Rostow's thesis was criticized at the time and subsequently as universalizing a model of Western development that could not be replicated in places like Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. Another line of criticism was his thesis that societies based upon "mass production" and "mass consumption" like those of the West were the ideal society that everyone in the world wanted to emulate. At the time, critical reception was extremely favourable with a book review by Harry Schwarz in the "New York Times" speaking of Rostow's "impressive achievement" of writing "one of the most influential economic books of the twentieth century". In a review in "The Christian Science Monitor" wrote: "There is a sharp intelligence at work, producing paragraphs and pages which seem to distill events to an almost unbearable simplicity. This is the special quality of the writer and the book". Adlai Stevenson wrote in a letter to Rostow: "Is the future Rostowism vs. Marxism? If so, I am ready to vote now". Much of the success of "The Stages" at the time was due to the fact that it addressed seminal issues in a style that was easy to understand but was sufficiently intellectual enough not to be dismissed as facile and shallow. Like the various theories of Marxism that he had hoped to debunk, Rostow offered up a grand theory, in this case, the "modernization theory" that explained the past and predicted the future. The Swiss scholar Gilbert Rist wrote of "Rostow's marvelous fresco of humanity marching towards greater happiness" and his theories as "Marxism without Marx" as Rostow asserted that capitalism was inevitably destined to triumph because, in his view, it was the superior system. The American historian Michael Shafer wrote about the modernization theory as "a logical construct, deduced from a set of universal axioms abstracted from the realm of human and temporal contingencies".