Tension City

2/5

My problem while I was reading Tension City was that I just didn’t find that it was particularly insightful in regards to presenting actual behind the scenes information. There was an early page listing quotations from Bush and Reagan talking about how the debates really help voters think about issues and I remember thinking just how thoroughly uninteresting that is.  Yep, the debates are important.  Yep, a lot goes on behind the scenes.  Seems on the one hand to be mostly obvious comments like that or the sort of thing you are either interested in or not.  I can’t remember details or stories that were really striking or compelling beyond being just sort of casually interesting.

I was also bothered by the lack of timeliness of the book.  For many of our choices that might not matter but with this one, a book that repeatedly talks about very specific dates, it felt very out of date to me.

But mostly it was the style.  There was rarely a paragraph throughout this whole book that was more than a few sentences at best.  This is no doubt very reportor-ly in nature but I found it especially inelegant, especially for such a respected figure.

Also, this book, once you are finished, doesn’t really lead to any compelling conversations other than political intrigue.  I find it extremely difficult to imagine what I would talk about with this book in class.  I can’t remember any chapter where he stops to talk about some bigger picture regarding, well, anything complicated.

I want to say that I really went in open minded with the book.  Seems like it could be an okay fit for our debate.  But I am really strongly opposed to this one.

test Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Tension City