Just in time for this year’s Democratic and Republican national conventions comes this 40th-anniversary edition of Norman Mailer’s groundbreaking New Journalistic study of the 1968 nomination contests, with an introduction by — who else? — Frank Rich. Needless to say, the historical parallels between then and now are plenty and grim, and Mailer’s acid, disabused prose may as well have been written yesterday. Indeed, it’s lost none of its urgency. Read (or reread) his essays now.