THE VICTORY LAB The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

Those smoke-filled political backrooms are long gone (and not just because smoking has been banned); the political nerds and statisticians are in charge now. Like egg-headed Bruce Lees, they merge the various political martial arts disciplines—TV advertising, direct mail, and the Internet—with psychological studies and data mining to micro-target voters—for example, buying bus ads on only one route in a city or purchasing billboards along a two-mile stretch of highway or “guilting” citizens in a neighborhood into voting. Narrator Michael Goldstrom keeps the pace moving in this audiobook and manages, like the best nonfiction narrators, to avoid getting in the way of the book. Though this is a frightening and fascinating guidebook for the current election, some audiobook fans may wish that an abridged edition had been micro-targeted to listeners based on their attention spans. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2012]