans audiobook runs 6 hr 42 min.

Is All the Worst Humans on Kindle Unlimited?

No. All the Worst Humans was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 6, 2026.

All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians by Phil Elwood book cover for the Book of the Day memoir book review

Our score

4.1/ 5

Excellent

Listen to All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

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EDITION PUBLISHEDJune 2024

PublisherAllen & Unwin

Genres

Non-Fiction Memoir Politics

Themes

Complicity and moral drift in professional lifeHow propaganda and image management actually work at the operational levelThe Washington influence industry and its global reachReckoning and accountability — delayed, imperfect, and hard-won

All the Worst HumansHow I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians

Name: All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians
Price: 11.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Phil Elwood

Phil Elwood

Phil Elwood's memoir All the Worst Humans is a self-implicating insider account of Washington's PR industry, written by a former operative who ran influence campaigns for clients including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar — and who eventually had to reckon, in a very concrete way, with what that actually meant.

The Review

Our take

The book opens, essentially, with a man who is very good at his job and not yet bothered enough by that fact. Elwood's early career reads as a sequence of escalating absurdities: a four-day stretch in Las Vegas with a dictator's son that somehow keeps accelerating — more money, more exposure, more complicity — until the whole episode reads like a controlled demolition of professional judgment, rendered in deadpan detail that makes it funnier and more disturbing in equal measure. That scene sets the book's tone precisely: Elwood is not going to moralize at you while he's describing the thing, and the restraint is what makes the portrait land.

He structures the memoir around clients and campaigns rather than strict chronology, which means each chapter tends to arrive with its own moral weather system. The cumulative effect isn't exactly momentum in a conventional narrative sense — it's more like a slow accumulation of evidence, each job slightly harder to justify than the last. What makes this work is that Elwood understands the systemic logic well enough to explain it without excusing it. He's describing a marketplace with willing participants on every side: PR firms, lobbyists, journalists, politicians, foreign ministries. The chapters dealing with West Africa and the Middle East are especially useful here, because they make visible what foreign influence operations actually look like as a business — strategy decks, client calls, billable hours, magazine profiles timed to diplomatic moments. The mechanics are specific enough to be genuinely educational.

Elwood has a gift for comic timing that keeps the self-accounting from curdling into self-pity. When he describes pitching a sympathetic journalist on a narrative he knows is thin, the humor comes not from the absurdity of the situation but from his own fluency in it — the ease with which the language came, the way the pitch practically wrote itself. That kind of detail does more to indict the industry than any amount of explicit editorializing, and Elwood is smart enough to know it. He largely lets the reader do the moral arithmetic.

The book's structural turning point — an FBI contact that arrives with the force of a cold bucket of water — is handled with more sobriety than most of what precedes it, and that tonal shift is deliberate. The memoir's arc moves from cheerful cynicism to something more unsettled and harder to dismiss, and the shift earns its weight precisely because it builds slowly rather than arriving as a sudden conversion. That said, readers who want the moral accounting front-loaded may find the first half's breezy self-deprecation tests their patience before the stakes fully settle in.

Why you should read

Readers drawn to insider accounts of political influence and media manipulation
Fans of self-implicating memoirs where the narrator is the instrument of the problem, not just a witness to it
Anyone curious about how foreign governments actually shape their image in Western media — the operational details, not just the concept
Followers of FARA, lobbying reform, or the broader Washington influence industry

What to expect

This is memoir, not investigative journalism — the scope is one man's career, not a systematically sourced account, so readers wanting external documentation and hard evidence should adjust expectations accordingly
The first half leans heavily into comedic self-deprecation; readers who want moral weight early may find the tone a little too comfortable with itself before the stakes fully arrive

One honest caveat: this is memoir, not reported investigation. Elwood's scope is necessarily limited to what he personally witnessed and participated in, and he makes no attempt to source or document the industry beyond his own experience. That's a fair trade if you're reading for voice, texture, and the specific gravity of personal culpability — but readers hoping for a policy argument or an externally sourced account of the lobbying and foreign-influence business should pair this with more rigorously reported work. What Elwood offers is something different and genuinely valuable: the view from inside one career, told by someone who was good at it, and who eventually stopped pretending that was enough.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.1/ 5

Excellent

Listen to All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians free with an Audible trial Narrator, runtime & our audio review

Buy on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of All the Worst Humans?: Yes. All the Worst Humans has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Holter Graham.
Listen to All the Worst Humans free with an Audible trial
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the All the Worst Humans audiobook?: The All the Worst Humans audiobook runs 6 hr 42 min.
Is All the Worst Humans on Kindle Unlimited?: No. All the Worst Humans was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 6, 2026.
How much does All the Worst Humans cost?: On Amazon: Kindle $11.99, Paperback $11.49, Hardcover $12.87. Prices as of August 27, 2026 at 3:45 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians about?: The book opens, essentially, with a man who is very good at his job and not yet bothered enough by that fact. Elwood's early career reads as a sequence of escalating absurdities: a four-day stretch in Las Vegas with a dictator's son that somehow keeps accelerating — more money, more exposure, more…
Is All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians worth reading?: We scored All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians 4.1 out of 5. Phil Elwood's memoir All the Worst Humans is a self-implicating insider account of Washington's PR industry, written by a former operative who ran influence campaigns for clients including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar — and who eventually had to reckon, in a very…