Obamanos!: The Rise of a New Political Era Book

Hendrik Hertzberg, celebrated political analyst for the New Yorker, watches the long presidential campaign of 2007 and 2008 as it unfolds to reveal the transformation of the Democratic Party, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama, and other seismic shifts in our national political consciousness. Hertzberg wrote about the events that culminated in the victory of Barack Obama in two venues, one Olympian and one immediate: his "Comments" for "The Talk of the Town" and the informal blog he began keeping on the magazine's Web site fifteen months before the election. ¡Obámanos! is adapted from both and framed by a new introductory essay.

¡Obámanos! shares the context needed to truly understand the events of the general election-the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent president or vice president was on the ballot-by first examining Bush's second term and the primary campaign. Hertzberg follows the central...

The New York Times - Jonathan Freedland

In book form, without the cooling effect of The New Yorker's trademark typeface or the ironic detachment provided by an adjacent line drawing or two, Hertzberg's fury is naked to the eye. And yet he is no finger-jabber leftist, hectoring his reader in the manner of so many radicals in print. The writing is too good for that. Hertzberg has a novelist's control of metaphor and a comedian's gift for the one-liner…But it is not only Hertzberg's wit that prevents him from being a left wingnut. He may stake out radical positions…but he is, more often, a spokesman for those unsung soldiers in the progressive army: the brokers of the messy compromise.