Parsing Gingrich

American politician Newt Gingrich recently announced that he'll be in the running to be nominated the Republican candidate to go up against Barack Obama in the US presidential election in 2012.

It's an interesting turn for a politician who until quite recently had appeared to have stepped away from the limelight of frontline politics. After all, as the Onion recently pointed out, he's best-known as the man who engineered the temporary shutdown of the US government in 1995.

It seems, though, that the prospect of the party's lunatic fringe running away with the nomination - personified by 'birther' Donald Trump - has spurred Gingrich into action.

The computing angle here is that Slate.com has tracked down the book reviews Gingrich posted on Amazon between 2005 and 2008 when he had more time on his hands. The list of reviews makes for interesting reading.

Picture by Gage Skidmore

Gingrich had pretty much retired by 2005, David Weigel says in the Slate piece, but by 2008 he'd become too busy again and had to stop reviewing. "That's too bad," he says.

The Gingrich who reviewed 156 books on Amazon was neither the fire starter who led the GOP's 1994 revolution nor the guy who told National Review that President Obama can only be understood through the prism of "Kenyan anti-colonial thinking." He was a smart nerd with a lot of time on his hands. If you read his entire collected Amazonian oeuvre, you can watch as an easily entertained quantum physics junkie slowly realizes that he needs to get back into politics and set the rest of us straight-one last time.

Gingrich was a master of blurb-speak; it's a surprise he didn't end up cited on the back covers of more paperbacks. On Robert B. Parker's thriller Potshot: "Parker has done it again." On Mark Bowden's drug war classic Killing Pablo: "Bowden has done it again." On Ken Follett's Jackdaws: "Follett has done it again."

But there's more to him than just cliched reviews of potboilers.

 Gingrich the reviewer/wonk is an optimist, but not a fool. One of the first novels he reviewed after 9/11 was Humphrey Hawksley's Dragon Strike, a novel about a fictional war between Pakistan and China. He gave it four stars, but the title of the review is "Unlikely Scenario Post 9/11." "The recent terrorist attacks on America make this novel slightly less likely," Gingrich says, "because we are almost certainly going to see a stronger American military and a closer American relationship with Pakistan, which will have a stabilizing influence."

He generally liked Atlantis Found, one of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels. Reading it shortly after 9/11, though, he wondered whether Cussler had punted on his choice of villains. "It is fascinating," Gingrich writes, "that there are far more novels about totally improbable Nazi revenge than there are about tragically real Islamic medieval terrorism and there are far more novels about bad Germans 56 years after the Second World War than there are about all too real current acts of terror against Israel and the West or for that matter the terrorists who seek to destabilize India, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc."

You can read all about it at Slate.