The Best and the Brightest

I started this book on the recommendation of Scholar's Stage, who I would describe as one of the few deeply interesting and serious conservative historians on X, the Everything App — someone whose recommendations and commentary I find uniformly interesting. His was a rapturous recommendation, albeit one prefaced with a caveat: that the book is deeply liberal, to the point of some small amount of bias. As a leftist I didn't expect to have a problem with this except for the fact that I find the truly great works of non-fiction — those of Caro, or Tony Judt — to be non-ideological: not centrist, exactly, but focused on a discourse that cannot be reduced to one side of the political axis. (As an aside, I agree with Scholar's Stage that this kind of book is the new great American novel; I have waxed and waned online and offline about Caro's work long enough to make my opinion clear in that regard. The downside of this kind of book, however, can be worse than the downside of overwrought…