The former Speaker of the House looks back on his thirty-four-year congressional career Former Texas Representative and House Speaker Wright has written an account of his 34 years of service in that body. Despite the length of the volume, it provides only cursory discussions of some of the most important measures considered by Congress during Wright's service there. For example, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 receive scant attention. Wright also discusses only briefly his very close and crucial victory over Phillip Burton in 1976 to become Majority Leader-the stepping stone to the office of Speaker. This contest is examined more fully in John Jacobs's A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (LJ 8/95). In spite of these deficiencies, general readers may find interesting Wright's observations about the personalities and leadership styles of the nine presidents and numerous congressional leaders he has known. (Index not seen.. --Thomas H. Ferrell, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. In a gracefully written memoir, full of insights and inside information about cooperation and conflict between the legislative branch and the nation's last nine presidents, former House Speaker Wright presents "the truth--as I saw it--about people and events that contributed to the major national decisions of the past forty years." A former mayor of Weatherford (near Fort Worth), Wright came to the House in 1954 and learned the ropes as a protegeof fellow Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Often serving as a mediator between blocs within Congress and between GOP presidents and Democratic legislators, Wright stresses the key role of civility in the consensus politics of the '50s through the '70s--and negative results of the '80s breakdown of that civility, thanks in large part to the secret contra war and to ideological bomb-throwers like current Speaker Newt Gingrich, who gleefully "brought down" Wright in 1989. Wright's final chapter argues that a "growing decibel level of hate-mongering and negativity threatens democracy" ; to overcome this threat, he urges campaign finance reform, a renewed social compact, infrastructure and education investments, acceptance of both the need for and appropriate limits on government, and restoration of civility. An enlightening (and, for political junkies, fascinating) historical document. Mary Carroll