Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, Sanford F. Schram and Brian Caterino, New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp. 304.

Making Political Science Matter is a response to Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again by Bent Flyvbjerg, Professor of Planning at Aalborg University, Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Making Political Science Matter is a collection of fourteen essays on methodological issues in political science. Its overarching aim is “to move the conversation forward in the hopes of seeing the possibility of a rejuvenated political science” (11).

Homeless and at Home in America: Evidence for the Dignity of the Human Soul in Our Time and Place, Peter Augustine Lawler, South Bend IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2007, pp. 229, index.

“We Americans are the most homeless and the most at home people of the West today” (1). This is the central paradox of Peter Augustine Lawler's latest book, Homeless and at Home in America. It is a collection of essays (some previously published elsewhere) on a wide variety of topics, from Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons and bioethics to Casablanca and Tocqueville. The chapters, though, fit well together and are linked by a set of related themes. The book, written in Lawler's usual engaging and often humorous style, presents a fascinating argument from one of the chief proponents of what he calls the “‘crowd’ of American faith-based, non-libertarian, Strauss influenced thinkers” (Stuck with Virtue, Wilmington: ISI Books, 2005, viii). This group is part of a growing school of thought Lawler refers to as “conservative postmodernism—postmodernism rightly understood” (134), which “is associated with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and American literary Thomists such as Marion Montgomery, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor” (135). Tocqueville is one of their favorite authors. This line of thought is a reaction against modernity for its failure to comprehend what it means to be truly human, that is, as creatures that occupy the “middle class” between beasts and God.

Les Allemands du Québec. Parcours et discours d'une communauté méconnue, Manuel Meune, Les Éditions du Méridien, 2003.

Le fait qu'en France, le nouveau Président Nicolas Sarkozy ait proposé et finalement créé un ministère de l'Immigration et l'Identité nationale met en évidence – s'il en est besoin – l'importance des questions et des problèmes qui y sont liés, à l'heure de la mondialisation, même pour une nation aussi vieille et aussi consciente de ses racines que la nation française. Les observations et les analyses que nous propose Manuel Meune dans cet ouvrage sont donc d'une actualité sans cesse renouvelée même si ses données ont été recueillies dans la première moitié des années 1990.

Rural Women's Leadership in Atlantic Canada: Firsthand Perspectives on Local Public Life and Participation in Electoral Politics, Louise Carbert, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 177, index.

In her latest work, Louise Carbert peers beneath the surface of formal electoral processes to explore how rural, female community leaders in Atlantic Canada view politics. She focuses on this group to explain a curious pattern: rural women are much less likely to secure public office than women located in urban areas, and this holds true at all three levels of government. Through interviewing women representing the typical recruitment pool from which political parties draw candidates, the author aims to identify the presence of barriers to female electoral participation specifically salient to rural women. This is no easy task in part because such an objective necessitates sifting through the inconsequential details of grassroots politics to locate and interpret underlying patterns of power. Carbert's approach is innovative and provocative, and many scholars will appreciate this work's inductive method and rich anecdotal basis. At the same time, readers scouting for clear answers may be left frustrated by the work's complex set of conclusions concerning exactly why few rural women successfully navigate the “slushy intersections” of politics, family life and the economic environment in pursuit of a political career.

The Arctic Promise: Legal and Political Autonomy of Greenland and Nunavut, Natalia Loukacheva, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. xii, 255.

Is there political space for a northern vision of governance? This book is a comparative evaluation of Inuit efforts to realize autonomy within the Danish realm and Canadian federation through the creation and evolution of Greenland and Nunavut. A comparative legal and historical analysis is used to make normative claims about Inuit autonomy in these two jurisdictions. The concept of autonomy is defined by the author as “equivalent to self-government in the context of an internal right to self-determination” (6). It is argued that there is no need for Inuit in either territory to pursue a special type of indigenous autonomy because Inuit legal and political aspirations can be realized through existing arrangements. Loukacheva claims, “The Inuit majorities of Nunavut and Greenland in practice are turning de jure territorial forms of governance into de facto indigenous ones” (40). The evidence presented in this book may not constitute the last word on Inuit autonomy, but it sure is provocative.