ABSOLUTELY GREAT READ: Am just about to finish David Lipsky's wonderful ABSOLUTELY AMERICAN, an apolitical account of a class's four-year trek through West Point. Believe it or not, the book grew out of a piece the Army itself pitched to Rolling Stone magazine, and editor/icon Jann Wenner originally envisioned it as a hatchet piece on the military. Instead, Lipsky, a self-confessed military doubter, penned what is at the very least a tribute to the men and women he more or less lives with for four years, and may even be a tribute to the military system in which they live and prosper. A tremendous book, a real page-turner of a nonfiction work. (An illuminating interview with Lipsky is here. Interviewer Dave Weich agrees that the book is an amazingly clear-eyed account of of a loaded subject. He writes, "Again, I come back to the absence of a loaded political agenda in the book. In that sense, it's very different from most of what gets published and promoted today. So much of what we see, or so much of what sells, is either Ann Coulter or Michael Moore. You know what you're going to hear before you even open the cover. Instead, Absolutely American is a story about people and values and commitment.")