Political scientists have been fascinated with the role of the Federal Reserve in making monetary policy. It has long been recognized that the Fed has a tremendous amount of power for a regulatory agency that has so much independence from political bodies. Students of comparative monetary institutions have marveled at the contrast of United States policy to that of the rest of the world, with the exception of Germany's Bundesbank. Yet political scientists and economists continue to try to identify how politics shapes American monetary policy. Irwin Morris's book offers a major corrective to some of the flaws of earlier efforts.

In this pathbreaking book, J. Eric Oliver proposes to answer an ambitious and important question: Has suburbanization brought about a decline of civic engagement in America? This question is, obviously, immensely important because more than half of all Americans live in suburbs. Whatever they think and how they vote and however much they participate in the civic life of their communities has enormous consequences, not only within the suburbs but also for the nation as a whole. The question is also consequential in light of the national debate that seems to have been provoked by the recent work on social capital. As Oliver notes, Robert Putnam has blamed suburbanization for part of the alleged loss in social capital in America. The general claim that suburbs have killed community and civic engagement is hardly new, and it has recently been amplified by (among others) advocates of the new urbanism. Oliver boldly states that “such claims are without any empirical basis” (p. 2), and he takes it as his task to supply the missing evidence that might answer the question. In doing so, he has produced a remarkable book, literally the first one ever published to present definitive evidence on the crucial issue of the impact of the suburbs on American democracy.

Trained in both law and political science, Julie Novkov has made a major contribution to an understanding of the transitions from the Progressive Era to the New Deal that will be especially important for new institutionalist scholars of the Supreme Court, for students of American political development, and for scholars of gender and politics, women's history, and labor history. It also instructs those activists both inside and outside the legal community who turn to the courts.

As the United States begins fighting a war devoted not to the overthrow or liberation of a particular government but, rather, as Mr. Bush put it, to rid the world of “evildoers,” it is easy to forget that our state is also busy at home killing people in the service of a similar oversimplified moralism. Austin Sarat's most recent book is, then, an important reminder. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 the country's appetite for it has steadily increased: More than 3,600 people now sit on death row, and their numbers continue to swell. While there have been some welcome signs of a slackening in the nation's tolerance for the killing of the mentally retarded and the innocent, the Rehnquist court has been streamlining the appeal process in an attempt, in the Chief Justice's words, to “get on with it.” Sarat rightly protests against the ensuing compromises of the rights of those caught up in the system, a disproportionate number of whom are, as everyone knows, poor and black. He argues that routine killing by the state is not just illiberal in its corrosive effect upon the Bill of Rights but in conflict with the institutions and spirit of our democracy. Where democracy calls for a willingness to seek reconciliation and the improvement of institutions through dialogue, and hence a willingness to admit that one's own perspective is limited and one's own judgment fallible, capital punishment requires that we assume the mantle of infallibility, and it is sustained by a spirit of rage that it in turn nurtures. One of the strongest features of Sarat's book is its insistence that none of this is accidental: “State killing…is part of a strategy of governance that makes us fearful and dependent on the illusion of state protection, that divides rather than unites, that promises simple solutions to complex problems” (p. 247). It is easier and less anxiety-producing to tell ourselves familiar comic book stories about the battle of good and evil than to get down to “the difficult, often frustrating work of understanding what in our society breeds such heinous acts of violence” (p. 14). And if we believe the stories we tell, it is hard to imagine living without the protection of a powerful and threatening state that can match the violent forces arrayed against us. For those who profit politically or financially from the present forms of that society, that is all to the better. Protego ergo obligo.

The conceptual—and legal—division between a woman and a fetus is most recently rooted in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established the trimester framework designed to balance a woman's right to privacy with the state's interest in protecting potential life. Prior to Roe, a woman and her fetus were legally viewed as having identical interests because of their biological tie. The trimester framework, however, established a precedent for viewing the maternal-fetal relationship as an adversarial one, where a woman and her fetus have conflicting interests. Indeed, as states demonstrate their willingness to protect fetal health—via restrictions on access to abortion—the fetus is increasingly being viewed as a separate entity that is entitled to protection and recognition as a person. The questions of when and under what conditions a fetus is a person have policy implications beyond the scope of the abortion debate.

In this history of American trade politics, James Shoch argues for the centrality of political parties in the making of trade policy. His thesis, simply stated, is that parties matter, and matter a good deal more than the literature generally acknowledges. As he depicts it, the historical record is something like a heavyweight prizefight, in which the Democratic and Republican Parties, driven by constituency pressures, ideological differences, and, especially, the quest for political advantage, spar ceaselessly over trade issues.

Uncertain Hazards is an ambitious book, in two respects. First, it tackles an important issue for political science as well as sociology and history, namely, the impact that social movements have on reshaping the societies in which they mobilize. Second, in adopting a case study approach to this issue, the author explores the development of the modern environmental movement and its purported reframing or hegemonic reversal of environmental science and risk assessment in America. In effect, this volume is two separate but related studies. Indeed, Sylvia Noble Tesh suggests as much when she notes in her acknowledgments that her “theme shifted as the book took shape” (p. xi).

It was New York Governor Al Smith's famous dictum that the ills of democracy could be solved with more democracy. Many agree with him some 75 years later. The shelves of political science overflow with books lamenting the decline of intermediary institutions that once plugged the hearts and minds of citizens into government and civic life. Democracy scaled down to the town and neighborhood allows people to address problems that are experienced in the routine of everyday life. Stripped of abstraction, politics loses its mystery and the sense of alienation that accompanies it. But Americans no longer gather at the political club, the town meeting, the church, and the union hall. Citizens are plugged into television, the family, or perhaps the job, interested in private concerns. In response, pundits, professors, and politicians call for a revival of local political and civic life. President George W. Bush's “Faith-Based Initiative,” which would use federal funds to support church social service programs, can be viewed as a response to the national mood of a people adrift. While many have forwarded tiresome critiques of what ails us, Kenneth Thomson does the nitty-gritty empirical work that should mark social science's unique contribution to this debate.

Death and the Statesman appeared in print one month after the terrorist attacks on September 11, and the timing of its publication alone might attract a wide audience. The book deals with a significant subject of immediate interest to scholars and citizens alike—namely, what drives political leaders as they decide when and how to conduct war. Joseph Underhill-Cady argues that members of the foreign policymaking elite remain preoccupied with their own mortality. He suggests how their metaphors and rituals reveal their persistent fear and high anxiety about death, and he shows how their decisions to go to war can be read to reflect this preoccupation. For the foreign policy elite, the conduct of war constitutes an “immortality project.” According to the author, “As the elite sought to overcome their physical limitations, they likewise attempted to ensure the nation's transcendence of its mortal bounds” (p. 10). Underhill-Cady notes the gender-specific nature of foreign policymaking (p. 45). Macho men deny the inevitability of their own deaths and suppress their emotions, while they labor to ensure that the nation shall long endure. He traces the roots of their immortality projects to the Christian tradition: Man has fallen, but he can achieve salvation and thereby gain eternal life (pp. 52–55). The author renders a plausible, thought-provoking argument, although the evidence he produces could be more convincing.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s produced strong pressure on all levels of government to give “power to the people.” This urgent demand came not only from radical activists in the streets but also from the halls of academia, where scholars churned out a massive volume of studies encompassing detailed recommendations for filling the power vacuum between authoritative public and private decision makers and disadvantaged citizens whose lack of sufficient economic and political resources condemned them to the bottom rungs of the American social order. Although most of these studies were considered positive and progressive, they were not without their detractors. The most searing critique of “bottom up” schemes for empowering the disadvantaged has come from the pen of Robert Weissberg in his book, The Politics of Empowerment.

Few public policy issues have drawn more popular attention, generated more media commentary, or produced more books than the national debate over the dark fate of Social Security and Medicare. In a new book, noted policy scholar Joseph White argues that the “entitlement crisis” and the future insolvency projected by so many experts, politicians, and opinion makers are myths that badly need exploding. White insists that although we should be very concerned about the viability of each of these two essential government programs, we should not be carried away by the hysteria amplified by radical reformers and saviors of every political coloration. Rather, we should attempt to formulate a clear-eyed analysis of the purposes and constraints of social insurance that will produce genuine programmatic solutions that do not radically weaken the nation's social safety net.

Alice Amsden is one of the founders of the “statist” or “revisionist” school of East Asian economic development. Her earlier book, Asia's Next Giant (1989), refuted claims that growth in South Korea and other Newly Industrialized Countries was simply a function of high investment rates and correct prices, based in turn on the small-government fundamentals of stable, private property rights, macroeconomic stability, and trade liberalization. Amsden, along with others, emphasized the benefits of sector-specific state interventions distinctly at odds with neoclassical prescriptions.

The difficulty of policing a complex border like that between the United States and Mexico, specifically stemming the flow of illegal drugs and immigration, demonstrates, according to Peter Andreas's insightful and pathbreaking analysis, the challenges associated with globalization, diminished sovereignty, and economic integration between developed and developing economies. In fact, as he notes, intensifying law enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border has had several unintended consequences, including enhancing the incentive and thus the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, which, in turn, create obstacles to the expansion of legal flows. Throughout the book an implicit question emerges: How do you balance the positive gains from globalization with the negative or dark side effects of free trade, that is, drug trafficking and illegal immigration? Taking the dilemma further, how can states in a global, borderless economy promote two contradictory policies simultaneously: strong prohibitionist, law-enforcement policies to enforce state sovereignty and economic neoliberalism and integration?

Whoever has spent some time in the Indian state of Panjab and is to some extent acquainted with the East European Gypsies must have concluded that this was their original home. But as in Europe, so also in Panjab, even at the local Chandigarh University where an international conference debated the problem, little is known and understood about Gypsy ethnopolitics or ethnoculture. European interest in the Gypsies at the university level goes back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century, but it focused on regional languages and folklore as, for instance, can be seen in the correspondence between Bogdan P. Hasdeu (Ghijdeu), a Romanian academic, and Franz Miklosich, an Austrian philologist.

This work is by a serious scholar who had previously written a fine book on peasant politics in Egypt. Interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world may be dismissed as naive given the notorious reputation of the region for autocracy and dictatorships. Yet Nathan Brown insists on taking constitutional developments in the region seriously, and he meticulously covers most constitutional developments over the span of the last century. But the book could have been easily condensed into a scholarly article. In the first part of the book, for example, which stretches into page 94, he provides the reader with a blow-by-blow account of constitutional developments in select Middle East countries. It contains very few insights, and the author breaks no new grounds; the developments were previously covered in many other works (for example, Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East, 1992).

This is a book about a man who may be considered “the twentieth century's last example of a ‘pure’ charismatic leader” (p. 5). With these words, Daniel Brumberg begins to analyze the thoughts and legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), who came to power in Iran in February 1979. In his introduction, the author maintains that his study provides “an accurate, objective, yet sociologically empathetic evaluation of the very complex process of ideological change in the Islamic Republic of Iran” (p. 8).

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to underperform the world's developing regions, remaining a region of pronounced economic stagnation at correspondingly frightful human and social costs. Exactly why this is so has been the subject of extensive debate both among academics and within the policy community. Since most sub-Saharan African countries have been implementing neoliberal economic reforms, there has been particularly heated discussion about whether or not these policies have helped to improve the economic environment.

This book is a collection of essays from a 1996 conference that brought together a number of political sociologists to discuss an article from 1991 by the coorganizers, Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, originally published in International Sociology. They argued that the collapse of blue-collar industries and other changes in occupational and income structures associated with postindustrial social stratification had lead to a breakdown of class politics. Two years later, the journal published a rebuttal by Mike Hout, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza that class conflict remained important but that the political parties ignored it. The two articles and a 1993 response by Clark and Lipset are republished here together with a series of response papers written for the 1996 conference. Hout et al. criticized Clark and Lipset for failing to distinguish between class as a social phenomenon and the political representation of class. “Class interests may remain latent in the political arena,” they wrote, “but this does not mean that they do not exist” (p. 64).

The titles of these books point both to their common concern and to the difference between them. Still Fighting underscores the extent to which Latin American women (in this case, Nicaraguans) are still struggling, from a disadvantaged position, to achieve recognition of their own personal value and identity, as well as a better social, political, and economic position. Empowering Women underscores, instead, the extent to which women's struggle is about achieving power in the form of legal title to land. The former stresses gender identity while the latter emphasizes personal empowerment. The first accentuates setbacks experienced and the work still to be done; the latter highlights accomplishments while acknowledging that much work remains. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon locate their work within gender studies in Chapter 1, stating their orientation toward redistribution rather than recognition (p. 9). Although Katherine Isbester does not refer to gender studies, her work is about the struggle for identity and the role it plays in strengthening a social movement.

A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant.