When former Gov. and U.S. Sen. Terry Sanford died in 1998, N&O political reporter Rob Christensen noted the scope of Sanford's action-jammed life. Sanford had been a player in many of the pivotal events in North Carolina's 20th-century history.

Christensen, who has covered politics for The N&O for 35 years, thought there was a good story to be told about the people and events who created today's North Carolina.

So in January 1999, he started work on a book. For a decade, he rose at 5:30 a.m. to research and write. This month, UNC Press published "The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalties, Elections and Events That Shaped Modern North Carolina."

The book is a gem. The analysis and storytelling are first-rate. You learn a lot from this book and have fun doing it. Christensen wrote not for academics and insiders but for the kind of general-interest readers who have been reading his work in The N&O since 1973.

As readers of his column know, Christensen, 58, has a writing style that is both insightful and engaging.

In his book, you learn that North Carolina's first female candidate for governor was a Soviet agent; that Sanford and Lauch Faircloth, who opposed each other in a 1992 Senate race, had shared a bed decades before; and that one of the state's U.S. senators, in front of photographers, gave movie star Jean Harlow a passionate kiss using what he called his best "Hollywood technique."

The current razor-thin national divide between Democrats and Republicans is best reflected in this state. In the 1990s, North Carolina, on average, had the closest races for governor, president and U.S. Senate.

"This is a fiercely competitive state," Christensen told 150 people who squeezed into Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books one night last week to hear him talk about his book. "What does it mean? It means North Carolina has had cutting-edge politics."

Some of the dominant political strategies of the last generation, such as direct-mail fundraising and saturation, hard-hitting TV campaigns, originated here. So did some of the country's top political operatives.

For 100 years, North Carolina's politics have been distinctive -- and polarized. Christensen seeks to answer the question of how the same state could elect the unlikely U.S. Senate duo of Jesse Helms and John Edwards.

You can't understand today's politics, he says, unless you understand yesterday's politics.

He says that there have been three dominant strands to Tar Heel politics: business progressivism, as represented by former Gov. Jim Hunt and Gov. Mike Easley; conservatism, as shown by former Sen. Helms; and populism, represented most recently by former Sen. Edwards.

"The strains of business progressivism, conservatism and populism are often commingled, so that thousands of people voted for both a conservative such as Sen. Jesse Helms and a business progressive such as Gov. Jim Hunt," Christensen writes.

Still, these philosophies have competed for the last century, sometimes leaving outsiders -- and even many North Carolinians -- puzzled by the paradox.

Now they have an explanation. Christensen has spent his professional life observing, probing and writing about the state's political life, meeting the highest standards of objectivity and fairness.

There's nobody better to explain Tar Heel politics than Rob Christensen.