Greg Palast: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy & Mark Leibovich: This Town; Two Parties and a Funeral in America's Gilded Capital

I obtained these two books at very different stages during my time in Washington. I see I bought the Palast in 2003 while Leibovich was much later, probably 2015. Not much had changed!

I first came across Palast with the superb lengthy investigative pieces he wrote/writes for Rolling Stone - perhaps unreasonably I was initially very surprised to find this sort of journalism in a paper of that name. The pieces were always superbly researched and this book (a collection of his pieces) confirms this and the investigative skills that he constantly shows reading one piece after the other, makes one regard him with awe at his consistency, tenacity and skill.

Palast has the ability to marshall vast acres of fact into highly readable prose and he certainly has a way with words, often creating highly memorable phrases the stick in the mind for his topics - particularly at the start of the piece as a super example of a ‘hook’ to draw the reader in. But he does not make the mistake of writing in this way all the time. It is skilfully and sparingly used - just enough to keep one hooked but not so incessantly that one ends of rearding the pieces almost as rehtorical exercises where the search for a sparkling or memorable pbrase is done at the expense of the content. The content is ALWAYS there.

It is also eye-opening (and depressing) to see how there are connections between very different stories. It gives the bigger picture, over the American economy and society, even though the topisc are very wide ranging - and that is a great value of this book as it allows one to see this reading one piece after another. This is not always apparent on reading the individual stories - althuogh for very many, the bigger picture is alwasys considered.

Leibovich’s book is a little different. Firstly it is very much a journalist’s book (this is NOT an adverse criticism) that takes advantage of his insider status, off-the-record breifings, personal conatcts etc. That is why is was a great best-seller in DC as for all those living there, they either wanted to get an insiders views as they were not in that category or, if they were, anxsiousl seing what was revealed about themselves. When it came out, it was one of those books where, reputedly, insiders would start by checking of their names were in the index. If they were it was both good (they were clearly important insider figures) and bad (their malfeasance was likely to be revealed) and bad (if they were not there it was because they were not important enough.

Nowadays, sadly, much of this is considerably less revelatory - not quite the stage of ‘ah, those were the good old days!’ but perhaps something like that.

Fianlly though I think that an essentila different between the two books is that I ammuch more likely to revisit Palast than Leibovich as the latter is more insular. Not just ‘inside the Beltway’ people but there is that aspect tbh…