Paul Loeb, “The Impossible Will Take a Little While” (Basic Books, 2014)
Paul Loeb is well known in sociology as the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times, and for the previous edition of the book reviewed here. His books are used in coll...
18 Nov 201444min
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and P...
7 Nov 201444min
Darrell M. West, “Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust” (Brookings Institution Press, 2014)
So how many billionaires are there in the world? And what do they have to do with politics? Darrell M. West has answered those questions in Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust (Brookings 2014...
20 Okt 201418min
Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014)
How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Ka...
20 Okt 20141h 6min
Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013)
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth ce...
17 Okt 201443min
Anthony Santaro, “Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty” (Northeastern UP, 2014)
The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr...
14 Okt 20141h 8min
Andrea Louise Campbell, “Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Inst...
13 Okt 201423min
Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Making the Modern American Fiscal State” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many...
7 Okt 201440min
