New Review: Sneaking Into the Flying Circus

The following is a brief excerpt from a review posted on PopandPolitics.com:

National politics has not been a life and death struggle in this country since at least the 1950s and 60s. From that time on the majority of Americans could go about comfortably in their lives not knowing or caring what was happening in Washington DC. The nuts and bolts of political life were the province of high stakes Wall Street executives, the media, and of course the politicians themselves.

However, since the dawn of 24-hour cable news and the monopoly of said news stations, the public has been inundated with the background noise of life in the American political hemisphere. Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, HBO documentary filmmaker, and former NBC News reporter, uses her experiences covering the last two presidential campaigns to turn her blogger-esque observations into a full-length current events book. The fruits of that labor entitled, “Sneaking Into the Flying Circus: How the Media Turn Our Presidential Campaigns into Freak Shows,” is a companion journal to her second film, “Diary of a Political Tourist,” in which she followed all of the Democratic Presidential Candidates around the country with the hopes of understanding what in America makes a presidential candidate (as it turns out, there is no answer).

"Sneaking into the Flying Circus" is broken up into three sections with many mini-chapters. The First Act covers the pre-Primary season, when the candidates hit every district in Iowa and New Hampshire in the hopes of winning the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary, respectively. It has been often said, and Pelosi points this out as well, that whoever wins Iowa and New Hampshire wins the nomination. (Continued)