Before the Storm is out of print

I finished Nixonland last night, and now I don’t have anything to read. People have been recommending things lately, and I’ve seen a couple of interesting book reviews, but I’m still on the fence. What I’d really like to read is Before the Storm, the book Rick Perlstein wrote before Nixonland, but it’s out of print… and it’s selling for $150 on Amazon and abebooks.com.

<gulp>

Who knew that a book published in 2001 could fetch so much?! According to my local bookstore, the publisher is bringing it back in softcover next year, but I wanna read it nooooow.

Anyhoo, Nixonland was fantastic, 740 pages of page-turning delight. It bogged down a bit towards the end as it turned away from the riveting figure of RN to the upright, largely decent but boring George McGovern. Nixon is so compellingly sick and twisted, it makes me want to hunt down a good psychobiography of the guy… evidently there are quite a few out there.

What’s absolutely incredible after reading this book is to hear Pat Buchanan say to the author during an interview: “How did [Nixon] cheat during the ‘72 election?”, as though it was a ridiculous assertion. Why is Pat Buchanan on television? How can he ask that question with a straight face?

Books I’m thinking about reading next:

• Kluge, about the evolution of the brain
• On Being Certain, epistemology is fun
• New Kings of Non-fiction, compiled by Ira Glass
• Nixon psychobiography… hm…
• Eleanor Roosevelt biography, but they all seem kinda long

It’s weird not having a book in my bag! Really I should probably just go back and re-read the Moral Animal… it was way too complex to absorb in one pass.

Update: Holy smokes, Rick just commented on my blog! The world seems very small sometimes. OK, off to find a copy of Fawn Brodie’s book…