What to read about John McCain and the future of the GOP.

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John McCain has written several autobiographical works with strategist Mark Salter over the years, which explains why we don't see that many other McCain biographies. But they do exist. Some are even worth reading.

For juicy anecdotes about young McCain, see Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song, published in 1995 but since chopped and repackaged as John McCain: An American Odyssey. (Read the original; it's got Jim Webb.) Demerits, Brazilian model girlfriends, run-ins with cops—McCain was not, as Rudy Giuliani might say, an altar boy. At the Naval Academy, he dressed sloppily. "What do you think your grandfather would say?" an officer once asked him. "Frankly, Commander, I don't think he'd give a rat's ass," came the reply. Timberg, a vet himself, clearly adores the man.

And he's not the only one, according to Free Ride: McCain and the Media, by David Brock and Paul Waldman. The Media Matters duo set out to indict the MSM for its too-friendly coverage of McCain. But it often reads like an unintentional ode to the senator's press savvy. They're not wrong, though. Squarely in Camp McCain is Elizabeth Drew's well-intentioned snorer Citizen McCain, chronicling the senator's campaign finance crusade. Likewise, Paul Alexander's Man of the People should be sold with pompoms.

But McCain skepticism is alive and well. Take Matt Welch's McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, a meticulous upending of the candidate's public identity. Oddly enough, it mirrors McCain's latest line of attack against Obama, only it paints McCain as the lightweight celebrity snob. Welch argues that McCain "elevates his own self-interest over what's good for the country." He quotes a journalist confessing, "I'm falling for John McCain," and a former friend saying "John McCain was always much more of an elitist."
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