Deep Woodstein

Do we really need a book about the impact of Watergate on the lives and careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? We already know what happened to them. Woodward went on to write a shelfload of best sellers about the government, told from the inside, and Bernstein joined the glitterati.

Well, Virginia, that's not the whole story. Alicia C. Shepard's new book, "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate," fills in the rest with nuances you probably don't know or never considered, and does it with enough thoroughly documented details to slake the curiosity of a news junkie like me.

Is that special pleading? So be it.

Shepard has scrutinized the pair's Watergate papers (bought by the University of Texas for $5 million in 2002). She has interviewed both guys, their wives and former wives, their editors, their competitors, and plenty of others including Alan Pakula, the Hollywood director who did his own interviews for the film version of the Woodstein book "All the President's Men."

All in all, Shepard has put in a prodigious amount of work. Yet "Woodward and Bernstein" is a swift read, its lackluster prose notwithstanding. Which left me feeling grateful -- even surprised -- given the sense I must admit having of a magazine feature padded out to textbook length for journalism courses.

Besides, who can resist the opening bars of the "Dance of the Knights" from Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" in a book promo that riffs on the emblematic scene of the Pakula flick?