Posts From Author: mad men

How To Win Elections & Maybe Sometimes Influence People: Jonathan Alter on Obama v Romney

The story begins in media res. The Midterms, 2010: in something of a rout, the Republican Party captures sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the largest number to change hands since 1948. What honeymoon there might have been for America’s forty-fourth president is definitively over. The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, published in paperback by Simon & Schuster this week, picks up the national narrative from here and takes it through to the presidential election of 2012. Jonathan Alter, its author, has covered nine presidential elections and considers 2012 to be “a hinge of history”, “a titanic ideological struggle over the way Americans see themselves and their obligations to one another” in which the battles fought go back “to the dawn of the republic”. Hefty language requires ample support, and Alter’s the writer for the job: The Center Holds is a fantastically detailed account of the 2012 presidential election. Drawing on meticulous research and interviews with more than two hundred people close to the Obama and Romney campaigns, it comes to read almost like a handbook on how (not) to win an election. One by one, Alter ticks off all the major factors that contributed to the eventual outcome while simultaneously driving […]
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Manhattan Follies: Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility

“It is a lovely oddity of human nature,” observes our heroine, Katey Kontent, “that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance.” Commuting readers of Amor Towles’s debut novel, Rules of Civility, will certainly find themselves grateful for this lovely oddity as they immerse themselves in Katey’s world. The story, which concerns the good and not-so-good decisions made by Katey and her friends over the course of a single year (1938), is told from the perspective of her older self. Her memory is stirred by “Many Are Called”, an exhibition of photos Walker Evans surreptitiously took of regular Americans on the subway during the 1930s. In it, she sees two photos of a man she had known briefly very well, Tinker Grey, but had fallen out of touch with. The photos take her right back to the last day of 1937, when she and her friend Eve Ross first set eyes on Tinker… The Rules of Civility are the hundred and ten precepts a young George Washington jotted down in a writing exercise as a schoolboy in Virginia (see the full list here). […]
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