Recommended: The Inheritance

David Sanger is the Washington correspondent for the New York Times and twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a Washington insider for many years. His new book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power is an eye-opener to read, because it dissects many of the key events of the past decade in new ways, with new insights into how the key players thought and what they assumed.

This is not a book that will make you feel good about the Washington bureaucracy or political scene, Republican or Democratic. It is not a book that will increase your confidence that your government is doing the right things, or at least knows what it is doing. But it is a book that will give a taste of just how difficult and complex the nation's problems are today. As near as I can tell, Sanger is pretty even-handed politically, and just relates events as they occurred.

Well worth reading.