Richard Ben Cramer Had What It Takes

I confess to a sin of omission, slightly short of mortal, of being among the few, if not the only, political reporters in the Western World who has never read What It Takes, the behemoth of a book at 1047 pages by Richard Ben Cramer. I neglected it for no other reason than I’d always considered it too heavy to lift, kind of in the weight class with War and Peace, if not heftier.