An anthology of books and readings from the University of Chicago Press
The presidential election cycle of 2004 already carries a certain historical gravity. Not since 1968 has a war figured so importantly into an election. Not since 1960 has the issue of national security been such a defining issue of the campaign. Not since 1944 has an incumbent President campaigned so clearly in the role of commander-in-chief.
Among publishers, the defining character of this election year is the role played by books. Books play a role in every presidential contest—most every candidate has written (or authorized) his or her campaign biography. In the election cycle of 2004 however, a clutch of high-profile books—for instance the books by Richard Clarke, Bill Clinton, and Bob Woodward—seem to be playing an important role in defining the issues of this election. At the University of Chicago Press we have books that are no less influential—though lower in profile—among the circles of policymakers, campaign strategists, and cutting-edge journalists.
These are our books. This page collects our latest and best books for the election season. Many of our books have excerpts, interviews, or special features: these are listed in the body below and also in the sidebar to the right. Below the readings are links to websites that we find useful for keeping track of the campaign. Enjoy reading. And as we say in Chicago, vote early and often.
Politics
The one essential reference
The bible of pols, journalists, and activists. "Michael Barone is to politics what statistician-writer Bill James is to baseball, a mix of historian, social observer, and numbers cruncher who illuminates his subject with perspective and a touch of irreverence."—Chicago Tribune
Politics, the media, people, and talk
"Timothy Cook has studied how the press makes news—and thereby helps to make politics what it is and isn't.…Governing with the News is a model of engaged scholarship. If fully reckoned with, it could light a path toward a public policy for an improved press. Whether the polity or the profession is up to it is another question. But the task just got easier."—Jay Rosen, The Nation
"Projections of Power is a methodologically sensitive and often original attempt to disentangle the causal relations among White House actions, news media coverage, and public opinion. A timely book and a book for our times."—Herbert J. Gans, author of Democracy and the News
"Citizens aren't stupid. And television isn't evil. But there's a mismatch between the medium and its audience that we need to better understand, and Doris Graber takes us a long way down this path of inquiry. Processing Politics provides a number of profound insights about the nature of the citizen and the mediated world of modern politics."—W. Russell Neuman, author of The Future of the Mass Audience
"Crosstalk is an extremely useful book for anyone interested in the political process—and how it's affected by media coverage. It's a great relief as a journalist to see confirmed what I always believed to be true: we actually do cover the issues, but voters make their choices based on many factors in addition to, or in spite of them."—Cokie Roberts, analyst, ABC News and National Public Radio
The work of George Lakoff has borne fruit: in this election cycle it has shaped the thinking of presidential candidates and their campaign strategists. "I have long looked to George Lakoff for wisdom and insight, and [Moral Politics] focuses brilliantly on questions that are central to understanding modern American politics: how liberals formulate their world views and moral perspectives."—Steven V. Roberts, Senior writer, U.S. News and World Report
Silverstein demystifies the spun mists of political message on which an institution like the American presidency has always depended.
Walsh, a political scientist, approached her subject the way journalists sometimes do: she hung around a coffeeshop and listened to people's opinions. She uses her research on political conversation to demonstrate what political campaigns are really all about: how we think about ourselves.
Politics at the ground level
"Frank Bryan…is arguably (and you can bet he'd enjoy arguing about it) the nation's leading scholar on town meeting democracy. What can't be argued is that he is its most passionate and eloquent promoter."—New England Monthly
"This is a powerful and important book. By looking at different grassroots organizations first hand, Hart gets to the center of debates over American politics that ask what kind of languages are available when trying to persuade others, and what kinds of references to morality work in secular politics."—James M. Jasper, author of The Art of Moral Protest
"This carefully researched and well-written study weaves together history, political science, and economics to examine the initiative process, which has been a subject of great controversy for more than a century. As recent events in California testify, initiatives can generate important new policies, such as tax limitations, and they can transform the political landscape. This volume goes behind the headlines to offer careful empirical evidence on the political and economic effects of the initiative process. Any scholar or concerned citizen interested in the legislative and policy process will find this a fascinating and informative study."—James M. Poterba, coauthor of Fiscal Rules and State Borrowing Costs
"Polletta's interviews with scores of veteran activists have resulted in a deep portrayal of the ways in which activists tried to fuse moral principle and strategy. This portrayal challenges the common assumption that morality and strategy are incompatible, that those who aim at winning must compromise principle while those who insist on morality are destined to be ineffective.…Polletta shows how participatory democracy has become the guiding framework for many of today's activists."—Richard Flacks, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Faith-based community organizing is revitalizing democracy in many urban cities throughout the United States. Richard Wood tells this story in a highly engaging way, drawing on careful ethnographic research. Faith in Action is a helpful corrective to recent discussions of faith-based social services that ignore the important role of marginalized people exerting political leadership."—Donald E. Miller, University of Southern California
Politics at the national level
The House committee system is widely seen as inefficient, outmoded, unaccountable, and even corrupt. Why have efforts to change it failed? Adler presents extensive evidence to show that the system's structure works to the members' advantage, helping them obtain funding (and favor) in their districts.
Policy Dynamics
Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, editors
What causes stability or change in the political system? Policy Dynamics draws on a remarkable data set that traces all policy issues receiving public attention at the national level during the post-World War II era. Some chapters analyze particular policy areas, such as health care, national security, and immigration, while others focus on institutional questions such as congressional procedures and agendas and the differing responses by Congress and the Supreme Court to new issues.
"Political scientists have long been skeptical about interpreting election results as mandates from the voters.…Yet, as Patricia Heidotting Conley demonstrates in her fine book Presidential Mandates, there are times when leaders have a legitimate claim to a mandate. She is the rare political scientist who thinks that the politicians are usually right."—Michael Nelson, American Prospect
The three dozen black members of the House have a different relationship with their constituents than that of non-black House members. Fenno explores what representation has meant—and means today—to black voters and to the politicians they have elected to office.
"'Polling has turned leaders into followers,' laments columnist Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. Well, that's news definitely not fit to print say two academics who have examined the polls and the legislative records of recent presidents to see just how responsive chief executives are to the polls. Their conclusion: not much.…In fact, their review and analyses found that public opinion polls on policy appear to have increasingly less, not more, influence on government policies."—Richard Morin, The Washington Post
What if there were more women in Congress? Providing the first comprehensive study of the policy activity of male and female legislators at the federal level, Swers persuasively demonstrates that, even though representatives often vote a party line, their gender is politically significant and does indeed influence policy making.
Elections and campaigns
"The five-member majority strayed too far from their previous judicial judgments while hewing too closely to their publicly identifiable political leanings, Gillman concludes. He is humble enough to acknowledge that others can draw different conclusions, and his book's real accomplishment is its authoritative presentation of the 36 days as a legal struggle."—Michael Oreskes, New York Times
"Monmonier delivers a powerful wake-up call to citizens that could be, in effect, disenfranchised by maps drawn for partisan reasons. Bushmanders and Bullwinkles is not just for scholars but for office holders, journalists, political strategists, and any American concerned with fair elections and the protection of civil rights."—Congressman Charles B. Rangel; New York, 15th district
The roadmap for the Clinton campaign of 1992: "If you're preparing to run a presidential campaign, and only have time to read one book, make sure to read Sam Popkin's The Reasoning Voter. If you have time to read two books, read The Reasoning Voter twice."—James Carville, Senior Stategist, Clinton/Gore '92
"Sunstein and Epstein have assembled an impressive stable of commentators from the fields of constitutional and electoral law to try to explain—and to evaluate—the legal and political impact of Bush v Gore. By and large, they succeed."—Gary McDowell, Times Higher Education Supplement
"Given the value we place on elections, it's remarkable how poorly run and poorly attended we've allowed them to become--and how little time we spend pondering whether there might be alternative electoral systems that would better serve such core (but often conflicting) democratic values as equality, liberty, inclusiveness and popular sovereignty. Into this breach comes an exceptionally lucid tour of our electoral horizon by one of the nation's leading political philosophers, Dennis F. Thompson.…If you care deeply about our hyper-democracy and worry that its electoral processes have grown creaky, [Just Elections] is a thought-provoking tour de force."—Baltimore Sun
Issues
Social security and medicare
"The authors challenge basic assumptions with vigor and intelligence.…An absolutely relevant and important analysis, presented with force and clarity, that asks, basically, what kind of a nation we really are."—Kirkus Reviews
"This book transcends the petty squabbles over reimbursement to address the fundamental challenge facing Medicare. Lawlor's work helps us write a social contract between society at large and its most vulnerable citizens that meets the changing needs of the population in an age of exploding medical technology and widespread chronic illness and disability."—Jack A. Meyer, president, Economic and Social Research Institute
"The Political Life of Medicare is, without exaggeration, required reading for those who would hope to understand this vital element of the American social insurance state.…Oberlander has written the first comprehensive account of how Medicare emerged from its turbulent birth in l965, became an accepted part of American public life, and only in the late l990s emerged as a contentious element in the fight over what kind of welfare state the United States was to have in the twenty-first century."—Ted Marmor, author of The Politics of Medicare
Shaviro clearly and straightforwardly describes the current system and the pressures that have been brought to bear upon it, before dissecting and evaluating the various reform proposals. Accessible to anyone who has an interest in the issue; a balanced, nonpartisan account.
"Dan Shaviro is that rare scholar who can blend legal and economic thinking in designing social reform. In this masterpiece of logic, he takes us outside the narrow debate over what we get and asks the fundamental question of who should pay for it. Only with approaches like Shaviro's are we ever going to face up to the types of Medicare—and broader health care—reforms that sooner or later we must undertake."—Eugene Steuerle, Urban Institute
Business, economics, and tax policy
"This book is for readers seeking to comprehend the broad canvas of U.S. trade policy and international financial maneuvers. They will find…a well-constructed conceptual framework that encompasses large subjects, a mild and lucid style, and up-to-date comprehensiveness."—Foreign Affairs
"A brilliant and iconoclastic examination of the major social trend of our time."—Michael Lind, Washington Monthly
"Lewis, founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute and former partner at McKinsey & Company, offers a detailed look at the local economies in several parts of the world including the U.S., Japan, India and Brazil. Based on the Institute's 12-year survey and analysis, Lewis concludes that the great economic disparity between rich and poor countries will ultimately have a negative impact on all nations.…This is an insightful treatment of a complex issue that deserves a wide readership."—Publishers Weekly
"Well worth pondering.…If anyone can rally a spirit of bipartisanship to the whole rancorous debate about taxes, it is Mr. McCaffery."—Bruce Bartlett, Wall Street Journal
"[Smith] determines that the real power of business lies in its ability, particularly over the last several decades, to influence public opinion through the support of policy think tanks that hold favorable views on business. The mechanism through which this occurs is the news media visibility of researchers from conservative think tanks.…Like all significant and able scholarship, Smith's book raises a number of important questions. It is gratifying to see an examination of such a fundamental and enduring political questions addressed again by a mainstream political scientist."—John F. Camobreco, American Political Science Review
Rights and privacy
"A timely work by scholars who have a manifest knack for fixing on the questions that are most interesting her and now."—Ken I. Kersch, The Law and Politics Book Review
"Swedish anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö sees in the annual presidential reprieve of an otherwise doomed turkey something much more than a lark.…'It is really a symbolic pardoning act which, through public performance, establishes and manifests the sovereign's position at the helm of the state by highlighting…his power to control matters of life and death.' That observation leads Fiskesjö to some troubling thoughts on the exercise of U.S. sovereignty, from Teddy Roosevelt's big-stick era to the holding of prisoners at Guantánamo."—Washington Post Book World
"A compelling inquiry into the problems faced by poor women caught in the web of an instrusive welfare surveillance system. It is an elegantly written, nuanced account of the struggles of welfare mothers to retain a modicum of dignity and control."—Alice Hearst, Perspectives on Politics
"Monmonier explores the ramifications of studying the physical and digital landscapes with tracking equipment.…Monmonier explains the tradeoffs of each particular data system, noting their specialized applications for agriculture, forest fires, storms, traffic, tax assessment, electoral redistricting, crime control, and more. But he also explains that 'geographic information systems' can integrate separate domains of data, to the delight of marketers. We, whose compromised privacy provokes less joy, can at least be glad of Monmonier's incisive account of 'dataveillance' and its implications for civil liberties."—Booklist
Courts and litigation
"The Most Activist Supreme Court in History is far more detailed and theoretically rich than existing commentary. Keck has written what I believe will be recognized as the best place to begin a realistic debate on the merits of Rehnquist Court jurisprudence."—Mark Graber, author of Transforming Free Speech: The Ambiguous Legacy of Civil Libertarianism
"Haltom and McCann build a multilayered analysis, using a wide range of evidence to support their thesis that the perception of the United States as overwhelmed by litigation and in desperate need of tort reform is empirically false yet still constitutes popular knowledge of law. With its clear and lively writing, sophisticated theory, and rich evidence, Distorting the Law will be widely read and very influential."—Charles R. Epp, author of The Rights Revolution
Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
Cass R. Sunstein, Reid Hastie, John W. Payne, David A. Schkade, and W. Kip Viscusi
"Now it can be said with supreme confidence that the prevailing system of punitive damages regularly deviates from express legal standards."—Bruce Fein, Washington Times
What is the role of government?
"Trenchant and persuasive.…What makes Heat Wave such an essential book at this moment in American politics is that, using the 1995 heat wave as his paradigm, Klinenberg has written a forceful account of what it means to be poor, old, sick and alone in the era of American entrepreneurial government.…It's hard to pin down Heat Wave without believing you've just read a tale of slow murder by public policy."—Charles Taylor, Salon.com
"Since the mid-1970s, many Americans have contended that government cannot solve the social and economic problems we face. Page and Simmons are more optimistic. In this well-written book, they argue that many government programs, here and abroad, have reduced poverty and inequality.…This timely, thoughtful book presents a strong case for greater government action."—Library Journal
Gay marriage/union
Merin presents the first comparative study of the legal regulation of same-sex partnerships worldwide, as well as a unique survey of the status of same-sex couples in Europe. He ultimately concludes that all of the models except civil marriage discriminate against gays and lesbians.
In the zeitgeist
Reading the national mood
Returning to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow "citizen" Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship.
"Wise and penetrating.…With Making Patriots, Walter Berns has done his part to help us make patriots, but there is still the larger challenge out there, to find a voice that can poetically express our love of country in the age of e-mail, irony, and the market."—David Brooks, The Weekly Standard
Protest activity during the Republican National Convention was inevitably compared to the week in August 1968 when the whole world was watching Chicago. In this book, David Farber tells and retells the story of those protests in three different voices, from the perspectives of the major protagonists—the Yippies, the National Mobilization to End the War, and Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police.
"Just when the patriotism of Americans who disagree with specific policies of the government is being called into question, Hansen's judicious and incisive book arrives to remind us how vigorously leftists of a century ago refused to yield the flag to the White House. The debates involving Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, William James, Woodrow Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Kallen, and a host of others during the crises of the Spanish-American War and World War One, Hansen shows, remain relevant to today's disputes over what it means to love and defend one's country."—David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley
"Revisionist study of America's backwoods doomsayers. Sociologist Mitchell begins with a simple thesis: survivalists are not necessarily crazy or stupid. Rather, he writes, survivalism is a creative response to the stresses of modernity.…Provocative and surprising. His book is an important attempt to clarify and contextualize a movement that thrives on mainstream society's fringes."—Publishers Weekly
Behind President Bush, some say, is the guiding hand of the neocons. And behind the neocons, some say, is the guiding spirit of Leo Strauss. In this classic work, Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics.
"Tatum refuses to let us delude ourselves. The poetry of war for western civilization has always been in the killing."—Thomas G. Palaima, Times Higher Education Supplement
