Political Books

Anyone who's completely unaware of the impact that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg left on American life in the second half of the 20th century must have spent his life on Mars. But what a lot of us are less aware of is his international peregrinations, especially to India and its environs.

Deborah Baker, a writer who has lived in Calcutta since 1990, describes in A Blue Hand -- The Beats in India how in 1961, Ginsberg embarked with his lover Peter Orlovsky on "a restless, comic, and tortured quest for meaning in the ashrams in the Himalayan foothills, the opium dens of Delhi, and the burning pyres of Benares."

In Calcutta, Ginsberg joined a circle of aspiring young writers, which led to a cultural exchange of ideas between East and West. Baker's work traces "how India's landscape of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise, devastating poverty and political unease profoundly altered American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century."

Even for this lawyer, it's as hard to read Vincent Bugliosi as his fellow lawyer/author Alan Dershowitz. So tendentious is their approach to reasoned discourse that you feel that seated across from them at lunch, you'd be lifted half out of your seat by your tie before coffee arrived.

Bugliosi, who's been commanding public attention since his involvement in the Charles Manson trial led to his best-selling book, Helter Skelter, knows that even many diehard George Bush critics will dismiss, out of hand, the idea that the President ought to be tried for murder because of his role in the Iraqi war. So, in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, he sets the table by carefully conditioning his readers to disabuse themselves of the notion that no matter how misdirected George Bush was in the 2003 runup to war and even if he lied about the WMDs, that it's unthinkable that an American president could, like Saddam Hussein, face conviction for killing thousands. It's just not the American way.

The manner in which wealth and power have anesthetized Americans to government corruption all around them leads Bugliosi to conclude that "I do not believe that America is a great nation anymore." He bases his opinion on other nations' opinion of us, on Kenneth Starr's ability run roughshod in trying to destroy an American president over his private sexual dalliances, on public unpopularity towards helping the poor, and on our government's failure to provide universal health care.

His conclusion is sobering and persuasive until he concludes that another major reason for America's decline is that while European nations have "virtually discarded organized religion," America "is the only nation in the Western world....that is becoming more religious." He then goes on basically to equate organized religion with born-again fundamentalism. I'm sure the scores of millions of mainstream, practicing American Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims would recoil from that conclusion.

Texas law enforcers' raid in April on the ranch owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints and led by Warren Jeffs transfixed the nation, as young women, dressed in 19th century clothing and hairstyles to match, begged for return of the 419 children removed from the ranch and placed in protective custody.

In When Men Become Gods -- Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, And The Women Who Fought Back, writer Stephen Singular recounts how the sect came into being, how Warren Jeffs came to head it, and how investigators built a case for his arrest in 2007. The following brief excerpt gives a flavor of the tale:

"On January 30, 1998, Warren Jeffs spoke to a class of seventh and eighth grade females: 'A girl's emotions and feelings can be led by the wrong things if she's not careful. After all, who knows the spirit of revelation better -- you or the prophet?'

"Sometimes Jeffs demonstrated his teachings about female obedience and male leadership with cruelty. His first wife, Annette, had become Alta (Academy)'s home economics instructor, and one morning in front of boys and girls gathered in the meeting hall, Warren and his spouse were addressing the audience. he grabbed Annette's long braided hair, twisting it slowly around his hand, tightening his grip until she dropped to the floor, her face turning crimson and contorting in pain. She didn't make a sound or movement of protest. He let go and quietly left the room with no explanation to the students and no apology to his wife, who stood up, straightened her hair, and went back to teaching. She'd grasped well the concept of 'keeping sweet.'"

In the 1980s, Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, a Syrian originally known as Mustafa Sethmarian Nasar, published a 1,600-page book entitled, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which supplied the younger generation with a blueprint to follow to build an Islamist insurgency and guerrilla warfare movement.

While al-Suri was reportedly captured in Pakistan in late 2005, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Prof. Brynjar Lia argues in Architect of Global Jihad that he "remains a potent political and ideological figure." His new book is a biography of the charismatic leader and the world that gave rise to him.

The earth, according to retired University of Washington Prof. William H. Calvin in Global Fever -- How to Treat Climate Change, has begun what is nothing less than a death spiral. The time has long passed for considering how much sacrifice we're willing to make -- not if we want to save the planet we inhabit.

"Every decade since 1950 has seen more floods and more wildfires on every continent," Calvin observes. "Deserts are expanding, coral reefs are dying, fisheries are declining, hurricanes are strengthening. The debate about climate change is over: there's no question that global warming has made the Earth sick, and the outlook for the future calls for ever-warmer temperatures and deadlier results."

Given the stridency of his warning, it's not surprising that this environmental Cassandra calls for nothing less than a "third industrial revolution" to save the planet. This one, Calvin writes, would be "one of clean technologies -- while simultaneously expanding our use of existing low-emission technologies, from nuclear power to plug-in hybrid vehicles, until we achieve the necessary scientific breakthroughs."

Using social science techniques to get inside the heads of prospective jurors is employed in many, if not most, civil jury trials today, producing a bonanza for consultants in the field. As a science, it dates back three decades to the Harrisburg Seven trial of anti-Vietnam War protestors.

As Joel D. Lieberman and Bruce D. Sales argue in Scientific Jury Selection, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sought funds from Congress to control antiwar protestors, including Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan. Upon their indictment, the government deliberately moved their trial to the conservative bastion of Harrisburg, PA. In reaction, sociologist Jay Schulman and other antiwar supporters formed a coalition to help the defense create a more impartial jury.

The trial strategy the defense employed was risky by any standards -- they proclaimed the defendants' innocence at the outset and called no witnesses. Seven days of jury deliberation ended in a hung jury, and the defendants were never retried. The rest, as they say, is history.

Joel D. Lieberman, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada; and Bruce D. Sales, professor of psychiology, sociology, psychiatry and law at the University of Arizona, trace the history of jury selection, the purpose of voir dire, and the influence of demographics, personality, and attitudes on jury selection. They examine how prospective jurors are questioned and observed for nonverbal behavior, and suggest how scientific jury selection is likely to evolve in the future.

How many grandparents among us have given official state quarters to our grandkids to teach them about history, government and geography? On the occasion of the release of the final state quarter this year, attorney Jim Noles takes readers on a tour of the people, places, monuments and symbols that appear on the quarters in A Pocketful of History -- Four Hundred Years of America -- One State Quarter At A Time. In a brief interview, Noles talked about his interest in the quarters and the writing of his book:

Q. Visually speaking, which quarter do you like best?

A. I think there are several good ones. I like the artistic simplicity of Connecticut's, with the Charter Oak; of Montana's, with a buffalo skull; and of Texas', with the Lone Star. I think Rhode Island's is well done also. It depicts the schooner Reliance sailing in front of the Claiborne Pell Bridge.

Q. Your book is divided into fifty chapters, and each tells the story behind the image of a particular state's quarter. Do you have a favorite?

A. I enjoyed the chapters in which I was able to tell something new or unusual about a state's history. For example, Colorado's quarter depicts a mountain range, which is a fairly common image of Colorado in people's minds. But very few people realize that the CIA trained Tibetan freedom fighters in Colorado's mountains outside of Leadville in the 1950s. Another example -- Alabama's quarter depicts Helen Keller. Practically everyone in the world knows of Helen Keller. But far fewer realize that, because of her radical political beliefs, she was subjected to monitoring by the FBI.

Among exemplars of the chronicling of lives of the poor were novelist Stephen Crane, who wrote Maggie, a Girl of the Streets in 1893 and Lincoln Steffens, whose The Shame of the Cities in 1904 lifted the lid off the roiling pot of municipal corruption. But Bonnie Yochelson and her fellow authors argue in Rediscovering Jacob Riis -- Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York, these muckrakers lacked the sense of moral uplift brought by their colleague, Jacob Riis, whose 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, used photographs to detail the breakdown of the family, small children imprisoned in sweatshops, and homelessness on a grand scale.

In his day and beyond, Riis proved a controversial figure for faith in private and religious charity to remedy these ills and for the possibility of creating affordable housing for the masses, whom immigration had dumped into the urban milieu in numbers far to large for cities to assimilate.

Bonnie Yochelson, former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, and Daniel Czitrom, professor of history at Mount Holyoke, offer scores of Riis's photographs and revisit many of the questions that poverty reformers from Jacob Riis to John Edwards wrestle with:

"What is the structural relationship between persistent poverty and new immigrants? If different "races" and nationalities possess inherent moral and cultural characteristics, how can that be reconciled with the American creed of individualism? How does environment shape "character"? What are the proper roles of government, private philanthropy, and religion in reform efforts? How important is spectacle and entertainment in rousing the public conscience?"

Workers have fared better or worse in one chapter or another of their participation in American capitalism. Yet in spite of all the gains recorded by the labor movement during the 20th century, the early years of the 21st aren't likely to go down in history as among its salad days.

In The Big Squeeze -- Tough Times for the American Worker, veteran New York Times labor writer Steven Greenhouse catalogs the challenges facing America's workforce: "the offshoring of white-collar jobs, the Wal-Mart effect, the steeper climb for young workers, the decline of organized labor, the exodus of factories to Mexico and China, the growing power imbalance between management and worker." Greenhouse relies not simply on anecdotal evidence but weaves in historical, economic and sociological analysis before forming his conclusions.

Helpfully, Greenhouse's tract is not only analytical but prescriptive, as he calls for solutions -- some insightful, others unrealistic. He would increase the minimum wage, legislate against management sleights-of-hand which effectively steal a portion of workers' wages, create statutory safeguards to insure job security and health benefits for the ill and elderly, and creating retirement security accounts to supplement Social Security. Other proposals, such as strengthening organized labor and treating workers with respect, depend on political will and grassroots effort, which seem lacking in today's environment. 

Much has been written of the widening gap between the power elite and the working class in America over the past three decades. But, as journalist Bill Bishop writes in The Big Sort, an even more insidious trend has been taking place during that period which is just as divisive. He calls the phenomenon The Big Sort.

Some of its characteristics include the clustering of college degree-holders in particular cities, reversing a trend towards an even spread across American cities; the growth of homogeneous mega-churches in new suburbs, built for "people like us"; and the targeting by marketers towards like-minded "image tribes." In a brief interview, Bishop speaks of the writing of his new book:

Q. Isn't the whole lesson of the 2008 election that the country is sick of this "red" and "blue" way of thinking?

A. No question. People -- especially Americans -- hate disagreement. That's why they put themselves in churches, neighborhoods, and clubs where they easily find agreement. It's interesting, however, that when pollsters ask about compromise, most Democrats and Republicans believe their side has given enough -- that it's time for the other side to see the error of their ways. We all seem to think it's the other side that's causing the problems. So, yes, there's a lot to talk about the end of partisanship. We just don't see anybody changing neighborhoods."

Q. Are you saying 2008 will be a repeat of 2000 and 2004?

A. There's no telling, of course. But already you can see The Big Sort at work in the primaries. The maps of Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Missouri in the Democratic primary are all deeply marked by geographic segmentation. Senator Barack Obama won the traditional Democratic strongholds in the cities. Senator Hillary Clinton won the communities that voted Republican in the last several presidential elections.

Idealism and pragmatism are two threads that continually interweave through American presidential campaigns. In 2008, widely considered a "change" election, idealism has come to the fore in ways not often seen. In Moral Clarity -- A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, moral philosopher Susan Neiman argues that this idealism is "far more than abstraction or stump-speech rhetoric. It is a potent driving force with a long history of effecting change that has undiminished potential for grappling with the most controversial and pressing issues of our time, including the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq."

In a brief Q&A, Neiman talked about the subjects raised by her book:

Q. Do you think that the issue of morality, ethics and values is in jeopardy of being hijacked by politics?

A. When politics doesn't involve morality it becomes nothing but negotiation of competing interests: your clan (or tribe, or party, or country) can have this if mine can have that. Many clever people -- since ancient Athens, by the way -- have argued that moral language is just a way of rationalizing that sort of negotiation. If you don't believe that, and most Americans don't, then the task is not to disentangle morality from politics but to ask hard questions about what morality and values are."

Q. How can the philosophy of the Enlightenment help answer today's political and social problems?

A. We've been stuck between various forms of postmodern thinking, which may take up exciting questions but are often simply what Neitzsche called 'muddying the waters in order to make them seem deep.' And while it may sound vaguely liberating, postmodernism has no political leg to stand on. People have largely turned to it because academic philosophy has remained so remote from the rest of the world. With those alternatives, it's no surprise that many people turn to populist and even fundamentalist messages because they seem at least to take ordinary concerns about values seriously."

In the spirit of William Least Heat Moon's iconic Blue Highways, W. Springfield (VA) High School history teacher James A. Percoco took to the roads for four summers to learn the backstories of some 200 statues erected over the years to Abraham Lincoln. In Summers With Lincoln -- Looking for the Man in the Monuments, he focuses his efforts largely on seven notable statues, beginning and ending his search in Washington.

Thomas Ball's Emancipation Group was erected east of the Capitol in 1876 with private funds from African Americans and dedicated to abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Percoco brought along his students, and together they explored "the impact of this Freedman's Monument showing Lincoln and a kneeling freed bondsperson. What does the statue say about race and freedom to today's Americans? What did Ball -- and his sponsors -- want it to say?"

Other statues included in Percoco's survey are Augustus Saint-Gaudens's 1887 Standing Lincoln in Chicago, Paul Manship's 1932 Lincoln the Hoosier Youth in Fort Wayne, IN; and Borglum's Seated Lincoln in Newark, N.J. The author chronicles the history of each monument, "spotlighting its artistic, social, political and cultural origins." It's little wonder that his publisher describes this innovative scholar as an award-winning history teacher.

Those who expected Russia to languish on history's slag heap after the fall of the Soviet Union were stunned to watch Vladimir Putin quarterback the payoff of the nation's international debt and accumulation of the world's third largest holdings of foreign currency reserves, largely by becoming, in short order, the world's largest petroleum exporter.

So in spite of widespread criticism he has endured in recent years, Marshall Goldman writes in Petrostate -- Putin, Power, and the New Russia, Putin's a central player in world geopolitics and will continue to be so. His account cites the Russian leader's "determined effort to reign in the upstart oil oligarchs who had risen to power in the post-Soviet era." Today, Putin, "his cohorts, and oil have stabilized  the Russian economy and recentralized power in Moscow.....(all accomplished through)....discovery, intrigue, corruption, wealth, misguidance, greed, patronage, nepotism and power."

Marshall Goldman is Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College and Senior Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard.

"After John Kennedy's assassination," writes Thurston Clarke in The Last Campaign -- Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, "Robert -- formerly his brother's no-holds-barred political warrior -- was left stunned and grieving. He was haunted by his brother's murder and by the nation's failure to address its most pressing challenges -- race, poverty, and the war in Vietnam."

Actually, after JFK's death, Bobby had no marked feelings about race or poverty. John F. Kennedy had delivered a speech in the summer of 1963, supporting a civil rights bill, but neither he nor his attorney general connected with the issues then on an emotional level. It was during a 1966 whistle-stop tour of America, during which Bobby hoped to build up some political IOU's for a possible presidential campaign two years later, that one began to see the scales fall from his eyes, as he saw poverty and race relations up close.

Unfortunately, it's beyond the scope of Clarke's book to chronicle the 1966 tour, which was lavishly covered by Life and Look, the leading photo/news magazines of the day. But that epiphany was every bit as fascinating as the 82-day campaign he describes here.

Clarke has written a misty-eyed, "What if?" account of that thrilling campaign. His prologue quotes leading politicians of the day, arguing how different the world would be today had RFK lived. Many of them are contemporaneous statements, made in the grief-stricken moments following his assassination at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, so allowances must be made.

Four and a half decades of life beyond RFK's death has left us older and wiser, and most of us realize that many of our idols have clay feet and that unforeseen circumstances arise during a presidency which change the best of intentions campaigned on. Which is not to say that we all aren't due for a healthy infusion of hope. Voters' reaction to the candidacy of Barack Obama is proof positive of that.

In any event, it's strongly evocative to relive those heady days, from LBJ's March 31, 1968 decision not to seek a full term to the horrific end of RFK's life in Los Angeles on June 4. All the old media hands, some now living, some dead, parade by. 

David Mizner's premise in Hartsurg, USA is engaging -- "Liberal, underachieving movie critic Wallace Cormier has returned to his hometown to raise his daughter and go bowling every Saturday night with his high school friends. When his beloved Cineplex, the only theater in town, becomes a church, Cormier decides that for once in his life, he needs to take action, a decision that pits him against conservative Christian Bevy Baer in the town's school board election. It is only a matter of time before the election gains national prominence -- and past secrets surface."

Neil Gordon, author of The Company You Keep, wrote of Hartsburg, USA: "Mizner's feat -- allowing red state readers to care about wholly convincing blue state characters, and bringing red state characters vividly to life for blue readers -- is an unusually accomplished piece of fiction, impossible to put down, highly relevant to us all today."

It happens, in writing such a work, for the author to be a political junkie. The author of the novel Political Animal, Mizner is a former campaign worker and speechwriter.

This isn't exactly a revisionist biography of Nixon administration Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, because as author James Rosen observes remarkably in The Strong Man -- John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, his is the first biography ever written of the only U.S. attorney general ever to be imprisoned.

But such was the conventional wisdom of the man while he was in office, as the personification of evil, that it is arresting to read from Rosen's interviews evidence that Mitchell was "A tremendous worker, loyal, nice to people, good to (them)...He rewarded people well, they worked  hard, and they'd bust their ass for him, but he took care of them....He was so unpretentious, so plain, so nice, so at ease that he made you feel at ease." Rosen's take on Mitchell the man is that of a "tough, unapologetic, drolly funny, unwaveringly loyal strong man..."

Not only did Mitchell fall on his sword for Nixon, perhaps sparing the president from prison, but he never wrote the tell-all memoir that enriched the likes of Bob Haldeman, John Erlichmann, and in a current context, George W. Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan. Among the many Nixon-era aspects Rosen deals with are the purpose of the Watergate break-in and who actually ordered it, the CIA's role in Watergate, who masterminded the Watergate cover-up, how the Joint Chiefs of Staff spied on Nixon and Kissinger, the troubled life of Mitchell's wife Martha, and Henry Kissinger's wiretaps on newsmen.

Tarek Fatah, host of the weekly TV show The Muslim Chronicle, neatly sums up the thesis of his tendentious new book, Chasing A Mirage -- The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, thusly:

"....the Quran did not prescribe that Islam should take on a political form -- an entity that is the Islamic State. Yet in the aftermath of the Prophet's (Muhammad's) death, two streams of Islam emerged. One was political and imperial, seeking power and domination, reverberating through the ages and resulting in war and bloodshed  among Muslim brothers. The other Islam was spiritual, which unleashed the human spirit, triggering an age of enlightenment that once was the hallmark of science, literature, music and mathematics."

Fatah clearly lays the blame for the culture of hatred prevailing in Muslim nations today on "the duplicity of imams who decry the West for the ills that affect Muslims."

One staggering statistic in Brand New China -- Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture speaks, at once, to the hugeness of the world's largest nation and the rapidity with which its economic system is changing. As of 2005, writes author Jing Wang, there were 84,272 advertising agencies in China.

Wang's book is a thorough-going study of branding and advertising in contemporary China, as seen from the inside of typical ad agencies. In it, she "examines the impact of new media practices on Chinese advertising, deliberates on the convergence of grassroots creative culture and viral marketing strategies, samples successful advertising campaigns, provides practical insights about Chinese consumer segments, and offers methodological reflections on pop culture  and advertising research."

Advertising as we know it had just begun when Mao Zedong arrived to quash it. But lest one think that the current advertising boom is simply an effort to emulate America and the West, Wang argues that one must understand "the intangible link between China's socialist persona and its capitalist face that lies behind many success stories in corporate China." Corporate branding, for example, "relies heavily on the disciplining power of corporatized Mao-speak and the Chairman's famed ideology of the 'permanent revolution.'"

Wang's chapter headings foreshadow content: "Positioning the New Modern Girl," "The Synergy Buzz and JV Brands," "Storytelling and Corporate Branding," "Bourgeois Bohemians in China?", "Hello Moto: Youth Culture and  Music Marketing,", and "CCTV and the Advertising Media." The book's conclusion is entitled, "Countdown to the Olympics."

Perhaps it's simply the hubris of our race. Throughout the period since the Enlightenment, at least, man has argued that we should be able to lift the unfortunate among us to at least a subsistence level. Earlier this year, in fact, former presidential candidate John Edwards unveiled a plan he vowed to pursue even outside the campaign framework, to end poverty in America within 30 years. Yet we remain haunted by Jesus's warning that, "You shall always have the poor with you."

In An End to Poverty? -- A Historical Debate, Cambridge University political scientist Gareth Stedman Jones examines the arguments of such seminal thinkers as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet that "all citizens should be protected against the hazards of economic insecurity." Jones revisits the 1790s era in which this noble principle "was derailed by conservative as well as leftist thinkers."

Jones also demonstrates how "current discussions about economic issues -- downsizing, globalization, and financial regulation -- were shaped by the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

The conservative blueprint that Barry Goldwater set forth in Conscience of a Conservative 48 years ago called for promotion of small government, lower spending and individual freedoms. Execution of this philosophy by the likes of Ronald Reagan may have made liberals wince, but they had to admit it was based on principles enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

But then came the administration of George W. Bush and the advent and/or expansion of illegal wire-tapping, secret prisons for suspected terrorists, the overriding of checks and balances, and an imperial presidency. In  Reclaiming Conservatism -- How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How it Can Find its Way Back, Mickey Edwards, for 16 years a conservative Republican congressman from Oklahoma, takes no prisoners in focusing blame for the dramatic transformation:

"...the finger of blame should be pointed directly at those people who call themselves 'conservatives.' If the Constitution and its fervent embrace of citizen rights is lost, they will bear responsibility for its demise."  Edwards not only shows conservatives "how far they have fallen" but offers prescriptions for returning conservatism to its original ideals.

Quixotic leader indeed. "The same politico who at incandescent moments, especially of risk and crisis, could move mountains," writes author Timothy J. Colton in Yeltsin -- A Life, "could on other days be maddeningly indecisive or self-indulgent." The Harvard Russian studies authority bases his conclusion on prodigious research, including nearly 150 interviews, some of them unprecedented ones with Yeltsin himself and his family.

, "could on other days be maddeningly indecisive or self-indulgent." The Harvard Russian studies authority bases his conclusion on prodigious research, including nearly 150 interviews, some of them unprecedented ones with Yeltsin himself and his family.

"It is anything but self-evident how the virtuoso product and agent of a dictatorship could end up as its hangman," concludes Colton. As anyone who lived through the '80s and '90s will recall, Yeltsin seemed loyal to the Soviet state, although lukewarm on communism because of treatment his family allegedly received under Stalin. The author challenges conventional wisdom in his assertion that Yeltsin and Gorbachev, originally his mentor, warred continually from the beginning of their relationship.

So what's your bottom line, Timothy Colton? "As against those who would shrug him off as an oddball or an antihero, or who cannot get beyond his welter of contradictions to come to a summary judgment, my net assessment of Yeltsin is as a hero in history -- enigmatic and flawed, to be sure, yet worthy of our respect and sympathy."

No American president -- not even George Washington -- is as well known as Abraham Lincoln, a man who served a lone term as congressman before being elected president. As author Roy Morris, Jr. writes, Lincoln's fellow Illinoisan Sen. Stephen Douglas was "the most famous and controversial politician" in the United States for two decades, yet is practically an unknown today apart from his role in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

And yet, argues Morris in The Long Pursuit -- Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle With Stephen Douglas For The Heart And Soul Of America, "had it not been for Douglas, who served as Lincoln's personal goad, pace horse, and measuring stick, there would have been no Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, no Lincoln presidency in 1860, and perhaps no Civil War six months later. For both men -- and for the nation itself -- the stakes were that high."

Had it not been for Douglas, the author writes, "Lincoln would have remained merely a good trial lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, known locally for his droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife. Nationally, he was barely known at all." Morris, editor of Military Heritage magazine, is the author of four books on the Civil War and post-Civil War eras. His new book, he says, is the first extensive study of Stephen Douglas in more than 30 years.

Reading Bill Moyers is like having a comforting brain massage. Not that his messages are comforting; most of them are not. But he has mastered the art of rhythm and cadence that aligns somehow with the mind's ability to assimilate thoughts. In this, he reminds me of historian David McCullough, who reads his daily writing production to his indispensible wife, Rosalee, before dinner as she takes notes; after dinner, she reads it back to her scribbling husband, who edits his text the next day. The final product, like Moyers's, as a result is easy on the brain.

Moyers' latest collection, Moyers on Democracy, draws from his speeches, most of them from the last couple of years. At 74, he's increasingly drafted to deliver encomia for good friends, among them Rev. William Sloane Coffin, former Rep. Barbara Jordan, Lady Bird Johnson, and broadcast executive Fred Friendly. His tribute to Jordan is particularly affecting. A few excerpts:

"Barbara was singing the last time we were together. There were twoscore of us at Liz Carpenter's up on Skyline Drive, belting forth old favorites from the Broadman and Cokesbury hymnals. "Standing on the Promses," "Throw Out the Lifeline," "The Old Rugged Cross." And spirituals, too. "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Deep River," "My Lord, What a Morning." Friends have said her music often eased the smarting wounds of her long battle with multiple sclerosis. But this night some other wellspring opened as she sang one of her favorite blues songs. Hands on the arms of her electric chariot, that big head tilted back, a mischievous glean of light in her eyes, she sang "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out."

"...She had electrified the nation (during the Watergate hearings) when she had famously declared her whole and total faith in the Constitution despite having been excluded from it because of her race. The convention of 1787 had decided people like her were '60 per cent a person,' which is how slaves were to be enumerated  for the purposes of representation. But the truth is, in her understanding of justice, Barbara Jordan would have fit right in with any of the 100 per cent white men in that hall, two hundred years ago, in Philadelphia."

                                                                        ---Steve Goddard