Many books are confident in themselves: in their analyses, in their predictions, in their perspectives. They tell you what will happen and what you ought to think about it. Other books are books of failure: they tell you how the author lost his or her way, and then, at the end, what you ought to think about it. Success Without Victory is a book not of confidence, but of hope. It looks at the past, and toward the future in light of the past, and hopes for the best on the basis of personal failure and historical success.

The book is structured around narratives of different legal and political battles. Some battles were successful, for instance the women’s suffrage movement and the battle against legal segregation. Others have been, at least so far, failures. The author participated in many of the latter, for instance, the struggle in favor of plant-closing legislation or the attempt to find legal remedy against U.S. intervention in Central America. But what characterizes all of the struggles he discusses—and this is the point of the book—is that they were long.

What is the significance of the length of struggle? In the contemporary world, we have become used to speed. Victories are won quickly or not at all. If a struggle cannot be won or a goal accomplished in the time it would take to cover in a two-hour movie, then we take it for a failure. In the struggles Lobel describes, however, it is the ability to move past early failures that is often the key to long-term success.

In fact, it is the failures themselves that may be the key to success. In the chapter on Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that codified the separate-but-equal doctrine, Lobel shows how the spirit of resistance to the Plessy decision was instrumental in the later legal battles that led eventually to Brown v. Board of Education.

How is it that failures, particularly legal failures, may lead to eventual success? There are several factors involved. First, legal failures, as an insult to an oppressed group, may galvanize group pride as a form of resistance to the insult. This was especially true of the women’s suffrage movement. Second, while a court may rule against the oppressed group, it may accept certain of its arguments as sound. This sets legal precedent for future cases. Third, and this is the point Lobel focuses on, failure can teach the lesson that struggles require patience and commitment. He argues eloquently that in our culture of the quick victory, we have lost visions of long-term struggle and prophetic witness. Legal failure can reinstate these traditions as part of our political culture.

If these struggles are long ones, how is a book to recount them? How does one summarize the politics of movements that last nearly a century? Here is where Lobel shines. Those of us who have had the pleasure to hear him speak publicly know that he is a consummate storyteller. Few speakers have the ability to take a difficult or complex issue and turn it into a suspenseful narrative. Lobel is one of those speakers, and his ability is not lost when translated onto the written page. One would not have thought of a book on legal history as a page turner, but indeed this book is.

The chapter on the legal challenges to the U.S. travel embargo against Cuba, for example, is particularly compelling. Tacking back and forth between detailed points of law and the desire of a certain Dan Snow to engage in bass-fishing tournaments, Lobel turns what could be a dry discussion of legal technicalities into a thriller about the fate of a small-time fisherman.

Success Without Victory ends on a note of hopeful sobriety, which is what gives it its peculiar integrity. There have been unalloyed victories, such as the suffrage movement, and undeniable failures, such as the attempt to stop the Persian Gulf War. There have been victories whose fruits are being worn away by time, such as the battle to end segregation. What does the future hold? Lobel, unlike many others, knows that he does not know the answer to this question. What he does know, however, is that we must develop a culture of patience and struggle that sees success not only in terms of short-term victory but also in terms of the rightness of causes. This lesson alone is worth the price of the book, and the stories through which that lesson is learned are not soon to be forgotten.

- Todd May