Robin LeBlanc is doing a tricky dance. She's clearly a serious academic devoted to the study of politics, and she does her damnedest to do right by that world. But she's such a good writer that her prose is accessible, even entrancing, to mere mortals. In fact, sometimes her prose is funny and even beautiful. This is a problem.

There is just no tactful way to put this: I'm sorry, but her writing has heart. This must be a real liability for her as an academic, because "heart" is something not usually allowed in this sort of scholarly discourse. This could explain why she falls all over herself in her eagerness to justify her own humanity. When the story of one man and his impact on the local political process jumped out of her research — no graphed trend, no stabilizing data points, just a middle-aged liquor merchant — it so shocked her that she struggled to reconcile it with her training and discipline as a researcher.

This is what happened: She went to "Takeno," a pseudonymous small town, intending to collect the kind of fascinating research on the electoral process that gives hives to anyone who didn't major in political science. Takeno was caught up in unusual turmoil. The old-boy politicos, who supported the building of a controversial nuclear plant, were being battered by an upstart group of locals who opposed the plant. To her great suspicion, she was told again and again that the citizens' movement she went to research was not simply part of a larger faceless trend, but was in fact ignited by the passion, personality and persistence of one man.