Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds by the journalist and historian Robert Mann is a thoughtful and engaging account of the television advertisement that made a huge splash in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. That advertisement showed a little girl counting (often non-sequentially) the petals on a daisy as she pulled them off, and it then shifted to an ominous countdown that culminated in a nuclear blast. It concluded by declaring that the stakes were too great to stay home and asking viewers to vote for Lyndon B. Johnson rather than Barry Goldwater in the forthcoming election. Mann, who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, provides the background, the strategy behind the advertisement, and the impact it had on the election itself and on campaign advertising in the future. The book provides a crisp assessment of an important issue...

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