Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this book one other time, many decades ago, probably in high school or when I was in the Navy. All I remembered about it was that I had read it once, and that it was a political novel about a Senate confirmation battle in Washington, which could be guessed from the title. Well, I read it again and enjoyed it thoroughly. The novel was originally published in 1959 and won the Pulitzer in 1960. Drury does a masterful job of writing a novel about post-war America with a complete fictional cast of characters, and he really does capture a number of timeless elements about representative democracy. The only part that clanked was his treatment of the race to the moon, which was understandable because that part was still a decade in the future when he wrote. His treatment of that was really off. The rest of it was gripping.
See Throne of Saturn for an outstanding novel of “Space and Politics.” While you are at it, read The Roads of Earth. Written in 1984, the Big Bad was Russia, but otherwise is remarkably close to what is happening in the South China Sea.