this passage is the point that makes them wonder:

Feldman’s Americans are not the kind who stand for hours at a Lincoln-Douglas debate, who ever ask their politicians to substantively persuade them of the rightness of ideas or weigh arguments in the voting booth. They — we — are more Pavlovian. Our brains are like vast blinking switchboards; the successful politician is the one who presses just the right buttons ("equality," "enemy") to light up the sequence of neurons that makes our hands shoot out and pull the lever marked "D."

Indeed, when I read that passage I wondered if the reviewer had given up on reading my book just after glancing through the table of contents. It seems that, instead of writing about my book, Fairbanks popped in a DVD of "The Matrix," or maybe "A Clockwork Orange," and then churned out a piece of creative non-fiction reacting to those other works of sci-fi.

Flipping to the first chapter of my book as listed on the New York Times site itself, we see that I have no such dark vision of "blinking" lights and manipulated brains--no such undemocratic cynicism projected onto "Feldman's Americans."

In fact, my book warns against the exact type of reactionary viewpoint espoused in the Fairbanks review:

despite its historic footing, many people often react to the idea of framing political debate with suspicion, concerned that framers engage in little more than the cynical packaging of ideas for political gain. "It's the substance that matters, not the wrapper," they say. In fact, framing the debate is never just about the wrapper. To make rotten politics smell better by wrapping them in clean paper is the goal of "spin," or deception, not of framing. Indeed, we should be opposed to the increasing number of "spin doctors" who use their skill at mass manipulation to pollute American politics. Unfortunately, as long as there are scandals in politics, there will be spin doctors to make the smell seem less offensive. While both framing and spin involve the packaging of ideas, "framing the debate" is as different from spin as coffee is to whiskey. (Framing the Debate, p. 1)

Unfortunately, for the reviewer of my book, the challenge of getting through page one must have been too great.

I am friendly with Dr. Feldman it is true, but I believe he has the better of the argument here with Ms. Fairbanks. Interestingly enough, I have never really agreed much with Dr. Feldman's specific framing formulations, but Ms. Fairbanks' review is simply ridiculous.