Carlos Lazzada is a columnist for the New York Times and before that the long time

non-fiction book critic for the Washington Post. In 2019, Lazzato won the Pulitzer

Prize for criticism for a series of pieces that judges described as

trenchant and searching reviews and essays that joined warm emotion and careful

analysis and examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American

experience.

Well he's now collected nearly a decade of such reviews in what he calls the Washington book,

How to Read Politics and Politicians, which was released this week.

If the art of politics can be to subtract meaning

from language to produce more and more words

that say less and less, he writes, than it is my purpose as a journalist to try to find that

meaning and put it back.

He reads a lot of books by politicians, as he likes to say, he reads all those books so that you don't have to.

If people want to read my columns and reviews and books in lieu of reading all the others?

I have no problem with that.

I have no concerns.

But he's found a way to use those books

to say something interesting about those same politicians.

What is real, what is performance.

With politicians I think it's sort of an instinctive reaction to assume that everything at all times

is a performance?

So what is Carlos's close reading of the likes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and

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