Gingrich is better than anyone in the capital at arousing interest and maintaining the capacity to surprise. Open one of his books at random, and who knows what you’ll find? “Congressman Bob Walker of Pennsylvania has been exploring the possible benefits of weightlessness to people currently restricted to wheelchairs.” (He has?) He is mad for adjectives: stunning, grotesque, enormous. His verbs get goosed, too, adverbially: remarkably, dramatically. The intensifiers are part of what Gingrich in a later book called “my usual boyish exuberance.” In his books the exuberance works as a stay against the approaching cataclysm.

After escaping the crossroads through the window, the reader follows the first chapter of this first book as it rushes into a discussion of the sclerotic technology of the welfare state circa 1984, the lengthening American life span, the futurist Alvin Toffler, space tourism, newfangled telephones, organic farming, the exercise boom, the return of apprenticeships, the decentralization of higher education, the rise of Methodism in Britain and the Third Great Awakening in America, Disraeli’s kinky sexual arrangements before he cleaned up his act, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, historical revisionism, Idi Amin, Jimmy Carter’s bungling of the Ayatollah, the future of Gabon and his, Gingrich’s, daughter’s year off in France.

When you come up for air, you notice you’re only on Page 39, with 233 pages still to come.

In “Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich introduced himself as a futurist, a role he has played off and on throughout his career. There are problems inherent in futurism, most of them involving the future, which the futurist is obliged to predict (it’s his job) and which seldom cooperates as he would hope. Gingrich has called some and missed some. In 1984, he saw more clearly than most that computers would touch every aspect of commercial and private life, but nobody any longer wants to build “a large array of mirrors [that] could affect the earth’s climate,” warming it up so farmers could extend the growing season.

Gingrich’s faith in technology, as his books express it, is total, undimmed by potential misfirings. His artless belief in gadgetry and the power of human ingenuity, his inexhaustible curiosity and magpie gathering of unexpected facts (did you know Ray Kroc gave his autobiography the unappetizing title “Grinding It Out”?), makes his first book the most winning of them all. Even the polemics against the bureaucrats and liberals and other opponents of progress are mild compared to what we’ve got used to in the intervening decades.

“It is not their fault,” he writes empathetically. “They are simply ignorant.”

Stupid, not evil: this is the kind of concession not often found in subsequent books. After “Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich lapsed into a prolonged silence, at least as a literary man. As a politician, of course, he was a dervish, and by the time his next book appeared, in 1995, he was universally honored as the architect of one of the century’s great political triumphs, the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives the year before. “To Renew America” was written in the headlong rush that followed Gingrich’s elevation to the speakership and international fame.

Once again America faced a crossroads, though the word itself wasn’t used. “There is virtually no middle ground,” Gingrich wrote. He later concluded: “To renew or to decay. At no time in the history of our great nation has the choice been clearer.” To avert disaster, Gingrich had no choice but to present many numbered lists. In addition to the Six Challenges Facing America — similar to the challenges we faced 11 years before — and the “five basic principles that I believe form the heart of our civilization,” there were the five forces moving us toward worldwide medicine, a seven-step program to reduce drug use, the nine steps we can take immediately to advance the three revolutions in health care and more. The futurism was still there, too: “Honeymoons in space will be the vogue by 2020.”

Meanwhile, his polemics had hardened. “For some psychological reason, liberals are antigun but not anti-violent criminal,” was a typically dubious example. As a former professor (an unpublished one, at West Georgia College), Gingrich wrote about university leftism with all the bitterness of an ex-academic: “Most successful [alumni] get an annual letter saying, in effect, ‘Please give us money so we can hire someone who despises your occupation and will teach your children to have contempt for you.’ What is amazing is the overwhelming meekness of the alumni in accepting this hijacking of their alma mater.”