getAbstract Summary: Get the key points from this book in 10 minutes.

Famed Watergate reporter Bob Woodward tells the inside story of how President Barack Obama’s administration and Republicans in Congress grappled with what one White House adviser aptly called “a modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis.” In the summer of 2011, in the run-up to what should have been a routine House of Representatives vote to raise the national debt ceiling, the US government brought the country to the brink of disaster. Woodward explains how the drama played out. Beware: His budgetary details can be head-spinning, as are the number of meetings, phone conversations, memos and emails that fly between the White House and the Capitol. Woodward wrote the book before the 2012 presidential election, so he does not cover the December 2012 fiscal cliff, the decision on George W. Bush’s tax cuts and the sequester, though his text tells you how all that came to be. getAbstract recommends Woodward’s reportage to policy wonks, nonwonks who like political drama, anyone who cares about making government work and budding policy makers who want to learn how not to run a railroad.

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Copyright © 2012 Bob Woodward
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.