Research Catalog
Primary colors : a novel of politics
- Title
- Primary colors : a novel of politics / Anonymous.
- Publication
- New York : Random House, [1996], ©1996.
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | PS3550.A1 P75 1996 | Off-site |
Details
- Description
- 366 pages; 25 cm
- Summary
- 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, psychological 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 sincerity, 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 impulsive pol - a prodigy of altruism and appetite - force him to confront his own ambivalence about political ethics, racial identity, and love.
- Primary Colors has its rich rewards as a savvy insider's look at life on the stump. But it travels far beyond mere gossip and expose and discovers a convincing 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 tell.
- Subject
- ISBN
- 0679448594
- LCCN
- 95039823
- OCLC
- 33166616
- ocm33166616
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries