Jeff Lomonaco

Among its many accomplishments is that it makes a narrative of bureaucratic process enormously compelling. It helps, of course, that the bureaucratic process Shenon is writing about is the production of the 9/11 Commission's report on the first of the pair of disastrous events that seems destined to define the soon-to-be-over Bush era. But Shenon turns the bureaucratic narrative of the 9/11 Commission and its report into a compelling read also because he is an extraordinary journalistic writer. The Commission is one of the best-written books by a journalist I have ever read.