Joshua Zeitz, “Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House” (Viking, 2018)
How did President Lyndon Johnson engineer one of the biggest bursts of liberal legislation in American history? And did his vision of a Great Society successfully alleviate poverty and reduce inequali...
28 Mar 201844min
Robert Pearl, “Mistreated: Why We Think Were Getting Good Health Care and Why We’re Usually Wrong” (PublicAffairs, 2017)
The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on the ...
27 Mar 20181h 12min
Domingo Morel, “Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2018)
When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local officials, ...
21 Mar 201826min
Jesse Rhodes, “Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights ...
19 Mar 201826min
Jonathan D. Quick, “The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018)
A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world―and revealed ho...
16 Mar 201849min
Christina Twomey, “The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia” (NewSouth Books, 2018)
In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and coll...
13 Mar 201817min
Jamila Michener, “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. ...
12 Mar 201824min
Nic Cheeseman, “Institutions and Democracy in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack eff...
12 Mar 201836min
