Thomas B. Littlewood

The imprecise gerund in the title allows the author to combine a focus on the reporting of election night returns with predictive polling through the years in America. The book is a trove of pleasantly unusual vignettes and facts which will be new to all but the most widely-read authorities on the nation's political history. Particularly interesting are the wacky means which newspapers used to report returns at the turn of the last century such as elaborately coded searchlight patterns and airplanes flying around with various colors of lights showing. The book continues to be interesting throughout the evolution of radio and television result gathering in the mid-twentieth century, but the author skips the seventies and eighties, oddly, and the book ends weakly with his prescriptions on how journalism is failing the electorate and how it should be practiced, which is probably true but is uninteresting and has little to do with the subject of the book.… (más)