Up, Simba!
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REVIEW BY RON KAPLAN
Step aside, Theodore White. The deliberate methods used by the author of the classic Making of the President series have gone the way of the dodo bird in this age of instant analysis (IA). The Internet has created a new methodology; he who hesitates to produce IA is doomed to go unread. Hence, the quick availability of e-books such as Up, Simba! 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate. On assignment for Rolling Stone, David Foster Wallace spent a week in February following Senator John McCain's campaign, a week which the author deemed "in retrospect . . . probably the most interesting and complicated week of the whole GOP race." Wallace basically wrote a book from his week on the trail, and only a small portion ran in Rolling Stone. Now the full-length version is being offered as one of the first e-book originals from iPublish, the new Time Warner publishing site. In spite of his journalistic neutrality, Wallace is clearly impressed by McCain and writes with a mix of awe and incredulousness of the former POW's degradations in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison camp. Try to imagine what he had to endure, Wallace advises the reader. McCain's history gives him the right to extol the patriotic values that some feel have become outdated. Up, Simba! is not just about McCain, his platform or his battles over how to respond to George W. Bush's negative campaigning. It is also about the way the media covers high-stakes politics. Rolling Stone may not be way up there on the food chain, but thanks to modern communications techniques, just about everyone's voice can be heard, and the race over who gets heard first can make or break a candidate. The book is peppered with the jargon used by the media, and while Wallace does explain most of these references, it gets a bit hard to remember the lesser phrases and acronyms, such as "22.5, the press corps' shorthand for McCain's opening remarks at THMs [town hall meetings], which . . . are always the same and always take exactly 22 1/2 minutes," or "scrum," the moving ring of reporters and equipment which capture McCain's every word and movement. The campaign alternates between periods of stunning boredom and extreme tension. The media is constantly on the go, scrambling to keep pace, while the campaign handlers, in turn, try to accommodate them as much as possible. Yet, Up, Simba! makes the mundane interesting enough. Wallace claims to write primarily to the "young voters," those between 18 and 40 (coincidentally about the age of the typical Rolling Stone reader). He laments the lack of political awareness/interest in that group, and warns that a vote not cast counts twice if someone votes for the "other" candidate. Who knows: although McCain is out as the GOP candidate, maybe Wallace will turn some of those politically apathetic readers into voters. Ron Kaplan writes from Montclair, New Jersey.
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