Oh, what an excruciatingly ugly cover this edition has...

But now that superficial judgement is over with, this is an extremely interesting book. I saw the movie some time back, and the thing that most sticks out to me, now that I've read the text, is how compressed the film made it seem. In reality, this investigation went on for months and months, while Bernstein and Woodward did interview upon interview, literally hundreds of them, trying to piece everything together. Seriously, the amount of work they put into this is staggering. All credit to them, and to the Washington Post for backing them to the hilt even under heavy fire. It really shows the value of investigative journalism, and how it can act as a break on political power. What the two of them uncover just gets worse and worse, and it just rolls on as an increasing juggernaut of consequence.

As fascinating as the subject matter is, however, it's also a tangle of names, most of which are unfamiliar to me. I imagine this was less of a problem at the time, given that all the people concerned were plastered over papers and thus familiar to most readers, but as the scale of the conspiracy was uncovered it seems to me that the authors might have been a little more aware of the historical value of what they produced, and futureproofed their book for later generations. This book would have benefited immensely, for example, from a few simple diagrams showing how the President's men actually related to each other. There's a character list at the beginning of the book, but it's not enough, and at times I had to resort to Wikipedia to sort it all out.