This topical book, for popular readers who follow the US political system the way that others may follow football or baseball, is written by journalist Jefferey Toobin. Its subject is the relationship between President Obama and the Supreme Court. Toobin is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a senior legal analyst at CNN, and the author of four previous books on parallel subjects. As a popular journalist tackling an intellectual subject he knows well in depth, Toobin knows he needs a dramatic hook on which to hang his story. He finds it in the moment of Obama's first inauguration, when John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, fumbled the administration of the oath of office. The book portrays the history of recent developments at the federal level in terms of both a struggle between executive and judicial branches of government, and a personal struggle between two strong-willed men: Obama and Roberts. The author has two primary sound bites. One is that the conflict between the American left and right wing has been played out less between the President and Congress than between the administration and the Supreme Court. The other is that if we were to make the Obama-Roberts story into a melodrama, in spite of popular accusations and assumptions to the contrary, Roberts is the firebrand recklessly agitating for revolution, and Obama the conservative standing on precedent and advocating slow and progressive change. The book's real subject is deeper and more interesting; that accidentally flubbing a non-essential word in an oral ceremony would not, in most times in US history, have been considered grounds for an investigation into whether someone is really the President. Mixing reporting with analysis, Toobin calls the plays for readers in a time when the basic trust and cooperation American governance is built on has largely disappeared from the field. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less