Boy genial: Tucker Carlson's nice-guy conservatism.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News - Book Review

I have a feeling that this will neither be the first nor last time you'll hear this question, but at this writing, some weeks before publication, it does have a glow of originality about it. Here goes: If Tucker Carlson offered to eat his shoe and tie if Hillary Clinton's memoir sold a million copies (as it did), what could she fairly offer to eat if Carlson's new book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, also scaled that best selling Alp? The contents of Imelda Marcos's closet? She could offer anything; barring a right-wing conspiracy to hoist Carlson to the top of the charts, it's a nearly riskless bet.

This isn't to say that Carlson has written a bad book. Carlson is best known as the co-host of CNN's "Crossfire"; he's the one in the bow tie with the insouciantly undergraduatish demeanor (and who also isn't Paul Begala). He seems like a pleasant sort, and in reading this hook, one gets the sense of what it must be like to sit next to him in the bar car of the Metroliner as he travels between Washington and New York. The book is full of good gossip and diverting adventures, and when you get off, you're grateful that you've lucked into this companion, and not, say, a conservative fundamentalist who wants to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy.

Carlson has a good eye for detail, and that helps him recognize the odd characteristics in people that make for good vignettes. He catches Bill O'Reilly blowing hard ("I've almost been killed three times," Carlson quotes O'Reilly, dubiously), Barney Frank in a shrewish mode ("I think you're filled with hatred," Frank sneers at him), and Jerry Falwell embracing his brothers in publicity hoghood, Alan Dershowitz and Geraldo Rivera ("he's a brilliant fellow.") He tells about the night Jim Traficant came on the show drunk, affectionately reveals that Bill Press, his former co-host on a show called "The Spin Room," seemed to operate a restaurant plugola scheme, and offers a brief but spot-on parody of the bombastic Chris Matthews. He calls Karen Hughes a liar who would make "a fascinating chapter in an abnormal psychology, textbook" because she accused him of inventing the words he quoted George W. Bush saying in a magazine profile.

This delectable candor, unfortunately, makes it all the more disappointing on those occasions when Carlson, making like Sally Rand doing her fan dance, throws a thin veil of discretion over his tales. He tells the story of a night during the adjudication...