That the magazine—glossy, rectangular, stapled, intrinsically dead-tree—is a dying breed is no secret. Over the last several years, as audiences have gravitated in ever-larger numbers to free online content, magazine formats have been revamped drastically (Newsweek), folded into other magazines (YM becoming a subset of Teen Vogue), or perished outright (the print versions of Vibe and Blender). Two recent books that collate unpublished material and stories that originally appeared as magazine excerpts make the case for the magazine’s continued survival, assuming it continues to support the work that lead to accounts such as these.

In Herding Donkeys (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), The Nation political correspondent Ari Berman tells the story of how grass-roots volunteers returned presidential and congressional power to the Democratic Party for the first time in a generation. New Yorker contributing writer Ian Frazier spends Travels in Siberia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) shining a reportorial spotlight on a region that, despite being “one-twelfth of the land on earth,” is mostly understood as shorthand for “the section of less-desirable tables given to customers whom the maître d’ does not especially like.”

Donkeys begins in Chicago’s Grant Park on Election Night 2008, as Barack Obama prepares to speak in public for the first time as a presumptive president-elect; the book ends with an Obama White House in poll-number chaos as Tea Party upstarts, Republicans, and liberal activists batter the administration for any number of perceived mistakes and sins of omission. In between, Berman diagrams Howard Dean’s grassroots, internet-savvy—yet DOA—2004 presidential campaign, demonstrates how the Obama campaign improved and capitalized upon the formula to win the White House four years later, and introduces readers to some of the tactics that helped wrest campaigning power away from entrenched, interest-beholden party fat cats: championing millions of small donations over a handful of huge, strings-attached contributions, the brick-by-brick construction of in-state grassroots units in hopelessly “red states” as part of a coherent 50-state strategy, and a political ignition of hostile or disengaged populations as a fortunate byproduct of community activism.

Berman approaches his subject with a measured objectivity, digging into local political divides and peculiarities with a gumshoe’s just-the-facts approach. He’s less interested in scoring ideological points than in telling a story, or a particular series of stories. Overshadowing Donkeys’ rah-rah optimism, up-with-disenfrancished-people brio, and underdog spirit—the book also spills a great deal of ink on Dean’s unlikely, fractious run as Democratic National Committee chair and the Obama administration’s subsequent cabinet-secretary snub—is the awareness that the coalition that elected the first African-American president was destined to collapse, as centrist Clinton loyalists take over for insurgent Obama insiders in a changing of the guard that’s as dispiriting as it was inevitable.