Book review

Ten days ago, I quoted author Larry Beinhart. Beinhart wrote the book Wag the Dog (originally titled "American Hero"), on which the movie Wag the Dog was based. Beinhart has written several other good books, one of which I can vouch for, having just finished it: The Librarian.

The Librarian is a thriller, based on the novel idea that in 2004 the Democrats had actually nominated a competent candidate (through no fault of their own, of course) with capable advisors and the many evil ways that the Repugs would have responded (and did anyway, at least most of them). The book is a page-turner, 432 short and exciting pages. I won't give away any more of the plot, but I'll entice you with a couple of paragraphs taken completely out of context:

Endless damn suburbia and a corpse in the back and cops everywhere.

Don't you want to read the book just to find out what that's all about? And to give you a better idea of Beinhart's political perspective, here's how he portrayed the Repug strategy at one point:

It was critical to keep this damn thing moving, moving so fast that no one ever caught up, then close it and shut it down and declare it over and settled and if they did that fast enough and with the proper pomp and ritual, all the questions would go away in the interests of stability and continuity and getting on with things and making money, just like it had after the Kennedy assassination and after the last election.

Sure, people still asked questions, but they were dismissed as conspiracy nuts. Not because they were wrong, but because nothing was going to change if they were right, so they were obsessing themselves with meaningless trivia, because truth upon which you cannot act is what trivia is.