ELECTING FDR: THE NEW DEAL CAMPAIGN OF 1932
By Donald A. Ritchie
University Press of Kansas, 274 pages, $29.95

It’s a presidential election year. The Republican incumbent is intensely unpopular. The Democrats are waging a tough fight for the nomination pitting an experienced New York politician against a candidate perceived as not tough enough to be president. Americans are frightened about the economy, and a new communications medium is being aggressively used for the first time by a presidential candidate.

I’m talking about 1932, not 2008.

Don’t think of it as ancient history. In his new book, Electing FDR, Donald Ritchie provides a meaningful lesson that today’s candidates should heed.  read more »

DECEMBER
By Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Alfred A. Knopf, 239 pages, $23.95

A chamber-piece in a minor key, Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s literally muted new novel introduces 11-year-old Isabelle Carter, who hasn’t spoken in nine months—"280 days," she reminds herself, since "February 29, not a real day, anyway, a day not to get out of bed, to eat, to drink, to speak." Wilson and Ruth, her well-to-do father and mother, have appealed to countless therapists, consulted manuals on autism and quarreled with school officials; after meticulously assessing Isabelle’s classroom performance, the principal complains that she’s been patient "to the max," an expression that would rightly alarm legions of Manhattan private-school parents.  read more »

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s that are all, in the words of the book’s author’s note, "connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City."

Mr. Mitchell writes about a restaurant in the old Fulton Fish Market, and its encyclopedic menu of things like shad roe and herring roe and mackerel roe and cod cheeks, and its proprietor, Louis Morino, and Morino’s hometown of Recco, Italy, and Morino’s reluctance to enter the disused upper stories of his restaurant building.  read more »

ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
By Ted Widmer
Hill and Wang, 355 pages, $25

Ted Widmer has carved out the kind of heroically peripatetic career in entertainment, politics and scholarship that gives young men hope and older men heartburn. Widmer? If the name doesn’t yet ring a bell, that could be because he’s had more than the average 44-year-old’s share of names.

Connoisseurs of high-concept mid-’90s glam metal know him as Lord Rockingham, dandy guitarist of the Upper Crust, a Boston band known for performing AC/DC-style anthems in powdered wigs and associated ancien régime regalia. (Their tongue-in-jowl celebrations of aristocracy include "Let them Eat Rock" and "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class.  read more »

DIRTY WORDS: A LITERARY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SEX
Edited by Ellen Sussman
Bloomsbury, 291 pages, $19.99

I wasn’t a fan of Charles Bowden’s boozy, frantic examination of American life in his part-essay, part-memoir Blues for Cannibals: The Notes From Underground (2002). But I marked this passage, which has stayed with me over the years: "[L]ove is essential even if I do not know the words that give it flesh and scent. That is why we find it so difficult to write about sex. Not because we are so inhibited and prudish but because when we write about sex, we get acts and organs, a breast, a vagina, a cock, juices, tongues and thrusts—and wind up with recipes but no food.  read more »

SAVE THE MALES: WHY MEN MATTER
AND WOMEN SHOULD CARE
By Kathleen Parker
Random House, 215 pages, $26

In Save the Males, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker defends that least likely of underdogs: the American Man. Parodied in pop culture, disenfranchised by the family courts, emasculated by Lamaze class and forced to endure crazy, empowered women "rhapsodizing about their vaginas and swooning over their inner goddesses," men today are raised in a culture that has turned against them, claims Ms. Parker.

Of course, she’s not the first to ride to the rescue: Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (2000) covered much of the same terrain—men’s broken psyches—without blaming it all on feminism.  read more »

BREACH OF PEACE: POTRAITS OF THE 1961 MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM RIDERS
By Eric Etheridge
Atlas & Co., 239 pages, $45

The slog was slow and messy, but the Democratic primary season at least left us with a handy object lesson in the principles and perils of proportional response. One suspects that for the Clinton and Obama shock troops alike, the defining episode will be the May 31 meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee, one of the few chapters of late capitalist civic life deserving of the old 20th-century catch-all epithet "Kafkaesque."

There, stammering and shaking on the dais, was Harold Ickes—veteran of 1964’s Freedom Summer and namesake of F.  read more »

LAW AND THE LONG WAR: THE FUTURE OF JUSTICE IN THE AGE OF TERROR
By Benjamin Wittes
The Penguin Press, 305 pages, $25.95

This book’s importance rides on the accuracy of its titular assumptions. Are we now fighting "the long war"? If not, then Benjamin Wittes merely charts a sensible course for mopping up messes of George Bush’s making.

If, on the other hand, we really are living through "the age of terror," the book delivers a blueprint for salvaging both our security and the Constitution’s integrity in the face of towering legal dilemmas.

A Brookings Institution fellow and former Washington Post editorial writer, Mr.  read more »

A TIME TO FIGHT: RECLAIMING A FAIR AND JUST AMERICA
By Jim Webb
Broadway, 255 pages, $24.95

Jim Webb is often mentioned as a possible running mate for Barack Obama. As a former Republican, his presence would lend substance to Mr. Obama’s talk of bipartisanship; as a senator from red-trending-purple Virginia, he might give Democrats a chance to take some electoral votes from the Republican column. He’s for an expedited withdrawal from Iraq, but he has the same—if not more impressive—military bona fides than those we all thought would save John Kerry, and without the taint of careerism.

But the strongest argument for a Webb vice presidency is the entertaining possibility that he’d eventually break off and start his own republic.  read more »

GRAND NEW PARTY: HOW REPUBLICANS CAN WIN THE WORKING CLASS AND SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM
By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Doubleday, 244 pages, $23.95

To their immense credit, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two dynamic young conservative thinkers, freely admit the comprehensive failure of George W. Bush’s so-called "compassionate conservatism." They acknowledge that the blue-collar voters who were supposed to benefit from his policies are feeling more beleaguered now than at any time since the recessionary 1970s. In Grand New Party, their intriguing outline for Republican revitalization, they don’t even bother trying to say something good about our 42nd president. (Efforts in that direction are making many of their colleagues sound as desperate as senators caught poking their feet beneath a toilet stall divider.  read more »