HUP 2008 Election: Domestic Issues

A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America; Aristide R. Zolberg; “An extraordinary achievement. In its sweep, erudition, conceptual precision, and analytic acuity, it may be the most important book on the history of immigration policy published in twenty-five years.”
—Dissent

The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition; Spencer R. Weart; “Charting the evolution and confirmation of the theory [of global warming], Weart...reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists’ views and the public reception their work received.” —New York Times Book Review

Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis; Harold S. Luft; A comprehensive new proposal to create a system with the quality of care patients want, the flexibility clinicians need, and the dynamics to continually improve the value of health care—all while providing affordable health insurance for every American.

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience: John Lewis Gaddis; “[Gaddis] offers a judicious mix of analysis and history to argue that, although the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks was indeed bold, it was hardly unprecedented.”
—Wall Street Journal

Surviving Large Losses: Financial Crises, the Middle Class, and the Development of Capital Markets; Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal; Why financial crises occur, why their effects last so long, and what political and economic conditions can help countries survive, and even prosper, in the aftermath.

Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace; Nancy MacLean; “MacLean uses the story of the struggle for workplace equality to consider nothing less than the major political realignments of the past quarter century... Contemporary history at its best.” —Chicago Tribune

When Is Discrimination Wrong?: Deborah Hellman; Claims of wrongful discrimination are among the most common moral claims asserted in public and private life. Yet the roots of these claims are often left unanalyzed. This book explores what it means to treat people as equals and thus takes up a central problem of democracy.

Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market; Katherine S. Newman; “Katherine Newman is not afraid to ask the hard questions...In Chutes and Ladders, policymakers have a blueprint for valuing work and reducing poverty.”
—Senator John Edwards

City Economics: Brendan O'Flaherty; This innovative textbook deals with automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education as well as non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, drugs, and economic development.

How Judges Think: Richard A. Posner; More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court. Distinguished appellate court judge Posner offers a unique and startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases.

The Race between Education and Technology: Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz; “[This book] tackle[s] the most important...domestic issue—growing income inequality...Essential reading ...Obama’s spin-doctors should start translating Goldin and Katz’s book into a campaign slogan at once.”—Financial Times

Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class; Christopher Newfield; Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society.

The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics; David L. Kirp; “A Best Book of the Year...[Kirp] leaves his reader with no doubt that our country would be better off if every child had the opportunity to attend a good-quality preschool.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

Political Ethics and Public Office: Dennis Thompson; “The text of choice for courses on the ethics of public officials...The major theme for which the book will be widely noticed and long remembered [is the] aim ‘to preserve the essentials of the traditional idea of personal responsibility against the pressures of organizational life.’”—Political Theory

Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics; Michael J. Sandel; Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life.

Discover more books about domestic policy in HUP's Political Science Subject Index.

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