• Fiction.

By Robert D. Novak. Crown Forum, $29.95.

Grade: B

Book in a nutshell: Longtime syndicated columnist Novak is, by his own admission, a hard-drinking reporter, one who climbed his way up from regional sports journalism to become a conservative pundit in the nation's capital. While infamous inside D.C.'s beltway for decades, he became a household name when he outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson in a 2003 column, initiating a complicated scandal that rocked the White House and led to a prison sentence for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. President Bush recently commuted that sentence.

Novak opens and closes his memoir with his own bitter take on the byzantine Plame affair, but in between lies 600-plus pages of salacious insider information covering the '50s to the 21st century, information that only a journalist with hundreds of carefully cultivated government sources could possibly relate.

Novak writes about a harrowing ride with a speed-obsessed Jack Kennedy, getting stinking drunk with Lyndon Johnson at his own wedding reception and getting in at the ground level of a little start-up with no future named Cable News Network - or CNN.

Best tidbit: Describing the hostile criticism he suffered as a result of the Plame affair, Novak writes, "The new element in communications was blogging on the Internet, and the attacks on me there knew no restraint. I was daily accused of treason and denounced in the most obscene terms, with personal threats against me and my family. "

Pros: Novak obviously possesses a memory as precise as a digital storage device and what must be a storeroom filled with notes. It would be any journalist's dream to be so intimately involved in the affairs of the nation's power center.

Cons: That said, the book is too long. Novak relates in minute, almost dry detail every twist and turn on the political scene for the past five decades. In the end, it's both fascinating and exhausting.

Final word: Novak's writing style is clear but plain, and a certain dedication is required to plow through the book, but there's no doubting he's made his mark on Washington, D.C., and journalists and bloggers alike should consider giving this scandal-and-gossip-packed book a spin.