Do Not Ask What Good We Do

Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert Draper, 352 pages, Audio: 11 hours and 18 minutes



First, if you're not familiar with audiobooks, 11 hours may seem like a lot of book.  It's not.  In fact, it's of barely middling length (for comparison, Justin Cronin's behemoth tome The Passage weighs in at a few minutes shy of 37 hours).  That said, this book hits the ground running with an engaging narrative of the 2011 debt ceiling debacle and felt far shorter than 11 hours.

That's an impressive accomplishment, considering the book's subject is Congress.  Remember the old joke about the horse and the camel?  "The horse is an animal, designed by God; the camel is is a horse, designed by committee."  Well, Congress is a committee, designed by committee.  It's an...inelegant body, which makes understanding its internal processes difficult.  This book isn't an intricate dissection of parliamentary minutiae, it simply shows how the institution works, and how it doesn't. 


At the end of the book you'll find yourself hoping that Draper writes a sequel.  You'll want to know what happens next to the Congressmen he covers in-depth throughout the book.  I can overstate how rare it is find someone who makes Congress interesting.  Draper makes it fascinating.