Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 by William Shakespeare (SparkNotes, $8). How did Prince Hal transform himself from drunken ne’er-do-well into the pious warrior-king Henry V? And why did he really invade France? The analogy to George W. Bush is obvious. The insights into character and dynastic politics are not.
Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama (Three Rivers, $15). Would be a wonderful memoir even if it weren’t written by a presidential candidate. To get this level of candor and self-insight from a future politician is not just rare, but utterly unprecedented.
What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (Vintage, $24). Cramer set out to narrate the 1988 race and returned with the greatest book ever written about electoral politics. His New Journalism narrative depicts a generation that has since left the stage. But his accounts of George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and Richard Gephardt stand as insights about the politician’s psyche in any era.
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Reagan’s America by Garry Wills (out of print). A model intellectual biography of a nonintellectual president. Of the many books about Ronald Reagan, this is the only one I’ve read that entirely explains him. You can’t help liking the protagonist, even if you deplore his ideas as much as the author does.
Primary Colors by Anonymous (Joe Klein) (Random House, $14). Sits on the short shelf of great novels about American politics, alongside Democracy by Henry Adams and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. This book set off a mad scramble to figure out who wrote it, because the author had obviously been in close proximity to Bill Clinton, and had the guy nailed.
The Second Civil War by Ronald Brownstein (Penguin, $28). Brownstein is one of America’s shrewdest political commentators. Here he breaks stride to argue, persuasively, that the causes of today’s much-decried hyperpartisanship are more structural than personal.
