I just got four new books I couldn’t resist buying. I haven’t read any of them, but I have read a bunch of reviews, and I was persuaded to grab them, all will, I think, be best sellers or already are best sellers, and all four seem eminently readable.

This is a good reading season, and these are the first books I’ve read by men in a good long time.

My new idea is to share my book choices with my readers the books I’m reading rather than wait and review each one. Many people have asked me to do this, and it makes sense to me.

People can make up their own minds about the books, and I can review one in detail now and then. I admit to being backlogged, but I’ll plow through them all this summer.

There are some fascinating books out there.

Two questions have haunted me for months. One was how did the Republican Party permit Trump to take it over when so many influential Republicans knew how corrupt and dangerous he was? The most influential people in the party knew he was a hazardous sleazebag and even said so. Almost all of them caved to save their hides.

The other was how Harvey Weinstein, one of the most gifted moviemakers in American history, became such a monster and escaped punishment and disclosure for so long? I might finally be getting the answers to both questions.

 

The wo books I couldn’t resist are Thank You For Your Servitude, by Mark Leibovich, who joined the Atlantic Magazine after working for ten years as a national political writer for the New York Times. He is an excellent writer, funny and ironic, innovative, and amazingly successful at getting people to talk to him who should know better.

His last book, This Town, was brilliant and often hilarious about Washington Culture during the Obama Years. This time, he’s taken on one of the great political questions in American History:  how some of the Republican Party’s most respected and influential figures – Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marcio Rubio – all of whom were united in their scorn for Donald Trump but then abruptly flipped in a moral rout that allowed Trump to take over the party and nearly destroy our democracy.

All three have been tarred, perhaps for life, and I hate to think how History will judge them.

Leibovich also focused on three people he considers heroes – Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and the late John McCain – who alone had found the courage and love of the country to stand up to Donald Trump and resist his takeover of their party, often at their political peril.

“We are just waiting for him to die,” one former Republican congressman  told Leibovich, who decided to use the Trump Hotel as a focal point for the story of the most profound moral cowardice in American political History. It was, he said, the greatest swamp of them all, the plotting base for the attack on the capitol on January 6.

The book is also said to be funny, but the story of the once great Republican party’s utter moral collapse is not. I want to know how this happened, and I think Leibovich is in a position to tell me.

This is the first time I’m reading four books by men in a while. I’ve also ordered Ken Auletta’s much-awaited book Hollywood Ending, a biography of Harvey Weinstein, and a painstaking effort to understand how this brilliant and successful man became such an infamous monster and will spend many more years rotting in jail.

I want to know that.

Also on the list are Agent Josephine, American Beauty, French Hero, and British Spy by Damien Lewis. The story of wartime Agent Josephine became one of the greatest and most successful spy legends of World War II.

Before the war, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva famous for her singing, dancing, sexuality, and sexy outfits. Before the war, she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe.

When the Nazis took over Paris, her beloved and adopted city, she was banned from performing, along with “Negroes and Jews.” Instead of fleeing to America, she chose to stay behind, become a spy for the Allies, and become a feminist activist.

She was one of the best. This sounds like an irresistible story; it’s a fat book, more than 350 pages long.

My fourth book is something of a gamble. Dan Fesperman is well known for his best-selling thrillers, but I’ve never read him.

He’s written what feels like a  John LeCarre brooding and ambivalent spy mystery focusing on the mad scramble that occurred when the Berlin Wall came down. The Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police, and the CIA were locked in a monumental struggle to seize the Stasi’s files before they were destroyed.

As in the best LeCarre books, the line between the good and bad guys is fuzzy, according to the reviews; this is a story of moral ambivalence and confusion between what were once two of the most powerful spy agencies in the world. Anything that evokes LeCarre is worth taking a look at.

I’ve got some excellent and exciting reading to do. I’m going to start with Lebovich’s book and then onto Ken Auletta’s story of a brilliant,  ambitious, successful Jewish Boy from New York who became a true American monster.