The Party Is Over
by Mike Lofgren (Viking, $26)
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The Oath
by Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday, $29)
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts is D.C.’s “most intriguing personality,” said Garrett Epps in The New York Times. Just months after Roberts stunned supporters by voting to uphold President Obama’s health-care law, Jeffrey Toobin has produced an absorbing account of Roberts’s reign so far. No reporter can fully divine what occurs behind closed doors, but Toobin comes close. “Not until scholars a generation hence gain access to the justices’ papers” is anyone likely to match his work here.
The Price of Politics
by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, $30)
“No reporter has better access to Washington’s powerful” than Bob Woodward, said David Lauter in the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately, the legendary reporter’s behind-the-scenes look at last year’s federal debt-ceiling talks “contains no real secrets.” Meanwhile, Woodward’s “other strength”—his ability to put readers into rooms they normally couldn’t enter—proves of little use. Given the tediousness of the negotiations that took place in this particular room, “most readers will simply want to get out.”
The Victory Lab
by Sasha Issenberg (Crown, $26)
Election campaigns aren’t Moneyball, but don’t tell that to the consultants who run them, said Nate Cohn in The New Republic. In a “timely, rare, and valuable attempt to unveil the innovations revolutionizing campaign politics,” journalist Sasha Issenberg profiles a new breed of consultants who are less interested in a race’s grand gestures than in mining numerical data to get the right message to the right voter. The mainstream media cover pageantry and gaffes; Issenberg suggests they’re missing the story.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”