[The Making of the Popes 1978 is] a fascinating chronicle, marvelously candid, rippling with pointed anecdotes, revealing conversations, rumors and rivalries, the sights, manners and sounds of old Rome, crisp, quick sketches of personalities and issues, fleshed out with emotional tension and relevant dashes of history. It looks like a real winner.

Because of the book's particular sequential mode and Greeley's fidelity to it before the unexpected tumble of events, the account is also essentially self-effacing. (p. 4)

The running, diary entries, recorded with the freshness of immediacy, are interspersed with subsequent, time-ripened passages set apart in boldface type. They provide fuller perspective and information gathered after the events, explaining how the unanticipated became reality, including votes in the secret conclaves.

The format makes for an unusual, charming turn-about, in which the reader has the advantage of sitting back in ex post facto wisdom and watching the author struggle and...