Race and gender may have been the most visible currents in the 2008 presidential primaries, but what really unsettled the political waters was a riptide of religion, and perhaps we could call Reinhold Niebuhr Barack Obama’s theologian. Parts of The Irony of American History are time-bound, but Neibuhr does sketch an existential drama that is born of the human condition. He appropriates the ideas of tragedy, pathos, and irony to portray three enduring theories of human nature and destiny. With Abraham Lincoln as his exemplar, the preacher casts his lot with irony.

Blogs are now a central feature of modern social life, including political arenas. Particularly transformative have been the “netroots”—virtual networks of activists that proactively engage in politics via the Internet and have become a central medium of political discourse. Though the sociology is only implicit, Crashing the Gate and Netroots Rising illuminate how the new technologies and practices of netroots face many of the time-honored social challenges of politics, especially when it comes to questioning the relationship between movement and party organization, and trying to balance idealism against political pragmatism.

The argument in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is more psychographic than tied to political economy or the stirrings of global markets. In other words, Perlstein is interested in people, more than in forces, and Nixonland focuses on reputations, their entrepreneurs, and how they’re established and preserved.