Customer Reviews

A Long Time Coming

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a political junkie, I always look forward to the Newsweek Election Book. Newsweek has always called this reporting "The Project;" it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the presidential campaign, and it never fails to deliver.

After this historic election, one of the most intriguing ever, I just could not WAIT for the Newsweek book to come out! I was thrilled when, the day after the election, Newsweek.com published on their webpage what I thought was a very, very huge "excerpt" of the forthcoming book, always released in early January following an election. The November 17th, 2008 issue print edition of Newsweek was almost entirely composed of this "The Project" and I was happy to have the issue so I could preserve the original "excerpt."

So, imagine my surprise when I purchased "A Long Time Coming" for $[...] and settled into what I hoped would be a long evening of reading the book and filling in all the details that were left out of the magazine and online versions. With just a simple glance through the book, I realized ever chapter was titled the same as the November article, and was presented in the same sequential order as in the book. So, starting to feel pretty disappointed, I pulled out my Nov. 17th Newsweek and got to comparing the two.

Down to the punctuation, this book is merely a reprint. Word for word! The book includes a pretty lame "Epilogue" as well as a rather uninteresting interview with President-Elect Obama at the end, but other than these additions, the book is just a complete copy of the original article! Including the photographs!!

Of course I'm returning the book. Why pay $[...] when I have the original Newsweek issue for $[...]? Heck you can read the entire book for free online at Newsweek.com, still!

I find it incredibly dishonest of Newsweek to not alert purchasers of this book that it is just a reprint of the original piece.

One final nitpick... you'd think that by printing the book, they would have corrected some of the major factual errors that appeared in the original piece. For example, in the original version the writers wrote that Hillary Clinton's sniper fire exaggeration occurred in April, when it occurred in March. This error was not corrected in the hardback edition of the book I purchased.

So, gentle readers, please avoid this book and try to just find a backissue of that Newsweek. Or go online. But don't waste your money on this disappointing book.

I bought this for $22.95 believing it was different than the lengthy Newsweek article done just after the election by Evan Thomas and others, still available at the magazine's website for free. It looks to be exactly the same. There is no mention in the book that it is merely a reprint. Very disappointed.

Barack Obama's historic election in 2008 may mark the resurgence of a dormant liberalism philosophy that has been dormant since the breakdown of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. If this turns out to be true, the 2008 campaign will be studied, analyzed and written about for many years from now. "A Long Time Coming" is probably the first in a long and interminable line of books about the election. It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history and as such, this book provides the closest understanding we have of the inside players and the decisions that made the election of Obama possible. There is an old saying that "victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan." As such, the conventional wisdom was that almost every strategic decision that McCain and his inner circle made tended to be disastrous. But, if one takes a closer look at the numbers, and especially the battleground states of Colorado, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, the switching of a few thousand votes may have made a huge and ultimately monumental difference in the outcome. If those votes had been switched around, the narrative may have been how John McCain pulled off an historic upset on the scale of Truman in 1948. However, it didn't happen that way, so every mistake that McCain made, from the picking of Sarah Palin to the short lived suspension of his campaign in September is magnified ten thousand times over. Whereas , everything that Obama did was brilliant from focusing on the caucus states early on to using the internet to woo new voters and most especially donors. In the appendix to this book, Mr. Obama, in an interview even says that there was a lot of on the job training going on in 2007, and but for his triumphal speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in late 2007, we may have just inaugurated the first Woman president, rather than the first African American one.
However, the point that Mr. Evans makes, and makes rather well, is that in politics, the simple things matter. Obama was probably the most effective candidate, in recent memory, at staying on message throughout his campaign, while McCain's campaign was reduced to a series of gimmicks that unfortunately stand at odds with the selfless patriot and hero that McCain was. This book was, for the most part, taken from the Newsweek cover story in the week after the election, and does not expand on it, except for a brief introduction by Newsweek editor Mr. Meachem and an interview with Mr. Obama conducted during the middle of the election. But in a year that saw the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, the party that represented the status quo had a tough road, but certainly the infighting in Mr. McCain's campaign did not help, and may have made Obama's victory a sure thing. In fact, the author writes that McCain's inner circle knew it was over a month before the election. The real history of this election, is that if someone like a John Kerry had won the nomination, there is probably a very good chance that he could have won with the way the economy was going, but the fact of the matter is that we will never know. In the future, the ebbs and flows of the 2008 campaign will be memorialized in books, documentaries and probably movies, but read this book and prepare for the tumult ahead as the facts become more legend then anything grounded in reality.

I enjoyed this book very much. It's a fast read with effective juxtaposition of what was going on in each major campaign at the same approximate time. The overall details will be familiar to the reader but I found the behind-the-scenes subtext enlightening and valuable. The book is spare in the sense that it mostly follows a "just the facts" style with little extraneous detail or illustrative exposition; if you are looking for flowery, evocative or soaring prose look elsewhere.

I did not read the Newsweek series so cannot attest to the alleged similarity. Perhaps because of that, I judged the book at face value and found that it delivers more or less what the reader expects. One area where it does come up short, in my opinion, is in delivering what I would call first person Obama. There is some of that but generally the portrait one gets is second person or impressionistic. If what you seek is Obama on Obama, the first 60 Minutes television interview is a better source. Another deficiency is the lack of an index.

With all of that considered, however, the average reader will nonetheless find A Long Time Coming to be enjoyable, insightful and well-worth the time.

This book had some interest, but I was really putoff by the author's strange choice of words: screeds, meritocrats, imperium, preternaturally (twice), amanuensis (twice), schadenfreude, ascetic, mishegoss, stasis, hermeneutics, madrassa (twice), kerfuffle, emo, hoary, tropes (twice), snarky, and doppelganger. These words were a mystery to me, and I've got two Masters degrees. Regular people don't know these words and should not have to consult a dictionary to understand a general book. I would advise all authors to use words people know.

Pure opium for political junkies. It tells the story of this long and historic election. To anyone who hasn't been on Mars for the last two years, much of it (but by no means all) may be familiar stuff. As time goes, on the book will be a valuable reminder -and keepsake.

For those of us, hooked on Obama's campaign from the beginning, Thomas's book didn't really have a lot of new behind the scenes information. It is well written surely and there were a few nuggets I had not known before, but in the end I felt this was a book for those who didn't follow the campaign closely. That reader will enjoy and profit from this fast, clean account of what happened. Evans does get some good stuff, especially about McCain which shed some light on his subsequent behavior. Evan's style is rugged, propulsive and easy to follow. So for the non-political junkie this book will probably be a treat. Don't look for depth or analysis. It's the facts in all their glory.

This is a nicely presented story of the tide that swept Obama into the White House and into what appears to be a place of unique influence around the world. Most importantly (to me) it is a very positive, hopeful introduction to this next chapter of our history, coming at a time when our country needs to feel this kind of energy and hopefulness. This is a very good read and I recommend it highly.

Evan Thomas employs his Newsweek style to good effect in A Long Time Coming. While this is a familiar style of recounting events of a long presidential campaign, Thomas breaks up the chronological stream by moving from the Obama camp to the McCain group and back again. I also like the way Thomas focuses on individual players such as Axelrod for some insight into these important figures around Obama. Even though I followed the campaign closely, I learned a good deal of the back story that just didn't make it into print or blog. Easy reading style, yet insightful and solid. Good interviewing and reporting.

Obviously a lot goes on during an election that shouldn't meet the eye before election day - Newsweek had reporters inside observing everything but embargoed until after the returns were counted - it makes for a great read even tho you know how it came out - and makes you even happier about the result