review by Brian Charles Clark
Politics: Observations & Arguments
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Publisher: Penguin, 2005
Hendrik Hertzberg has been a political observer and writer for nearly 40 years. He wrote for Newsweek for many years. In the 1970s, he took a hiatus from magazine writing in order to scribe speeches for Jimmy Carter. Then, in the 1980s, he was the editor of The New Republic. Since 1992, he has been a senior editor and frequent contributor to The New Yorker.
Hertzberg most often writes analytically about politics du jour: reports from the campaign trails of various candidates, analyses of policies and idiocies (including crimes and misdemeanors) of elected officials, and the (often pernicious) portrayal of the above by the (as Eric Alterman says) so-called liberal media. Though Hertzberg usually works the denotational side of politics, he also frequently covers the connotational side, that is, pop culture. “The personal,” as we know from the Situationist slogan graffitied throughout Paris in 1968, “is political.” In this sense, then, Hertzberg is an ecological writer: we’re all connected in an environment of often-conflicting ideologies. Read the rest of this entry »