The Joy of Politics

Playing to Win By Jeff Greenfield Simon and Schuster, 286 pp., $11.95 Jeff Greenfield is one of those ubiquitous chaps who seem to turn up for five minutes a day in every medium. Readers of these pages may know him best as that insufferably bright liberal wiseacre on Firing Line, who used to come on at the end of the show to throw a few wicked curves at the guest, and even the host. Currently he shows up on CBS, and in the New York Times Book Review and TV Guide.

Playing to Win, his answer to Machiavelli’s The Prince, delights in the actual practice of politics as she is played. It might have been titled The Joy of Politics. Its verve and wit and general shrewdness surprised me, because I expected Greenfield, more on generic than individual grounds, to be infected with the liberal reformer’s priggishness on the subject. Happily enough, he has something of an Aristotelian readiness to take a large human activity on its own terms.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Playing to Win By Jeff Greenfield Simon and Schuster, 286 pp., $11.95 Jeff Greenfield is one of those ubiquitous chaps who seem to turn up for five minutes a day in every medium. Readers of these pages may know him best as that insufferably bright liberal wiseacre on Firing Line, who used to come on at the end of the show to throw a few wicked curves at the guest, and even the host. Currently he shows up on CBS, and in the New York Times Book Review and TV Guide.

Playing to Win, his answer to Machiavelli’s The Prince, delights in the actual practice of politics as she is played. It might have been titled The Joy of Politics. Its verve and wit and general shrewdness surprised me, because I expected Greenfield, more on generic than individual grounds, to be infected with the liberal reformer’s priggishness on the subject. Happily enough, he has something of an Aristotelian readiness to take a large human activity on its own terms.