Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0684838990, Hardcover)

"There is a hidden history in American politics, the other side of the baby-boom generation: political rebels of the Right who emerged on campus in the 1970s and went to overturn the established liberal order," writes Nina J. Easton in Gang of Five. "To understand them is to understand what politics has become and what it will be." Her book is probably best described as a quintuple biography of five movement conservatives in the midst of their political careers: Clint Bolick, a civil rights lawyer; William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard magazine; David McIntosh, a GOP congressman running for governor of Indiana in the fall of 2000; Grover Norquist, an antitax activist and one of Washington, D.C.'s most prominent right-wingers; and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition maestro. "To understand these five men is to understand the real conservative movement," writes Easton.

That may be a slight overstatement, but only a slight one--this excellent book is one of the best narrative accounts of the modern conservative movement as it has developed since the 1970s. It's certainly the most readable. Easton's character-driven style brings each of her subjects alive; she treats them as real people with hopes and ambitions, not just mouthpieces for particular policies. Readers will learn of how Kristol grew up in the first family of neoconservatism, the bizarre way Norquist's father found his wife, and the charges of plagiarism leveled against Reed when he was an undergraduate. But Gang of Five isn't just gossip; it gracefully conveys the ideas that energize the conservative movement. Easton's discussion of Leo Strauss, delivered in a section on Kristol's days as a young man at Harvard, makes a difficult subject remarkably comprehensible. Best of all, this is no vast-right-wing-conspiracy tome. Easton reveals the important differences among these figures on everything from attitudes toward religion to personal style, and she reports on their sometimes vicious infighting (especially between Kristol and Norquist).

This is very much a book of the moment--each of these five men has long years ahead of him, and Easton could probably spend the rest of her life updating new editions of Gang of Five with fresh information. But there's also a sense of completeness here. She's done a remarkable job with an important subject, and made a compelling and original contribution to our understanding of contemporary politics. --John J. Miller