And the Race Is On

This being a presidential election year, we’re off to an early start at Politics and Prose with events featuring talented political writers. And many others are slated for the weeks ahead, as our shelves fill with an expanding inventory of political titles.

The biggest splash so far this month has come with the release of Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas. Kantor, a New York Times reporter, has presented a detailed and layered examination of the complicated political and personal roles of the president and first lady as they have adjusted to life in the White House and the strains of leading the country. Although Kantor interviewed several dozen current and former White House staffers, numerous close friends and colleagues of the first couple, and the Obamas themselves, initial reaction to the book focused on her accounts of friction between Michelle and senior presidential aides. This even led the first lady (who said she hadn’t read the book) to question the way she was portrayed. While the controversy has helped spur sales of the book, it suggests that well-researched attempts at nuanced political portraiture are more likely to be picked apart for sensational tidbits than appreciated for the broader understanding of political leadership they provide careful readers.

For a close look at the leading Republican contender, there’s the just-released The Real Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two Boston Globe investigative reporters. Also out this month are several books seeking to explain the political and economic landscape against which the presidential race is transpiring. Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank, for instance, recounts in Pity the Billionaire how the Right, whose notions of laissez-faire capitalism and economic free play seemed to have been discredited several years ago by the financial crisis and recessionary plunge, has managed to resurrect itself.

In The Swing Vote, Linda Killian looks at the still-sizeable group of independent voters who have grown increasingly frustrated with the heightened bi-polarity of American politics. And in The Age of Austerity, veteran journalist Thomas Byrne Edsall explores the federal government’s continuing inability to resolve its budget crisis and adequately address the nation’s other pressing economic problems. “The two major political parties,” Edsall writes, “are enmeshed in a death struggle to protect the benefits and goods that flow to their respective bases, each attempting to expropriate the resources of the other.”

Coming next month are more critical assessments of the country’s institutional failures and its fractious, bitterly divided political scene. These include The Obama Hate Machine by Bill Press, While America Sleeps by former senator Russ Feingold, The Fox Effect by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Hayt, and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson.

Experienced journalists are offering more behind-the-scene accounts of the Obama presidency—notably, The Escape Artists by Noam Scheiber, and Showdown: The Inside Story of Obama’s Fight to Save His Presidency by David Corn. Plus, in June, one of the most anticipated biographies of the president, Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss.

And this list takes us only to the middle of 2012!

-- Brad and Lissa