While the rest of the Washington press corps focuses obsessively on his upcoming wedding, Newt Gingrich took time out not long ago to compile a reading list for summer interns at conservative think tanks. As speaker of the House, of course, Gingrich became notorious for compiling reading lists -- urging his colleagues to wade into the Federalist Papers (imagine John Kasich reading Publius!) or the works of C. Vann Woodward. This most recent reading list shows that Gingrich's eclecticism remains intact.
Alas, the Federalist and Flexner's biography of Washington (George, not Grover) are gone from the list the former speaker put together for the young interns. Instead we find a number of the business-babble books he always had a weakness for -- for instance, Antony Jay's Management and Machiavelli: Discovering a New Science of Management in the Timeless Principles of Statecraft -- and a new interest in pop science, from Frans De Waal's Chimpanzee Politics, to Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language, which the publisher says studies "many aspects of non-verbal communication and considers the concepts of space and time as tools for the transmission of messages."
Gingrich's new interest in "non-verbal communication" is a welcome antidote to his passion for the verbal kind that got him in so much trouble. The list also shows an unexpected taste for left-wing pop fiction, as in Lincoln, by Gore Vidal, and The Unvanquished, by the proudly unrepentant American Communist Howard Fast. These interns are going to have a busy summer.