Imagine if the Rolling Stones were just now releasing its first greatest hits album, and you'll have some idea of how long overdue, and highly anticipated, Politics is. Here are Hendrik Hertzberg's most significant, hilarious, devastating and infuriating dispatches from the American scene - a scene he has chronicled for four decades with an uncanny blend of moral seriousness, high spirits, and perfect rhetorical pitch. Politics is at once the story of American life from LBJ to GWB and a testament to the power of the written word in the right hands. In those hands, everything seems like politics, and politics has never seemed more interesting. Hertzberg breaks down American politics into component parts - campaigns, debates, rhetoric, the media, wars (cultural, countercultural, and real), high crimes and misdemeanors, the right, and more - and draws the choicest, most telling pieces from his body of work to illuminate each, beginning each section with a new piece of writing framing the subject at hand.