'NYT', Young and the Reckless on John Edwards

On its site late today, the NYT posted a review of Andrew Young's bombshell book about the John Edwards affair (as it were), including an excerpt even. The excerpt, here, opens with John bizarrely speaking in legalistic code to his mistress, then veers off into buying a Christmas tree -- and a fiasco involving Elizabeth Edwards and a Play Station, believe it or not.

In the review, Janet Maslin calls the book, The Politician, "mindboggling." Here's an excerpt:

Although the basics of the Edwards meltdown are summarized in the current best seller “Game Change” (a book that got its reporting right, if Mr. Young is to be believed), the devil is in the details. And those details reflect an astonishing degree of either cynicism or delusional thinking on Mr. Edwards’s part. Having worked as an assistant to Mr. Edwards for 10 years, Mr. Young thought he knew a lot about how this politician’s mind worked. Still, Mr. Edwards could surprise him in chillingly Hitchcockian ways.

For instance, after Mr. Young finagled a way to explain Ms. Hunter’s presence in Mr. Edwards’s hotel room in Florida and get her out of there unnoticed, he says, Mr. Edwards just looked at him blankly and said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Rielle wasn’t in Florida.” What was this: “Gaslight”? A trip to the Twilight Zone? An exercise in lawyerly deniability, to which Mr. Edwards apparently often resorted? A conversation being secretly recorded? Or something even scarier?

“I could tell from his tone of voice that he truly believed what he was saying,” Mr. Young writes. “I decided that he was either the best liar in the world or he was having some sort of psychological episode.”