The Book Review Review

There was a big deal a few years ago, when the Detroit Tigers were all of the sudden good, when Jim Leyland had Pudge Rodriguez bat, for either the first time in his career or for the first time in a long time. That it was it was like when, smack first in the Book Review this week (subtitled "Democratic Vistas"), we get a facefull of roundup, this time a roundup of books about Obama by the guy who wrote my AP US History textbook. The leadoff roundup has all the benefit, really, of an extra essay, which is basically never bad. Brinkley gives a brisk rundown of books about the election, including one that he says is interesting but less prescient than it should be; the former because it is by Rahm Emmanuel and the latter because it is by 2005 Rahm Emmanuel. Which made me think: who is reading these election books? Don't the kind of people who would get these, just get newspapers instead? It seems to me like topical books like this need an angle on which to hang their hats, like Recent Book I Liked Imperial Life in the Emerald City: for years, it can be The Book about the Green Zone. I'm not sure that things bode well for books to be The Book about the Obama campaign, if they are being collected in a roundup by Alan Brinkley. But who knows.

The other democratic vistas all look either sobering or inspiring, just as they ought to; there's Gwen Ifill's book The Breakthrough, a book on the composition of Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, and a piece on a spate of books about FDR. Never one to shirk their Prime Directive, they also throw in a few otherwise-ly literary choices. And the essay, about William Buckley meeting Reagan, and the way they represented the battle between the brains and the brawn of the conservative movement, is intriguing. All in all a decent one, but still waiting to return to midseason form after the winter holiday.