Democracies at War

Rating:
Summary: Symphony of delight
Review: Ignore the previous reviewer. I have it on good authority that the by now famous break-up of Reiter and Stam (I won't go into details for uninformed except to mention it involved a very unseemingly screaming match at a major political "science" convention, which ended when Stam threw his hairpiece in disgust at Reiter) was not because Stam's contributions were not accorded their proper place. Anyone who reads the book will immediately see that the book uses the term "democracy" hundreds of times. In his earlier work (The Crucifiction of Bayes), Reiter rarely, if ever, mentions the word democracy. It is clear that Reiter bowed to Stam's keen insight that using the word democracy hundreds of times would surely sell a few extra copies.
In fact, the book is a masterful expose of the folly of state-sponsored cultural production. While the previous reviewer correctly identifies the link between coffee table production and the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire as articulated by Reiter and Stam, she completely misses the force of this elegant case study. As Reiter and Stam clearly show, it was the production of coffee tables that kept the commisars in their well-furnished and luxurious Dachas. In any authoritarian society, it is the interests of the elite that are at the forefront of the decision-makers minds. Small wonder then that the decline in the production of coffee tables (inextricably linked to the demise of the cheese industry) distracted the Soviet elite from so-called "Realist" concerns with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles.
The gratuitous slam of the picture of Reiter on the back cover reveals the previous reviewer's bias. Tae a look, the picture reveals a strikingly handsome, intense, and well-proportioned young man, who still has all his hair.

Rating:
Summary: Thumbs up for Reiter, Thumbs down for Stam
Review: Reiter's analysis can best be characterized as direct, piercing, and insightful, while Stam's contentions/contributions are largely uproven, and cannot sustain themselves in the face of the most fundamental and basic critiques.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read
Review: This was one of the most excellent books I have read in a long time. I had to read it for my world politics class and I became very intrigued in the propositions set forth by Reiter and Stam in this book.

The book is very easy to read, unlike many other pieces in political science. They save all of the confusing statistical data for the appendices so not to bore the reader during the chapters. They combine empirical data with interesting case studies. This would be an excellent book for anyone to read and I highly recommend it, especially if you want to learn why democracies win wars!

Also, who cares about the authors? These past reviews spent too much time dramatizing something that I'm sure most people that do not know who the authors are or follow their lives as if they were madonna, care about.