Biography: Much has already been written about John McCain, the war hero turned US senator. A US navy pilot during the Vietnam War, he was captured in 1967 after ejecting from his crippled A-4 Skyhawk bomber over Hanoi and was held for more than five years in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison.
A stubborn, principled soldier, he refused to accept an offer of early release because of his status as an admiral's son, insisting that he go home by order of those shot down first.
After returning to the US a hero, he divorced, remarried, and entered politics as a Republican. His political career is chronicled here, including his rather shady involvement in the Keating Savings and Loan scandal and his role in normalising relations with Vietnam.
The most fascinating section of this biography, however, is that dealing with the political war McCain fought for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2000. He was the candidate of the people against the candidate of the party establishment, George W. Bush, and when it looked as if he might win the contest got real dirty.
Deriding Bush as "all hat and no cattle", McCain won the first primary in New Hampshire on a populist platform topped by campaign finance reforms that would stop corporations giving "soft money" to candidates. A second McCain victory in South Carolina, which would have proved fatal to Bush's chances, seemed certain until the Texas governor staged a counter-attack. Bush went to Bob Jones University, where the faculty is drawn from the far-right Christian movement, and depicted McCain as a closet Democrat.
The next day, Bush appeared at a rally with J. Thomas Burch, a controversial war veteran, who accused McCain of leaving POWs behind in Vietnam and ignoring Gulf War veterans, both patently untrue. The Bush campaign then borrowed McCain's reform clothes, trumpeting its candidate as a "reformer with results" and portraying McCain, with some justification, as himself a beneficiary of corporate largesse, a case of a very black pot criticising the kettle.
McCain hit back with a television ad saying "Bush twists the truth like Clinton", a telling charge in a state where almost half the voters were religious conservatives who loathed Bill Clinton.
The Christian right weighed in on Bush's side and, at ground level, a dirty tricks campaign got under way. During McCain rallies, plants in the audience whispered to supporters that McCain was no hero; e-mails were circulated saying McCain had a "nigger baby", a cruel reference to his adopted child from Bangladesh, and on the Internet a conservative website alleged that he had been brainwashed in captivity and programmed to act as a closet socialist. Unsolicited telephone calls to voters piled on the lies: McCain had given his wife, Cindy, venereal disease, Cindy McCain was a drug addict, he was the "fag" candidate. At a McCain town hall meeting in Spartanburg a distressed woman testified how a caller had told her young son that the senator was a cheat, liar and fraud.
McCain was shaken: this was not what campaigns were supposed to be about. He announced he would pull his negative ads and urged Bush to do the same. Bush refused, and was caught by a C-span camera vowing to hit McCain's soft spots, but saying that "I'm not going to do it on TV", a remark the media took as an admission he was behind the negative campaigning.
Bush won South Carolina and eventually the nomination and the rift was patched up during the campaign against Al Gore, but after Bush became president the animosity resurfaced. McCain forced through a campaign finance reform bill with Democrat Russell Feingold, which a furious President had to sign, and he voted against Bush on tax, gun control and healthcare. Bush may have been right all along - the maverick war hero was acting like a closet Democrat. The book ends with a list of the reasons why McCain might indeed quit the Republican Party and try for the 2004 Democratic nomination to fight George W. Bush again.
This book is written very much from McCain's perspective and lacks real insight into what drives this complex man. The politician, like the life story, is still a work in progress. This book by Paul Alexander, a journalist and radio talk-show host, is, however, a basic primer and - like its subject - never boring.
Man of the People: The Life of John McCain By Paul Alexander
Wiley, 416pp, £18.95
Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times