The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Blurbs

A New York Times con­trib­u­tor offered the best take on blurbs. Maybe we should call in the Bureau of Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion. He was talk­ing about “mis­blurb­ing” of exist­ing book reviews, but orig­i­nal blurbs come with their own perils.

Just the same, as oth­ers have noted before, pos­i­tives exist. Hon­est blurbs can be a use­ful form of, ‘If you like this, then maybe you’ll like that.” So I sought out three inves­tiga­tive types I know: well-regarded jour­nal­ists who share my love of qual­ity muck—and maybe your own fond­ness for it:

• James Fal­lows, who, besides hav­ing made a name for him­self as an inves­ti­ga­tor, not just a com­men­ta­tor, is author of Break­ing the News—in other words, a media expert well qual­i­fied to dis­cuss news­pa­per mem­oirs, true or faux. Jim is a mas­ter of many top­ics, but I espe­cially like his writ­ings on gov­ern­ment mis­man­age­ment, class issues and tech­nol­ogy. His most recent book is Post­cards from Tomor­row Square: Reports from China. Dis­clo­sure: I helped Jim with his Web site eons ago.
• James Polk, whom the Pulitzer jurors hon­ored for his Water­gate report­ing for the Wash­ing­ton Star. Enjoy the scene where Jon Stone tries to sneak his story into the Wash­ing­ton Telegram? That was Jim’s sug­ges­tion to me, offered three decades ago. Jim saw early drafts of The Cover-Up, as we then called it, and encour­aged me to write on.
• Bet­tina Gre­gory, the for­mer ABC News cor­re­spon­dent, who, like Jim Polk, ver­i­fied and picked up my report­ing on the gov­ern­ment office leas­ing pro­gram. She enlight­ened ABC view­ers on The Case of the Miss­ing Cafeteria—the $500,000+ facil­ity that the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency was sup­posed to get from the land­lord, who moved in Spiro Agnew’s circles.

The deal with three was, “Zap the file or toss out the gal­leys if the book sucks. I’m rec­on­ciled to the fact that not every­one will like Scan­dals.” What’s more, if the two Jims and Bet­tina were review­ing Scan­dals, I know they’d find flaws. Every novel has them, The Great Gatsby included. Still, I doubt that the three would want their names on this page if they didn’t believe in the book and what they wrote—it’s their reps at stake, too. Here, then, are the blurbs.

JAMES FALLOWS

“The Solomon Scan­dals is a mor­dantly enter­tain­ing book that broad­ens the cast of the stan­dard Wash­ing­ton novel beyond spy­mas­ters and politi­cians to include real estate barons and fed­eral con­tract offi­cers. David Rothman’s detailed knowl­edge of the D.C. scene comes through in his satire. Scan­dals is set in yesterday’s Wash­ing­ton, but is about truths behind today’s headlines—and about the trou­bled news­pa­pers that pub­lish the headlines.

“Like Booms­day and oth­ers of the best recent Wash­ing­ton nov­els, it amuses while broad­en­ing our under­stand­ing of how today’s gov­ern­ment works—and doesn’t.”

JAMES POLK

“If only the cesspool of cor­rup­tion Roth­man plumbs so well in the past did not per­sist even today in Wash­ing­ton, where the first pur­pose of pol­i­tics seems to remain the divvy­ing up of spoils among secret cronies.”

BETTINA GREGORY

“David Rothman’s bright, breezy, face-paced, and funny novel shines a mer­ci­less spot­light on greed, skul­dug­gery and fraud within gov­ern­ment, catch­ing Pres­i­dent Bullard like a deer in the head­lights. But what res­onates with me, as a long-time inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, is pro­tag­o­nist Jonathan Stone’s night­mare in get­ting his explo­sive find­ings into print. Seem­ingly the Wash­ing­ton Post hun­gered for every syl­la­ble Wood­ward and Bern­stein could dig up on Water­gate. How­ever, it’s not always that easy. Stone’s fic­tional strug­gle to write and pub­lish his expose is more than a shadow of the truth.”