Watergate Lib/E

From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated--uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs--it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal's greatest mysteries--who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?--and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his "splendid evocation of Washington," Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a "third-rate burglary" into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

About the Author :
Thomas Mallon is the author of eleven novels and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials.

Review :
"I was thrilled, captivated, deeply moved, and wholly subsumed by the world that Tom Mallon created...The book is fever dream, wolf whistle, and history as plain and simple human longing; the book encapsulates no less than everything. I finished the last page and wept for an hour; I remain stunned forty-eight hours later. The laughter, the horror, the pathos, the tawdry drama of small people and their fatuous lusts and drives--ever falling short but, somehow, achieving a transcendental interconnectedness. Watergate is certainly a masterpiece. More importantly, it is a concurrently credible and fantastic subversion of all our perceived notions of a smugly overreported event and an underscrutinized time and place...Here, Nixon himself achieves grandeur; here, he will live as the embodiment of glorious intransigence and twisted courage." -- "James Ellroy, New York Times bestselling author" "If ever a historical event was worthy of a comic novel, it's Watergate, and Mallon, with several outstanding historical novels to his credit, has the skills to write it. What a cast of characters we meet!...Mallon writes with such swagger that it all seems new again. A sure winner, for its subject and Mallon's proven track record as a historical novelist, and because it's good." -- "Library Journal" "In this stealth bull's-eye of a political novel, Thomas Mallon invests the Watergate affair with all the glitter, glamour, suave grace, and subtlety that it doesn't often get. His cleverly counterintuitive Watergate even has the name-dropping panache of a Hollywood tell-all...[and a] fine, boisterous historical tableau...Readers who deem the book's liberties too free can stick to the tonnage of Watergate memoirs, transcripts, investigative, and marginalia. More fun-loving types can take Watergate as lively, witty drama." -- "New York Times" "Revisiting the history of the 70s with our favorite cast of characters...While billed as a novel, this book reads more like a documentary of a fascinating yet unlamented time." -- "Kirkus Reviews" "The ruthless, paranoid, sometimes farcically inept architects of America's biggest political scandal seem more colorfully real than ever in this fictional portrayal." -- ""Titles to Pick Up Now," O, The Oprah Magazine" "Mallon, astute and nimble, continues his scintillating, morally inquisitive journey through crises great and absurd in American politics by taking on Watergate...Mallon himself is deliciously witty. But it is his political fluency and unstinting empathy that transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow." -- "Booklist (starred review)"