Marco Calavita conducted extensive interviews with 15 “Generation X” Americans in order to understand their political ideas and how contextual factors (particularly the news media) influenced these thoughts, feelings, and actions. He wisely prefers the term “individual political development” (p. 6) to “political socialization” because he finds it truer to the complex, dynamic, lifelong experience. He is particularly interested in exploring the role that the news media play in attitude formation, stability, and change.

Calavita concludes that the people he interviewed exhibited both attitude persistence and change and that they had agency and selectivity in negotiating the media (and other contextual influences). The result was that “these Americans have developed their own politics, but they have not developed them just as they please; the biases and parameters of their environments have proven conducive to some kinds of continuing development and hostile to others” (p. 231). Specifically, he found that the people shared a “new populism” that was cynical toward federal government, liberals, and what they characterized as a “liberal media.” Interpretations of the role of the media in fostering these perceptions are suggestive, relying on quotations from the interviews and Calavita's own analysis of the news sources they used.

The book includes six chapters and comprehensive methodological appendices. After a brief introduction, the second chapter describes the contemporary political culture, focusing on the “rightward shift” since the 1960s (p. 17) and the increased “disconnection” (p. 43) people feel toward politics. A persuasive case is made that these changes are evident in news content; however, the degree to which the media reflect or cause these changes remains unclear. The next chapter contains long descriptions of each of the 15 people and uses extensive (often fascinating) direct quotations from their interviews. In Chapter 4, Calavita tries to make sense of the “complex interrelationships—the ecology—of individual political development” (p. 127). He does this by describing how the respondents talked about various influences on them (such as family, religion, peers, media) and noting commonalities in their stories and self-assessments. Chapter 5, the strongest chapter, describes the individuals' political ideologies, focusing on their attitudes about “Class and Power,” “Race,” and “Government” (p. 189). It is here that the “rightward shift” discussed earlier is dramatically illustrated in the way that conservative rhetoric connects with the subjects' cynicism and commitment to free agency. This is evident among even the more liberal subjects. A short conclusion reviews some general findings.

Certainly, for anyone in the political socialization area, this is a must read. Scholars of public opinion and political communications frustrated by the limitations of polling are also likely to be an eager audience for the book. Although Calavita does not delve deeply into his subjects' psyches to analyze the origins of their conflicts and consciousness, political psychology scholars should find the interviews intriguing. Sections of the book offer insights to those interested in news bias, ideology, and vote choices made in the 2000 presidential election.

Although cognizant of problems of generalizing from so few subjects, the author is clearly proud of the diversity of his sample. He reminds readers frequently that their race/ethnicity/gender/religion/socioeconomic background, geographical locations, and political affiliations vary. He even includes age as a characteristic of the “richness of that diversity” (p. 57) because they were born between 1966 and 1977. This claim goes hand in hand with his argument that “X”ers are the “embodiment of contemporary America” (p. 9), but seems at odds with the generational effects that he claims to find among the cohort. Some readers might take issue with these claims and be more troubled than Calavita is that everyone in his sample had attended college, that none were poor, and that their voting in 2000 was in no way reflective of the general electorate. Only one did not vote, only a third voted for Bush, seven voted for Gore and two for Nader (p. 125).

The use of in-depth interviews and the concern for how information influences political thinking and choices puts this book in the tradition of Doris Graber's (1988) Processing the News and Robert Lane's (1962) Political Ideology. While both are cited, the author does not fully engage either work or build directly on their insights. Also surprisingly missing from the literature review is Lane's (1969) Political Thinking and Consciousness and Theodore M. Newcomb et al.'s (1967) Persistence and Change. As a result, some observations that seem new to Calavita are, in fact, quite old. For example, it should not be much of a surprise that “only” seven of the individuals talked explicitly about ideology (p. 189) or that there was both stability and change in political attitudes during adulthood. Nevertheless, the book does provide lively contemporary examples of political socialization which students will find easier to relate to that the ones in these classics.

How satisfied readers will be with this book is likely to be evident in their responses to the introductory sentences of the concluding chapter. “There is a blizzard of data presented in this book. As a qualitative study of individuals, based on in-depth interviews, this volume of data is to some extent an end in itself.” (p. 223). Those who agree with this statement will find learning about the “frequently eclectic, even incoherent, nature of the participants' ideologies” (p. 221) satisfying and thought provoking. Those who disagree with the statement are likely to be frustrated by learning so much about so few people, will want more help making sense of their thinking, and be disappointed in the overall lack of theory-building.