Andrew Ferguson reads 21 of Newt Gingrich’s books.
The ghosts for that first book served him unevenly. They got him in metaphor trouble from the first sentence. “We stand at a crossroads between two diverse futures,” he wrote. This crossroads, it transpired, faced an open window. That would be the window of vulnerability, which is widening. Three paragraphs later, the crossroads, perhaps swiveling on a Lazy Susan, is suddenly facing another window, also open. The important point, Gingrich writes, is that this window of opportunity is about to slam shut. And if it does? “We stand on the brink of a world of violence almost beyond our imagination.”
… As a result, he wrote in “To Save America,” “we stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.” “America today,” he announced in “Real Change,” “is at an extraordinary crossroads.” In a revised edition of “Winning the Future,” he phrased our predicament like this: “America is the most energetic, resourceful and innovative nation in the history of mankind. But we are at a crossroads.” Moreover, he said in “Saving Lives and Saving Money,” “we find ourselves at a crossroads.”
… just when my stack had dwindled to nothing and I felt the thrill of liberation, the mail arrived with my preordered copy of Gingrich’s latest book, “A Nation Like No Other.” I thumbed through it. “The election of 2012,” Gingrich writes, “will bring us to an historic crossroads.”