John Dean

John Dean was White House counsel to Richard Nixon. He has recently published his sixth book, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.

Advice and Consent by Allen Drury (out of print). Drury, a veteran New York Times journalist who covered the U.S. Senate and popularized a genre with this 1959 work, hooked me on Washington-based political novels, starting a lifetime habit of reading and collecting them.

The Portable Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (out of print). I was once told that no person’s education was complete until they had read all six volumes of Gibbon’s classic. I made it through five volumes before I found my (now tattered) abridged edition, which nicely captures the salient perceptions of this 18th-century British parliamentarian, whose observations are again relevant.

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Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Bantam, $6.95) Essential reading for anyone interested in law. Not because the endlessly litigated Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce is the greatest civil lawsuit that never was; rather, because Dickens always gathers timeless characters and situations, and none better than those gathered here.

Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant (Penguin, $14.95). This work was not only the gift of a dying man to the continued financial well-being of his wife, but a model for posterity of presidential autobiography. Without question, this is the greatest presidential memoir ever written.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Vintage, $13). Funny but sad, enlightening albeit disheartening, suspenseful yet sardonic. When I first read this novel, in 1955, it opened my eyes to the meaning and consequences of racism and bigotry. Ellison manages to sear the reader’s mind with his characters.

Les Misérables