You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Neil Gross shows that the U.S. academy’s liberal reputation has exerted a self-selecting influence on young liberals, while deterring promising conservatives. His study sheds new light on both academic life and American politics, where the conservative movement was built in part around opposition to the “liberal elite” in higher education.
The first comprehensive study in more than forty years to explain congressional leadership selectionHow are congressional party leaders chosen? In the first major study since Robert Peabody’s classic Leadership in Congress, political scientists Matthew Green and Douglas Harris draw on newly collected data about U.S. House members who have sought leadership positions from the 1960s to the present—including whip tallies, public and private vote commitments, interviews, and media accounts—to provide new insights into how the selection process truly works.Elections for congressional party leaders are conventionally seen as a function of either legislators’ ideological preferences or factors too idiosyncratic to permit systematic analysis. Analyzing six decades’ worth of information, Harris and Green find evidence for a new comprehensive model of vote choice in House leadership elections that incorporates both legislators’ goals and their connections with leadership candidates. This study will stand for years to come as the definitive treatment of a crucial aspect of American politics.
Contrary to popular belief, the problem with U.S. higher education is not too much politics but too little. Far from being bastions of liberal bias, American universities have largely withdrawn from the world of politics. So conclude Bruce L. R. Smith, Jeremy Mayer, and Lee Fritschler in this illuminating book. C losed Minds? d draws on data from interviews, focus groups, and a new national survey by the authors, as well as their decades of experience in higher education to paint the most comprehensive picture to date of campus political attitudes. It finds that while liberals outnumber conservatives within faculty ranks, even most conservatives believe that ideology has little impact on hir...
Many still see the Vietnam War catastrophe as the ultimate cautionary tale for US presidents faced with wartime decisions. A singular focus on Vietnam, however, overlooks the seismic shift in strategy following attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. When Presidents Fight the Last War: The Oval Office, Sunk Costs, and Wartime Decision-Making since Vietnam is a groundbreaking work that draws on high-level interviews and archival materials to show how recent presidential decisions to cut losses or double down on military conflicts abroad have been made with the goal of avoiding either another Vietnam or another 9/11. Offering five case studies, author Bryan N. Gro...
Nothing is as elemental, as essential to human life, as the air we breathe. Yet around the world, in rich countries and poor ones, it is quietly poisoning us. Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, dementia, and premature birth, among other ailments. In Choked, Beth Gardiner travels the world to tell the story of this modern-day plague, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s coal heartland and India’s gasping capital. In a gripping narrative that’s a...
In early 2000, the Center for the Study of the Presidency organized a group of eminent scholars to examine key cases of Presidential success and failure and the lessons learned. Leading presidential researchers and writers provided 76 case studies organized in nine broad subject areas. After surveying the broad sweep of presidential concerns, the scholars examine the First One Hundred Days of an Administration from FDR onward. They then review Executive-Legislative Relations, Domestic Policy, Fiscal Policy and International Economics, National Security Institutions and Decision Making, Foreign Interventions and Interactions, Managing the Executive Branch, Presidential Continuity: The Use of Individuals Across Administrations; and Presidential Crises: Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Impeachment. Must reading for executive branch figures and scholars, researchers, and the interested public concerned with presidential issues and American political history.