Reviews for Airwaves

The average rating for Airwaves based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-14 00:00:00 Zaheer Goodman-bhyat Reading this book is like reading a upper level undergraduate book or perhaps a starting text for a graduate course about politics and campaigns. The tone is basic and the layout is similar to many textbooks I used as a student and a professor. Each of the 10 chapters starts with a simple introductory paragraph, breaks the topics up into easily digestible pieces, and then a summary. There is talk of statistics and some charts but they are understandable if you read carefully. I never felt overwhelmed by the statistics and they are important when comparing 60+ years of history. It isn't exciting reading for the average person and it may upset some folks who are still stressed because of the 2016 elections. West does offer advice along with the analysis and history, a bit of hope for those who want more facts versus popular flash. I found the pictorial history of campaigns very interesting and I wish those images had been spread throughout the book to help illustrate points being made. I realize that a lot of photos can increase the price of a book by a great deal but they could have been spread out more. Likewise the Appendix of "memorial ads" from 1984-2016 elections was hard emotionally to read in one big chunk and would have been better understand woven into the rest of the book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-02 00:00:00 Zachary Lutz In the history of the Democratic Party, Adlai Stevenson represents the bridge between the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman on the one hand, and those of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on the other. The grandson of Cleveland's second vice president (for whom he was named), he emerged as a reform governor of Illinois in the late 1940s. Though twice defeated by Dwight Eisenhower for the residency, he nonetheless enjoyed a passionate following among many liberals in the 1950s. Chosen by John Kennedy to serve as America's ambassador to the United Nations, he served in the post during the tensest period of the Cold War before dying of a heart attack in London in 1965. Stevenson had no shortage of admirers during his lifetime, and many of them wrote biographies about him after his death. Porter McKeever was among their number; as a longtime friend of Stevenson's his book is informed by his own personal insights on his subject. This is both the book's strength and its weakness, being less of a scholarly study and more of a glowing -- if not entirely uncritical -- tribute his subject. With it readers can understand how Stevenson was able to command such devotion from so many people, even though the justification for it is largely absent from Stevenson's career. Though a more dispassionate analysis of Stevenson's career remains to be written, until it is readers should turn to this partisan study to learn about his life and achievements.