Primary Colors

Fülszöveg

Young Henry Burton, a former congressional aide of mixed race and the grandson of a legendary civil rights leader, is going through a precocious midlife crisis. Tired of the back-scratching and back-stabbing and back-watching of legislative politics, he's wondering what to do next with his Beltway experience and abilities when Jack Stanton, the governor of a small southern state who has set his sights on the presidency, half flatters, half shanghais him into a campaign-staff job. What follows for Henry—and the reader—is an education in modern American electoral politics that in dramatic power, humor, psy-chological acuity, and insider knowledge beggars a hundred textbooks and a thousand lectures.
Henry hopes against hope that he has at last found a leader he can believe in. He then watches in admiration and dismay as, in his quest for votes, Governor Stanton combines calculation and sincer-ity, dodges a draft-controversy bullet, gorges on barbecue and poaches food off others'... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Young Henry Burton, a former congressional aide of mixed race and the grandson of a legendary civil rights leader, is going through a precocious midlife crisis. Tired of the back-scratching and back-stabbing and back-watching of legislative politics, he's wondering what to do next with his Beltway experience and abilities when Jack Stanton, the governor of a small southern state who has set his sights on the presidency, half flatters, half shanghais him into a campaign-staff job. What follows for Henry—and the reader—is an education in modern American electoral politics that in dramatic power, humor, psy-chological acuity, and insider knowledge beggars a hundred textbooks and a thousand lectures.
Henry hopes against hope that he has at last found a leader he can believe in. He then watches in admiration and dismay as, in his quest for votes, Governor Stanton combines calculation and sincer-ity, dodges a draft-controversy bullet, gorges on barbecue and poaches food off others' plates, seduces the occasional bystander, and confronts the resulting sex scandals. Henry's attempts to manage this impul-sive pol—a prodigy of altruism and appetite—force him to confront his own ambivalence about political ethics, racial identity, and love.
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Primarjr Colors has its rich rewards as a savvy insider's look at life on the stump. But it travels far beyond mere gossip and exposé and discovers a con-vincing world of its own, peopled by smart cookies, nutcases, and wheeler-dealers, whose public and private lives illuminate each other—sometimes by casting dark shadows. This story spans the novelistic spectrum from bedroom farce to high moral drama, and it paints a picture of the political state of the nation so vivid and authentic that one finds in it the deepest kind of truth—the kind of truth that only fiction can teil. Vissza