A Long Time Coming

An adroitly distilled chronicle of the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama. This easily devoured, crisply anecdotal account, spiked with revealing, side-of the-mouth comments, charts the most cautious and reckless of political maneuverings and provides in-action portraits of the major players, both obvious and behind-the-scenes. Thomas writes that Obama, an avid reader and gifted writer, sees himself as a figure out of literature, and, indeed, real-life stories don't get more compelling than this.