Well, the prose is rigid and unavoidably cold. Douglas writes in a simple way which seems to almost dumb-down the ideas he discusses. Said ideas are genuinely worthy of pondering, and so it's a shame for me to confess that it wasn't the most entertaining of reads. Certain vocabulary choices just didn't work (at least it's accessible, I suppose). Nonetheless, this is a nice artefact within the literature of New Zealand politics vault, and there's certainly no harm in owning a copy.