But Mr. Obama's book, for which the publisher paid $850,000, occupies a place of its own in the political-book spectrum: it is not a tell-all, not quite a memoir and not a straight polemic.
It being apparently impossible to saturate the market for grammar books, as Ezra Pound said it was impossible to saturate the market for guns, we also have Harry Ritchie's English for the Natives: Discover the Grammar You Don't Know You Know (John Murray), which is on the pleasantly scholarly end of the word-book spectrum.
That puts "Bad Ghost" at the high end of this book's spectrum.
And at the other extreme of this book's spectrum, Mr. Ebershoff also brings Ann Eliza to life.
Bowman's quest for vengeance is on the far end of the book-stuffing spectrum.
Indeed, one of the delights of this unusual book is the spectrum of writing styles it embraces.
Three former presidential aides found in these pages suggest the book's ideological spectrum: a conservative, Gary L. Bauer; a liberal, Paul Begala; and a libertarian, Doug Bandow.
$3 billion in cash would go to Deutsche Telekom as a default payment, while another $1 billion would go to the book value of spectrum that big blue would be forced to relinquish.
The company had previously agreed to pay a $4 billion pre-tax charge in the case that its $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile failed to go through, $3 billion of which would go to Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile and another $1 billion going to the book value of spectrum access.
An impressive set of experts active in the field have contributed towards the 14 chapters in this book, across a spectrum from epidermal growth factor receptor protein isolation to complex techniques such as sensitive assay for monoubiquitination of receptor tyrosine kinases.
Kelefa Sanneh's review of Nell Irvin Painter's new book considers a monochromatic spectrum of white American characters (Books, April 12th).
