TWIB-(be)IV: January 18-24, 2010

[akujunkan]

In which we finally break into this year's books.

1) Going Rouge - Richard Kim & Betsy Reed (eds)
I first heard about Going Rouge here and was immediately sold. Unfortunately, it is not available on Amazon, and one needs an American address and a credit card to order it. Being lucky enough to have friends in possession of both, I have now read the book from cover to cover.

Or rather, read it twice, because there is precious little in Going Rouge that isn't already available for free online and there's a good chance that any reader who followed the 2008 elections will have already read most of it. That said, the volume's contributors are a who's who of the liberal journalism/blogging elite and the majority of Going Rouge's content is well-written and holds up well to the test of time, although what were once shocking revelations when the individual pieces were published are now old news. Perhaps this is why the volume's editors have organized the articles by theme instead of chronology--a decision I consider to be one of the book's weaknesses, as no effort has been made to clarify when individual pieces were written. This results in jarring jumps backward and forward in time, especially when "Author A's piece, published on Blog Q last month" appears dozens of chapters after the chapter referencing it.

Nevertheless, the political wonk in me likes having all of these articles in one easy-to-grab volume, and even were that not the case, Hart Seely's "anthology" of Palin's "poetry" pretty much justifies the cover price all on its own.


That will be all.

Comments

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

Do you still have this one? I'd like to borrow it. I could probably get through it in about a night.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

Alas, Going Rouge has already found a new home.

[wombatdeamor.livejournal.com]

Sadness. But not too sad. I've probably read most of it anyway, as you pointed out. Sometime this summer I'll find it through ILL or at a used bookstore on a quiet afternoon where I can read everything out of it I want and then reshelve it for the next liberal.