Politics Government Books

Predictable pseudo-history from an avowed Marxist.
Just saw Wilentz on CSPAN. In that interview he actually praises Reagan, unbelievably. I guess he didn't write this book.

By the way, the reviewer Ravitch needs to be liquidated.

A very funny book. My wife thought I was reading fiction (I was) because of the constant belly-laughing. I guess I never realized that all of Carter's failures were actually great successes and all of Reagan's successes were actually terrible failures. Amazing. Thank god for "intellectuals" telling us the facts (as interpreted by them). If you are looking for a good laugh rent Spinal Tap again. Otherwise avoid this diatribe at all costs.

Unfortunately this is a book which does a fine historian no credit. It is poorly written with many infelicitous lines but it has some value. Liberals and conservatives will both hate its nuanced appreciation of Reagan, a man of limited understanding but some firm beliefs which turned sometimes in a dangerous direction and finally in a beneficent one.

The book recalls for many of us, both those who voted for Reagan and those appalled by his election, why he won two national races for the presidency: it was a reaction to the disintegration of the old Democratic Party caused by Vietnam and the destruction of the Solid Democratic South by the black uprising some call the Civil Rights movement. The fear of the black underclass motivated many to trust the rightwing Republicans for the first time and this fear continues today with the appearance of Obama as a possible president. McCain may win for the same reasons as Reagan. Obama benefitted from the Civil Rights Movement as did his wife but most blacks are no better off than before the end of segregation. Indeed many were better off on the Southern plantations.

Wilentz is a liberal Democrat but he has a good sense of where Reagan properly responded to what Americans really wanted and needed. His analysis is fair and balanced, certainly more so than Fox News' contributions. Wilentz has a good handle on the reasons why Bush 43 is a disaster, the worst president since James Buchanan and perhaps even worse than Buchanan. His sympathy for Bill Clinton does not conceal the real weaknesses and deficiencies of Clinton, both personal and political.

But in the last analysis this book has been gotten up for the 2008 election and it will not stand as any kind of permanent resource in our political history. Wilentz has missed the boat here, I fear.

If you are looking for an objective history of the Reagan Administration, look elsewhere. This guy lists himself as a Pulitzer finalist...well, I hope hope he doesn't expect to win anytime soon. Politically, he's a teacher at Princeton -- enough said. The book is predictable, almost elementary.

In the introduction, Wilentz brags that he didn't conduct any interviews because it would have taken too much time. The end result is as expected. Ronald Reagan is the bogeyman. The most popular president of my lifetime only gets credit for Iran-Contra. Meanwhile, Wilentz's beloved Democrats manage to overcome despite Ronald Reagan. It reminds me of the old New York City party joke: How did Reagan win? no one I know voted for him. I suspect none of Wilentz' friends voted for him either.

Wilentz is entitled to his opinion, But please don't pass it off as fact.

Then there'd the writing. I was taught that adjectives were cheap. Well, Wilentz is the master if the ham-handed adjective. Every Republican is "mean-spirited" while every Democrats is courageous or (at the time) misunderstood.

If you are looking for a predictable "Princeton" editorial of the Reagan Era era, this the book for you. If you want to be enlightened and learn something, I suggest look elsewhere.

Don't' buy this book, you can have mine-- not that I want I want the dis-information to spread. Wilentz doesn't want to waste his energy conducting interviews -- don't waste your energy reading it.

Sean Wilentz is an awoved Marxist with a long track record of writing tendentious leftist history -all hailed as magisterial by his fellow leftist academics. For anyone willing to do their own reading and be their own critic, the bias and political agenda in his work is plain to see.

Take a few minutes, if you can, before buying this one to read the preface. The outrageously absurd comments on President Bush and the Republican Party generally tell you all you need to know about Wilentz's perspective, his political agenda and his reasons for writing this book - and his competence as well. Anyone who seriously believes the nonsense he spouts there shouldn't be writing history - he shows a total lack of the ability to read objectively, weigh sources and penetrate beneath the slogans to the reality.

If you really want to understand Reagan, try something by Steve Hayward.

My husband who is off fighting for the Constitution sent this book to our daughter. If he had not sent it, I would want a refund. My daughter and I sat down to read the book together. She thought the drawings did not match the words and thought the author still did not like the Preamble. (HE makes mention in the begining that he was forced to think about the Constitution). There was no inspiration from this book and she hasn't picked it up again. The pictures are not exciting to children and only vaguely connect to the words. She loves the Freedom Rock version of the Preamble and and really enjoys Lynn Chaney's "America A Patriotic Primer", so I understand why he made the purchase, however it is not inspiring or uplifting or interesting.

This fun book helped me to reach my fifth grade class in a way their social studies text never would have! Catrow finds a way to take the elegant (and sometimes difficult to translate into kid-talk) language of the Preamble and not only make it simeple to understand, but really helps put the kids right in there.

He makes it clear that this is a document for all Americans, not only including kids, but maybe especially for kids.

His buddy 'Bubbs', is pictured throughout so even the less than interested can be drawn in by finding the dog...

So glad I found this!

I haven't read this book in a long time, but I plan on picking it up on my next visit to the library!
I love the illustrations, so funny! The kids on the cover, too!
If you like this book, I suggest The Kennedy White House, 1961-1963!

As David Catrow tells us in his introduction, "...For me, the Constitution is a kind of how-to book, showing us ways to have happiness, safety, and comfort...", and he uses his immeasurable talents as an artist and cartoonist to teach an inspirational and unforgettable lesson that is sure to open interesting discussions at home and school. Following a glossary of what the actual words in the Preamble of the Constitution mean, (e.g. "IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION: To come together and make things better for everyone who lives in our country. INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY: To make sure we can all have a nice life and get along with one another. TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY: For kids, parents, other grown-ups, and all the people born in our country after we are."), Mr Catrow details the meaning of these important ideals, phrase by phrase, using his marvelously bold and busy cartoon illustrations. Each two page spread is a clever feast for the eyes, rich in engaging details, manic energy, and droll humor. Perfect for youngsters 8-12, We The Kids is a witty and memorable treasure, and one of the real winners of 2002 that shouldn't be missed.

As a librarian, I recommend this book for everyone from 5 to 105. All right, this is actually a picture book that depicts some wonderful insights into our freedom and basic tenets of this great nation from a child's viewpoint. The hilarious illustrations by David Catrow will delight readers of all ages and will be fun for those who are not even studying the Constitution. For those students who are studying the Constitution, this book would be a great visual aid to memorizing the Preamble. I have not met a teenager who didn't enjoy a quick read in a great children's picture book. Teachers: Why not reduce your stressed out students and let them begin their studies with this light-hearted look into some very serious words? Buy a couple of copies and circulate them through the class. Everyone will love them. For the younger reader, ESL or special ed student there is one page explaining the basic meaning of these words and another page and a half explaining why anyone bothered to write the Constitution of the United States. It's ALL GREAT!

This has to be one of the most boring books I have had. I wish I didn't buy it. I luckily had a great professor who taught well and was descriptive and a huge SW advocate. So, I wasted my money. But, if you don't know what kind of prof or it's required for class, be prepared to be bored out of your mind. I really hope your prof is good!

I have adopted this text for my social policy course since the first edition.

The hallmark to Jansson text is that he offers the best framework for generalist practice. Other policy textbooks perceive policy-making as an enterprise dominated by great persons who direct great ideas on a macro level. Policy, in this sense, is the development and maintenance of programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Jansson makes it clear that policy encompasses all aspects of social work intervention. For example, Jansson offers students a framework to comprehend the lack of adequate parking spaces on campus and -- what to do about it. Thus, Jansson enables the student to understand that policies operate on the micro, mezzo and macro levels.

Jansson spends most of his energy on the application of micro policy issues. This is most appropriate for two reasons. First, I estimate that 90% of social work graduates who are required to read this text will face micro policy issues on a daily basis. Unless they reflect back on what they learn from Jansson, they won't realize it. Second, for those who actually obtain policy positions, it is unlikely that they will be involved in making grand decisions in the arena of what is thought to be classic policies (e.g. Social Security). They are most likely to be making policy decisions regarding the use of the copy machine, discharging staff, hiring (including issues like affirmation action for the agency staff) etc. No other text will assist the student in these areas as much as Jansson.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jansson offers the BEST text for a social policy course. However, he has one serious limitation. His writing is terrible. He can't seem to write in an economical manner. In a discussion in an open forum, I made this observation. Other professors thanked me. Everyone in the room knew it was true, but no one wanted to say it aloud - except perhaps me.

The bottom line is, Jansson offers the best text for a social policy course. However, his writing is overly sophisticated, students must be spoon-fed this framework. Once students comprehend his essential points, they have a clear understanding of policy development and maintenance. Some of them, because of Jansson, decide to pursue a career in policy rather than clinical social work.

Although I am not a social worker, Jansson's text is proving very useful for finishing my legislative analysis paper--and completing field work. A hallmark of his writing is the desire to ensure the reader knows how close (and therefore permeable) government is to our daily lives.

Jansson's book is certainly well researched, but he does not use the long resource list as a justification for ailenating his readers (and potential colleagues). He specifically wants people to become and remain interested in this information. Throughout the book, the reader learns this information IS important and is completely different from academic filler and/or abstract theory which does not neccessarily work in their post-degree workplaces.

It is formally listed for social work, but this book would also be a great text for government/political science, public administration, and even some social science (women's studies, multicultural studies...etc) classes.

Marion Nestle's book "Pet Food Politics" is about the pet food recall of 2007. For those of you who don't remember, there was a massive recall of pet food last summer. The recall began with cat food manufactured by Menu Foods (but sold under many other brand names including Iams, Nutro, and Hill's), but expanded into a large number of cat and dog foods under many different brand names. It became clear after the recall that the problem occurred because an unscrupulous Chinese supplier sold a mixture of wheat flour, cyanuric acid, and melamine as wheat gluten. As a pet owner, the recall inconvenienced me (I had to change my cats' foods). As a parent, I became greatly concerned about what I was feeding my daughter and began seriously looking at where the food I bought was produced. I bought this book because I wanted to better understand what happened.

I knew the basic story here, but did not know about the total number of pets who died (likely in the thousands), the reasons why melamine was substituted for the wheat gluten (cheap melamine looks like expensive protein when tested using standard industrial tests), nor what happened to the contaminated pet food (it was fed to livestock and made it into the human food chain).

This book is a fast read and is clear, well written, and very interesting. Unfortunately, it is too brief. I wish that Ms. Nestle had taken this opportunity to explain more about the pet food industry: its history, the major players, the processes used to make pet food. The story is fascinating, but it feels more like a New Yorker article than a book.

I would recommend this book to someone who was interested in the pet food recalls, though I think that most readers should start with other books about food production. Specifically, I would recommend Michael Pollan's excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals or Marion Nestle's own What to Eat before reading this book, to get a feel for how food is produced and to understand some of the politics involved.

Scott's work is a meticulously-detailed analysis of the blinding effects of big-picture macro-economics. There's nothing radically new here - remember the old adage that the "slave sees the master, but the master never sees the slave." And he buttresses his standard, post-Communist negativity toward state-ism with well-chosen examples which it's hard to deny - Stalinist collectivization being a standard of this genre. I'm reminded of the old Estonian Communist who said there were "two ways to build the road to socialism: one is that of a highway that cuts straight ahead, blasting through mountains and draining swamps. The other follows the natural contours of the terrain. It might be a little devious, but it arrives at the same destination." (This man was unsurprisingly purged from the ECP in 1950 for "nationalist deviationism.") I'm reminded also of Rene Dumont's and K. S. Karol's critiques of 1960s Cuba, when Fidel was obsessed with creating a "New Man" marching "not just to socialism but communism."

Yet societies like 1920s Russia, or Cuba, or Tanzania did not have the private capitalization necessary for modern development; without the state they could not possibly have been anything other than colonial appendages of those who did. Stalin said in 1931 that an undeveloped Russia was always "beaten for its backwardness; we must catch up to the developed nations or we will be crushed." This was borne out by WW II. Even if Stalin did much "beating" of his own, the NEP-peasant society of the 1920s could not have possibly stood up to Hitler's invasion. Would a victorious Third Reich in the east have given Scott any better example? The state-minimizing model has worked best only in the Atlantic states, and with good reason: only the trans-Atlantic trade created the concentrated capital that could invest in independent development. This was not a viable path for Russia, or any Third World ex-colony.

Another point not addressed is that the masses oif eastern Europe did not joyously celebrate their alleged "emancipation" from collectivist serfdom in 1989; to the contrary, workers clung to their dinosaur factories and peasants to their collectives because these structures, no matter how resented in the past, had come to provide a social security lacking in the new free order. Even Sheila Fitzpatrick, whom Scott quotes at length, admits as much at the end of her book on "Stalin's Peasants."

One case Scott probably dared not touch in his paradigm is American school consolidation/integration, with its centralization, massive bussing of children, and all-around disruption of community life. This surely is a pointed example of "seeing like a state;" but how to deal with those who resisted such "collectivized education" sympathetically? Looked at objectively, the outraged parent who overturned "invading" buses of black schoolchildren in Boston is morally equivalent to the revolting kulak who took up arms against Bolshevik collectivizers of his land. Scott nicely sidesteps this unprogressive example which by itself pulls much of his moral argument out from under itself. What would be Scott's answer to the general shabbiness and disfunction of the US public school system? To go back to "community education"? - which, public or private, would re-enforce all the old inequities of geography, class, and race.

To Scott's credit, he critiques the trendy neo-liberalism built around von Hayek and Friedman, and warns against private corporate equivalents of blindness. The current craze for "eminent domain" decrees that condemn small property in favor of big investors carries his analysis one step further, where the state - in that exemplary democracy, the United States - becomes as purblind as Julius Nyere when allied with corporate power.

Scott asserts--that states have made concerted efforts to put in place systems that would improve the human condition. However, rather than improve the human condition, bureaucratic processes and procedures enhanced the legibility of citizen populations for purposes of control as control applies to productivity "taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion". Authoritarian, hierarchical schemes were designed to record, monitor, and control populations to advance and sustain economic growth for the state. These elite schemes "to improve the human condition" failed, because the schemes were not originally designed to improve the human condition.
Prior to reading the text, I had imagined what schemes might improve the human condition. I thought in terms of Max Weber's life chances--food, water, shelter, and health care. Bureaucracies, legibility, manipulation, force relocation, and revolution never occurred to me. In Scott's examples, people independently eking out a living without government interference or aid, are heaved up like trees out of their sustaining systems and planted in hostile microclimates. They are given an impossible objective without any notion of self-efficacy or personal benefit. Here the state anticipates an alienated, marginalized people will comply with a continuous, stagnate, emotionless organized notion of a productive utopia. High modernists did not scheme to improve the human condition. They did not think in terms of what the state could do for its people, but rather what the people could do for the state.
It's a great read.

This book is probably best summarized by its moral: The most successful systems are those that exploit the knowledge of all their people, rather than assuming that society can be changed from the top. All the knowledge of how the world actually works, and the actual complexity of getting things done, resides in the people who need to do it, rather than in the minds of planners far from the action. Beware of those who believe that the people's indigenous ways are backwards, pre-scientific and ignorant; in reality, though the people's methods may not have all the rigor of the latest scientific theories, they are likely to be precisely adapted to all the complexity of the world around them.

But Seeing Like A State is much more than that. It is a thoroughly documented attack on high-modernist thinking. This is the mindset of a Le Corbusier, who comes in for a thorough lashing at Scott's hands. Le Corbusier and his disciples decided that modern cities were all wrong: their "chaotic" layout must indicate that they were corrupt and unworkable within. Jane Jacobs most famously tore into that fundamental confusion in The Death and Life of Great American Cities : surface chaos actually conceals remarkable underlying purpose and form. Scott takes a lot from Jacobs. Along with the classical anarchists, she seems to be his biggest inspiration.

The high-modernist ideal is at its worst when it's combined with infinite state power. Combine these two and you get the evils of the former Soviet Union: shift peasants off their plots into "modern" industrial agriculture and force them to adhere to the latest theories of geometric crop planting -- theories like monoculture, identically spaced crops ... all very geometrical and orderly in the mind of someone who's not imaginative enough to see past the surface. And this mindset assumes throughout that the people must just be ignorant: they mustn't want to live in crowded cities; they mustn't know what they're doing when they farm their polycultured, "chaotic" crops. When combined with state power, the expert is the designated local god. That way lies ruin.

In a lot of respects, this is not an argument against experts, though it could be misconstrued that way. For one thing, scientific experts really do have a lot to contribute to, say, peasant agronomy, and they really can contribute a lot to improving (say) rural sanitation. The trouble is when a few threads come together:

1. Ignorance of local conditions.
2. Confusing the thing being modeled with the model itself.
3. The desire to make the world look like the laboratory
4. The power to turn items 1 through 3 into reality.

Item 4 is what makes Seeing Like A State into an argument for anarchism. States get most of Scott's ire, because they do bequeath this power onto dictators. But industry comes in for a spanking, too. In fact chapter 8 of Seeing Like A State is the next logical thing to read after The Omnivore's Dilemma: it explores at a slightly different level the problems with scientific farming as it's practiced in the United States. Rather than adapt farming to local conditions, American agriculture bends the natural world to its particular model of how farming should be done. This includes monoculture, whose predictable consequence is the rise of pests that are adapted to eat that monocultured crop. The next step in the game, if you're an American agricultural conglomerate, is to spray loads of pesticides on your fields. Evolution can play the game too, though, so it responds by building pests who are better adapted to those pesticides. And so the arms race continues. And so the soil erodes, the pesticide runoff blackens, and so forth.

The root of that whole war is the assumption that nature should play the game our way, rather than that we should bend to it. In turn, this monomania is a consequence of straight-ahead economic logic that asks what a profit-maximizing firm (farm) would do, then produces an unambiguous answer: maximize output. When cost and output are the only variables, the model is very clear. It's only clear, of course, if you ignore other things, such as long-term soil degradation. Including these other variables would complicate the model. And, again, if you confuse the model with the thing being modeled, you come to believe that maximizing output is unambiguously and objectively good, rather than being the result of a fixed set of assumptions.

This is a relentlessly powerful and unbelievably sad book: it picks off, one by one, the forces that made the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries look grotesque. It suffers from some verbosity; like Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, though, it always manages to save itself within a few paragraphs of where your patience starts to wear thin. The sections on Russian collectivization, the Tanzanian Ujamaa, Le Corbusier, and the creation of Brasília, in particular, are worth the price of admission on their own. In all these cases, the thing that the experts created was meant -- quite consciously -- to negate the society around it. Brasília was the anti-São Paulo, for instance. Only by relocating to an unoccupied spot in Brazil and starting afresh could the experts create the world as "science" told them it was meant to be made. The consequences were predictable: starvation in Tanzania and in Russia, and a city in Brazil that only survives because people color outside the lines.

Rather than go theoretically very deep, Scott insists on painting the details vividly; I assume this was a stylistic choice, in keeping with the theme that all the intelligence in a system is at the "edge of the network." Don't write like someone positioned at the center, I imagine Scott saying to himself; write like you're at the edge. And so he does. This is where a lot of his verbosity comes from.

I have only two wishes for this book:

1. I wish it gave some more criteria by which to judge modern-day schemes organized by experts. As luck would have it, for instance, my roommate pointed me to a video of William McDonough describing his plans for new Chinese cities -- McDonough being one of the Cradle to Cradle guys. The Chinese government has asked McDonough to apply cradle-to-cradle principles to city design; it looks like he's building a number of 400,000-person cities for them. If you watch the video, and you have the "beware experts with unlimited power" principle in mind, you'll wonder whether McDonough's work is another Brasília. His model city surely has the geometric perfection and cleverness of a Brasília or an Ujamaa village. Should I be scared of it?

Probably the answer is simple, if we're listening to Scott. We need to ask McDonough, "Did you consult with residents to ask how they feel about this city? Or did you impose it from on high, using seemingly perfect principles of architecture and resource conservation?" Like all principles, Scott's are guidelines rather than rules, but it stands to reason that the people who know how to live are the people who'll be doing the living, not their overlords.

2. I'd like more examples of successful scientific interventions. Without them, Scott's book occasionally sounds anti-scientific. Surely it's not that, but the absence of positive examples makes that a sensible interpretation.

The $100-billion development question is: how do we combine expert scientific research with indigenous experimentation? How can the West bring its science to nations that could really use the help, without being scientific imperialists about it? What could Western science bring back from Africa and Asia? The Western model of industrial agriculture is really broken, or so it seems to a lot of knowledgeable folks; it would be really helpful to get a rigorous scientific understanding of sustainability from people who've sustained their agriculture for thousands of years. I would have liked Scott to provide examples of fruitful two-way collaboration.

This book will appeal to a lot of people. It'll appeal to those who have already taken Jane Jacobs's messages about cities to heart. For that matter, it'll remind a lot of people why they love cities. It goes into more depth on Soviet collectivization than many of us will have encountered. And it will make us think twice before we allow experts to reshape communities from on high.

I've found this book useful, breathtakingly so, in so many ways these days; Scott raises a question at the heart of almost all our current civic debates, even in my own micro-field of schooling and education. I find myself saying, time and again, "she's thinking like a state", and it fits and helps me resort out the arguments. Thank you thank you, Prof. Scott.

I got this book because it was recommended as background reading for a local debate about CAFOs. I like the meticulous detail in this treatment of social engineering by governments. That is not a liberal/conservative issue, but one which is worth looking at wherever there is a risk of social control that can lead to inequality and injustice.

I was required to read this book for a Social Problems Analysis class. Before, I had never thought about the major problems with our health system. Unlike a reviwer before me, I don't see her as being biased. If you have ever lived in a poor urban neighborhood, then you would know, Abraham is correct. People who live in poverty, often have no access to better health care, so they take what they can get. It is easy to say these people should take responsible for their health care if you have never been in this situation. Abraham did a wonderful job staying objective, even at times, when I don't know if I could have. I would reccomend this book to anyone who has questions about how the medical system works in poor areas.

This left wing, socalist bent author wants to shame the government for not providing cradle to grave management of people's lives; maybe if the author focused on this nation's irresponsible people, who go through life thinking you can abuse your body then get Washington to pay your medical and nursing home bills..... sick book, sick thinking,

I was required to read this in medical school. This is a great book. It is leaning to the side of socialism, but it is certainly addressing a real problem in America. This book has been out for a while. I am wondering why in the world politicians and businessmen invovled in healthcare are not required to read this book. They should. I think it's good enough to qualify for 12th grade mandatory reading.

Mama was required reading for a graduate-level nursing course. It was very enlightening -- a poignant and heartbreaking look at a poor African-American family living in one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods. However, I found the author's style and choice of words biased towards the subjects and exceptionally left-wing. Not that these things really don't happen, but the author's descriptive language is heavily biased against the "system" while downplaying the flip side of the coin, that people need to take some individual responsibility for their actions. Abraham does her best (one would hope) to remain objective, but it is most definitely a narrative and should be treated as such. Still, definitely worth the read.

If you're interested in health care in America, Medicare, Medicaid, Chicago, poverty, and health care disparities read this book. Great investigative journalism style.

Anyone involved in running for a congressional seat, working on a congressional election or just interested in national politics will find this book enormously interesting. It's short. It's down to earth. It's up-to-date. And, it's one of the best on the subject. Professor Jacobson's book features pertinent analysis of national survey data plugged into long-term electoral trends. It covers all you need to know about how to make a run for Congress, calculating your odds and the chances of knocking off an incumbent. It is a unique blend of academic effort and practicality that is continually useful. It is the very best on what to expect in congressional elections for the U.S. House and Senate.

This is one of the best and most valuable political science texts I have ever read - and, as a political science major, self-confessed politics junkie and activist, I've read most of them. Gary Jacobson's research is unmatched and his findings are essential to anyone who wants to get involved in Congressional campaigns. His assessment of the role of money in such campaigns is astounding and discomforting. While the going gets dry at times, overall the book is a good read with very practical applications today.

--Bill Arnone

Delivered early. Great condition. Good delivery info provided. I'll do it again.

I'm currently doing a History course for the IB. A reasonable percentage of final grade orignates from my internal Assessment.

For this i need two realiable sources. This source proved itself to be very helpful and explanatory for it is written in a manner that the reader wants to always know more. The book explains why the Soviet put Nuclear Missiles in Cuba how the Jupiter Missiles influenced this and at the end, it shows how the Americans were able to make the Soviets withdraw their missiles form Cuba.

An execellent book. I recommend!

Reading "Essence of Decision" resonates with Kurosawa, or maybe Stoppard. We have a central story - one of the great non-events in human history, the moment when the Soviet Union and the United States "came eyeball to eyeball" (as Dean Rusk is said to have said) before someone blinked. We hear it three times: one, from the standpoint of the "rational actor;" second from the internal logic of organizations; and third, from the perspective of politics where people more or less rub along together.

It's an event that bears retelling and, with qualification, the device works. The upshot is that we get some insight into the missile crisis. But not at all incidentally, we get some insight into the academic study of politics (I resist calling it "political science"), and a whiff of what it might have to offer for our better understanding of the world.

Aside from the Kurusowa effect, there is another structural innovation. We have, in a sense, two books interleaved, like Faulkner's "Wild Palms." The even-numbered chapters tell (and retell) the basic story. The odd-numbered chapters offer a framework of "theory."

I suppose you might read just the even-numbered chapters - indeed the authors themselves suggest as much, though rather half-heartedly. And indeed, the odd-numbered chapters can be heavy going. One cannot help recalling the old canard about the sociologist as a person who gets a government research grant to find the bordello next door. You are tempted to say that their theory is what sophisticated people know anyway, and the clueless will probably never figure out.

But there is an answer to this dismissal. That is: most (or at least) a lot of history gets told from the standpoint of the "rational actor." A survey of the competing approaches makes it clear just what this approach leaves out. And if the polyphonic approach is so obviously superior to the single narrative line, then why have historians from Thucydides to Henry Kissinger been willing to do without it? One answer might be: for all their talents, they simply haven't learned the way to tell a story in any other way.

So on the whole, retelling works. But not, perhaps, as well as it might. Another reviewer has said that this isn't really a case to illustrate "organization" theory here because this is not a case that highlights organizations - rather, at least for the United States, the response to the Cuban missile crisis was the work of a small group of men, working together in close cooperation. There is some merit to this view: concededly, you do not get the clash of bull elephants that you might have got at another time when Defense makes war on State, and both work together to fend of Intelligence. But you get a taste of it: we find that the Joint Chiefs were most hospitable to an invasion; that State thought that maybe we could talk it through; and that John McCone from the CIA was the one person who most clearly anticipated the threat. Moreover, you see the "organization" problem in a somewhat different light, when you see how the President's orders were massaged or modified by the military (sometimes, even, within the military).

But perhaps in any event, I need not get too distracted by the framework. Along the way, there are any number of nuggets that stand pretty well on their own. I liked in particular, for instance, the discussion of the role of committee work. We tend to stick up our nose at any project done by committee. But, argue our authors, in World War II it was Churchill, high-handed as he was, who worked through committee-and virtually always followed the committee's advice. The "strong leader" who kept things close to his vest, was Hitler.

But more generally - I was already an adult at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I remember it well. Specifically, I remember how frightened were so many people in my surroundings. I wasn't that frightened; I figured that one way or another, we would rub along. In the end, of course, I was right - we did rub along. But I think in retrospect, it was I who was kidding myself and the Nervous Nellies who had the right attitude. We did rub along, but as Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo, it was a near thing. I particularly like Robert Kennedy:

"The fourteen people [in the American inner circle] were very significant-bright, able, dedicated people, all of whom had the greatest affection for the U.S. ... If six of them had been President of the U.S., I think that the world might have been blown up."

[Final technical note: one or more of the other reviews appear to be discussing the first edition of this book. The (current) seocnd edition is not a mere cosmetic update, but substantially a new book].

A great number of books and articles has been published attempting to explore and explain the Cuban missile crisis that had brought the world to the brink of a thermonuclear world war. Allison and Zelikow, in Essence of Decision, explain the Cuban missile crisis through three different lenses, that is, The Rational Actor Paradigm, Organizational Behavior Paradigm and Governmental Politics Paradigm, each of which is based on a different set of assumptions, each of which has a distinct bundle of organizing concepts and, each of which brings different general/specific propositions for the issue under question. Allison and Zelikow investigate the Cuban missile crisis through the lenses of three models in turn by asking three simple questions:

1. Why did the Soviet Union decide to place offensive missiles in Cuba?
2. Why did the United States respond to the missile deployment with a blockade?
3. Why did the Soviet Union withdraw the missiles?

The analyst looking to Cuban missile crisis through the lens of "rational actor model" conceives of governmental action as a "choice" made by a unitary and rational nation or national government. In this model, national government is treated as if it is an "individual" identifying problem, producing solution alternatives and picking one of those alternatives up whose result would satisfy the expected utility function of the nation best based on the "purpose" of the nation. The rational actor model analyst generates hypotheses, for example, about why the Soviet Union decided to send nuclear missiles to Cuba: to defend Cuba, rectify the nuclear strategic balance, or provide an advantage in the confrontation over Berlin? The virtue of the model comes from its power of explanation especially in case it is able to expose the "purpose" of the nation/state. So all the puzzling pieces of the relevant issue under question are to be tied into a coherent and satisfactory story.

The rational actor model falls short of fully understanding of the issue under question in that it does not take account of other equally important considerations. Admittedly, the rational actor model neglects the organizational processes and capabilities that structure the issue or problem under question, and, limit or extend the policy alternatives available to "rational" policy actors. In final instant, it is manifest that policy executives have to decide policy alternative from the "menu" that current organizational technologies and capabilities write. In organizational behavior model, the analyst investigates, for example, the standard operating procedures (SOP) of government organizations in order to understand which policy alternatives are available to political actors and which one is chosen and why. So, the organizational behavior paradigm closes the gaps of the rational actor paradigm.

Finally, the governmental politics model conceives of governmental policy under question not as a rational actor choice or organizational output but as a "resultant" of bargaining along regular circuits among players positioned hierarchically within the government. In this model, the political actors and their intentions, positions and interests, their relative power, the action channels through which the political actors input and exert their influence, decision rules and similar matters stand to the fore in analysis.

The three models, according to Allison and Zelikow, are complementary to each other. "Model I fixes the broader context, the larger national patterns, and the shared images. Within this context, Model II illuminates the organizational routines that produce the information, options, and action. Model III focuses in greater detail on the individuals who constitute a government and the politics and procedures by which their competing perceptions and preferences are combined" (p. 392). Rather than giving different answers to the same question, each of the three models illuminates one corner of the issue and contributes to our understanding. By integrating the factors identified under each lens, the authors argue, explanations can be significantly strengthened.

The final chapter of the book in which the authors hypothetically demonstrate how the interaction of the factors identified under each lens can lead to a nuclear war should be perused by those who firmly believe that after the collapse of the Soviet Union there no longer exists the precipice of a nuclear slaughter.

Though I believe this book is a must-read for everybody (not necessary to mention all the fields), I recommend this masterpiece especially to students of strategic management who have read Strategy Safari by Mintzberg et al. (1998) for which I believe Essence of Decision will be an excellent field book and to students who have read Case Study Research by Robert Yin for which I think Essence of Decision will be a perfect workbook.

Overall, this book is a living example of a dedicated and illuminating scholarship. Highly recommended.

This is a political-sciency version of the closest we came to a nuclear war, in effect using the crisis to introduce the reader to a methodology on how people make decisions. The authors see three ways that things get decided, and when observers confuse them, dire consequences may follow. First, there is the rational-actor who does things for explicit reasons, as if there were one decisionmaker who controls everything from conception to implementation. Second, there is the political decision, often made for purposes of manipulation rather than for stated goals and hance are harder to read. Third, there is bureaucratic decison-making, according to which actors on the ground carry out orders in the way that they are trained (i.e. by standard operating procedures, or SOPs).

Basically, in my reading, they argue that these modes were mixed in the Cuban Missile Crisis - the US thinking that there was a (rational actor) policy to militarise Cuba with nuclear weapons when in fact much of the provocatively appearing construction was due to SOPs of the military who installed the missiles. Thus, the US had less to fear, but its political reality made an over-reaction inevitable.

Now, these are very useful distinctions and the analysis is interesting. However, they do not make for very interesting reading or very good history. That makes this book a slog, which limits its appeal to academics rather than the general reader. I read this for a class - otherwise, I would never have gotten through it.

Recommended on balance, but go elsewhere if you are looking for a good story rather than a rather staid acadeimic analysis.

Although history is replete with Crusades, Jihads, Holy Wars, etc. it still stymies me how, otherwise intelligent people can slaughter each other and bring chaos to thousands, over religion. Even if any of it were true, it would seem sane to avoid it simply because it is so divisive, violent and irrational.

The thesis of this book is that religion and violence are always linked and that all religions are the same in having a violent strain and that all religions have violence in them naturally because religion is violent.

This is blatently and historically untrue. In attempting, like so many works, to not single out Islam as violent this book wants the reader to beleive that Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and all religions are equally violent and a study of each reveals a strain of hate. Timothy Mcveigh is the Christian, the Sikh Kalistan fighters are the Sikhs, The Tamils are the Hindus, Osama is the Muslims, The strange terror cell in Japan is the Buddhist. This is easy. Rather tahn doing a comprehensive study this book found one murderer from each religion that led a sect and said "see this religion has a strain of violence". However Timothy Mcveigh was one man as were the Buddhist extremists in Japan. The Tamils are not religious, there ware is based on ethnicity. Where are the Jewish terrorists, well there must be Baruch Goldstien and recall those Jewish Zealots 2000 years ago.

This is sheer lunacy. Different religions did indeed engage is certain levels of violence throughout history. THat is true. THere are also different forms of religions and religions change. Religions that were once violent or state controlled like Christianity and Buddhism, have become peaceful. Religions like Sikhism are naturally warrior based religions, but not neccesarily violent. Hinduism has never manifested itself violently, and Judaism hasnt been violent since the time of the revolt and that was a national revolt. This is just a gigantic scam. Islam has violent passages in the Koran. But this doesnt mean Bin Laden is timothy Mcveigh.

It is also not true that religion is 'more' violent than secular societies. Hitler and Stalin killed more people in 5 years than any religion has ever done. If anything religion may work as a hand holding violence back but helping unify it when it takes place.

Seth J. Frantzman

Excellent book covering all the major religions and their terrorists. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a scholarly survey or someone looking to make more sense of the world.

Many of the cases explored are chilling in their cold bloodedness, but the author makes all of them eminently understandable.

As a comparative cultural study of religious terrorism, Mark Juergensmeyer attempts to explain how and why religion and violence are linked. Juergensmeyer analyzes recent incidents of global religious terrorism in order to illumine overarching patterns that heighten the risk of religious violence. Splitting his book into two parts, Juergensmeyer, first, highlights examples of religious terrorism within the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions. The author interviews religious leaders and activists within cultures of violence present in each of these traditions. In the second part of the book, Juergensmeyer identifies those characteristics that enhance the likelihood of religion becoming violent.

Juergensmeyer believes the first common denominator in religious extremism is the act of violence itself: terrorism is a theatrical display of violence. According to the author, these acts are performance events, inasmuch that they make symbolic, not strategic, statements. They are performative acts, insofar as they attempt to create change. The location and the time of the violent act, also, have symbolic purpose. Terrorism needs an audience, somebody to terrify, in order to be effective, and with the technological advancements of the twentieth century, the audience of this theatre is virtually global.

If religious terrorism is violent theatre, the image of a cosmic war provides the script. Violent activists view their terrorist acts as part of a larger spiritual confrontation, a battle between good and evil, between God and God's enemies. With the notion of warfare, compromise is not possible and violence, naturally, is morally justified. Religious symbols also undergird religious terrorism: all religions have symbols to overcome the images of death, disorder, and disarray. Religion asserts the primacy of meaning and order in the face of chaos, in this case, a world gone awry. Juergensmeyer identifies when these symbols can become deadly and when confrontation is likely to be characterized as a cosmic war.

The processes of satanization and empowerment are a result of viewing the world as engulfed in a cosmic war. Juergensmeyer believes that terrorists believe that they are victims, and this justifies their violent actions. If they die in their cause they are martyrs - again, religious symbolism overcoming disorder - sacrificed for their community and religion. With every war, enemies must be created, and as such the process of demonizing the enemy is important. Terrorists must deny the personhood of the enemy and create stereotypes so that the enemy can be seen as individuals. Juergensmeyer explains the process of satanization, the creation of a cosmic foe, and the process of empowerment, to create the hope that history can be changed, are integral parts of the mentalities caused by the image of cosmic warfare.

Religious violence provides a sense of empowerment to religious activists and their communities. According to the author, all terrorists fear social marginalization. In general terrorism is a male occupation, and women have minor ancillary roles, if at all. This gender specificity implies that sexuality is a factor in militant movements: sexual control needs to be established in a world gone awry, seen in active subjugation of women and homosexuality. Juergensmeyer finds commonality in terrorist groups: they are "anti-institutional, religio-nationalist, racist, sexist, male-bonding, bomb-throwing young guys," (210). Their marginality is experienced through sexual despair, which leads to violent acts of empowerment. Religious terrorists recognize they are in a struggle that cannot be won, but by dismantling the state's monopoly on power, the group demonstrates their power on behalf of the powerless.

In his concluding chapter, Juergensmeyer believes that terrorists would do anything if they believed it sanctioned by God. Because of the increasing secularism and liberalism prevalent in the world, religious terrorists seek to vault their religious views, perceived as both marginalized and traditional, into the mainstream. Secular governments are by nature enemies of these terrorist organizations, and violence is an attempt to reclaim this public sphere. Juergensmeyer, extrapolating from current trends, concludes with five ways in which religious terrorism can be resolved: terrorist organizations can be literally destroyed; terrorists can be frightened into submission by the threat of violent reprisals or imprisonment; the goals of the terrorists can be accommodated; the religious aspects are separated from politics; or religion and politics can be reconciled. Juergensmeyer believes the last solution to be the most successful.

This book is being used in a Terrorism seminar class that I am taking and for good reason. Juergensmeyer does not rely wholly on second hand information but has actually visited and spoken with those accused and some even convicted of terror and gives a perspective that only a first hand knowledge would provide. This is an excellent insight into the minds of true idealists with a bent on death and destruction.