In downtown Washington, at the house where Abraham Lincoln died, there is a three-storey tower of books. Thirty-four feet tall, 8ft round, it is made of 6,800 volumes about the 16th president. The cover of Carlos Lozada’s new book, a collection of the Pulitzer-winning critic’s work from the past 10 years or so, imagines something rather grander: a whole Washington Monument, all 555ft of it, made of books about DC.
It’s an apt image. The Washington Book, Lozada’s second (after What Were We Thinking?, his “Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era” from 2020) makes for a monumental read about a publishing glut. Books about American politics – pre-Trump, of Trump, not yet post-Trump – simply keep on coming.
