POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in April. American Economic Aid to Thailand. J. Alexander Caldwell. Lexington,. $1 5. Attack on Privacy. John Curtis...
...Reform as Reorganization: The Governance of Metropolitan Regions...
...Lippincott, $6.95...
...Jose h P. Kennedy: A Life and Times...
...William 0. Douglas...
...Justice Douglas has some fascinating stories to tell, particularly about the days of the New Deal, but his consistent inability to criticize himself tends to make his autobiography disappointingly one-dimensional...
...Unfortunately, the author has a positive aversion to any sustained analysis of his material, and this keeps the book from rising above its titillating-compendium . status to become the serious study it might have been...
...The Modest Commitment to Cities...
...Simon & Schuster...
...Kahn...
...Arnold Forster, Benjamin R. Epstein...
...Sensitive, readable portraits of seven citizens of Yarborough, pseudonym for a New England mill town, symbol of a condition to be found throughout the country...
...William D. Barnard...
...Go East, Young Man...
...Land speculators-urban blockbusters, suburban developers, and hucksters of vacation paradises-are the viilains in this well-written and researched tour of the real estate jungle...
...Rexford C. Tugwell...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in April...
...The Structure of Urban Reform: CommunL. Warren, Stephen M. Rose, Ann F. Bergunder...
...Leroy Gould, et al...
...The National Labor Relations Board...
...Press, $12/$5...
...of Alabama, $7.95...
...Roche is still agressively unrepentant on the war, describing himself “as an old-fashioned liberal cold warrior...
...Nelson and David Rockefeller may live 40 more years...
...Richard Morgan’s article on the establishment clause of the first amendment is especially interesting...
...Morton Halperin...
...John Curtis Raines...
...Yale, $8.95...
...A Blue-Collar Journal A College President’s Sabbatical...
...Uncertain Passage...
...A detailed and provocative brief arguing that the reports of the death of our urban centers have been greatly exaggerated...
...Scribners, $15...
...Thus, with the pace and the heavy steadiness of a tank, we move to such earthshaking conclusions as this: uncertainty about the outcome of an election makes a candidate work harder...
...Griffin’s theoretical solutions, which center on taxing externalities and recognizing social costs, are hardly trail-blazing but are generally sensible...
...Lexington, $13.50...
...of Alabama, $7.50...
...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...One of his more interesting comments, which comes in the preface to the American edition of this book, which was first published in France, reveals both an imperfect understanding of the U. S. polity and the European’s anxiety about our current disruptions: “I can speak out forthrightly and assert that it is on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that a European pins his hopes for a foreign policy governed by reason...
...Although Downie’s solutions are somewhat limited, the book’s strongest section is its unromantic look at widely acclaimed “new towns,” ranging from Columbia, Maryland to Irvine, California...
...Univ...
...McGraw-Hill, $7.95...
...the other half, a lucid analysis of who gets selected (22 out of 103 nominees were serving in the executive branch when they were nominated...
...Saul Padover...
...It is to the presidency rather than the Senate that Europeans look for an equitable policy...
...How this great hero of all of us who love the First Amendment could have been on the take from the Las Vegasbased Parvin Foundation may be explained by this sentence: “Leonard Lyons, famous columnist, and his wife, Sylvia, were among the most talented couples I ever knew...
...Arguing that our cities are not facing a space shortage, Harrison suggests that “development is also feasible in a downward direction,” noting that more than one third of new building in a number of Russian cities is underground...
...Bennett Harrison...
...The Birth of Nations...
...Operation S linter Factor...
...For those whose knowledge of Deep South politics does not extend beyond George Wallace, the ties of Folsom (who said in 1946 that FDRs biggest mistake was in not aiding the Spanish Loyalists) to the left wing of the national Democratic Party may be rather startling...
...Pitman, $8.95...
...Univ...
...Campus in Crisis...
...Scribner’s, $7.95...
...England’s Rowntree Trust told an applicant that while they couldn’t approve his $1,080 research request, they’d like to give him $144,000 for a wider study...
...Isadore Silver, ed...
...Prentice-Hall, $4.45...
...Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans...
...Little, Brown...
...The Education of Black Americans...
...Oxford, $10...
...Dull but worthy with some thoughtful proposals for constitutional reform...
...Connections: Notes from the World of Heroin...
...The president of Haverford College, who is also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, spent his sabbatical doing a variety of blue-collar jobs...
...Harper & Row, $6.95...
...The Emerging Constitution...
...At times Harrison’s zeal to make the best possible case for the economic vitality of the city leads in strange directions...
...Resources for the Future/fohns Hopkins, $3...
...He knew all the celebrities, their scandals as well as their other lives...
...Ovid Demaris...
...Leonard Downie, Jr...
...Prentice-Hall, $10...
...3.95...
...Macmillan, $9.95...
...and the stillbirth of such nations as Bao Dai and Eritrea, are rambling and at times sloppily thrown together, but are still quite appealing in their own way...
...Library Research Associates, $5,95...
...The time lock has run out on a vault full of diplomatic documents, and their release is the occasion for this new history...
...But the real problem is not Roche’s philosophy, but how little he seems to have noticed while working in the White House...
...Frank W. McCulloch, Tim Bornstein...
...Judson Press, $4.95...
...Justin Kaplan...
...The Imperial Re ublic: The United States and the World 1645-1973...
...A well-executed history of Alabama politics in the late 1940s, focusing on that ever-fascinating character, populist Governor “Big Jim” Folsom...
...McGrawHill, $10...
...Brookings, $8.95/$3.50...
...The author is an old friend of his subject’s, and the results show up in a characterization which is almost totally uncritical and heavily romanticized...
...A collection of essays about the important cases of last year...
...In the era of the modern investigative reporter, Steffens the pioneer muckraker is an obvious source of parallels...
...Praeger, $10...
...The elected representatives of the American nation are swayed by economic interests, both commercial and monetary...
...Charterhouse, $8.95...
...Holt, Rinehart &Winston, $7.95...
...Lexington, $13.50...
...Harper & Row, $8.95...
...Stewart Steven...
...A highly simplistic manifesto that rails against inherited wealth and the progressiue income tax...
...Raymond Aron...
...Philip C. Jessup...
...Lexington, $12.50...
...Lincoln Steffens...
...Richard Gambino...
...C. W. Griffin...
...The Middle East in World Politics...
...It adds few novel insights or basic re-interpretations (new details and quotations are here aplenty), but its evocation of an era when international organization was taken seriously (even our lack of membership then seemed a more important issue than anything connected with our membership in the UN now) makes it instructive reading in this present era of a paralyzed UN and a growing need for international coordination...
...Presidential Power and Accountability: Toward a New Constitution...
...This “unsubsidized study of the burdens of benevolence” is a treasure-house of information, both trivial and substantial, about the foundations: in 1969, the House Ways and Means Committee raised its proposed tax on foundations the day it learned that Walt Rostow had received a $24,500 grant from Ford...
...The $100 Million Dollar Lunch...
...Tamin the Last Frontier: A Prescription for the $ban Crisis...
...Gallagher’s straightforward descriptions of Alaska past and present are, however, fascinating...
...Univ...
...Urban Economic Development: Suburbanization, Minority Op ortunity, and the Condition of the CentrafCity...
...The New Anti-Semitism is the indifference of society (the press) to the bigotry of outlandish figures like Gerald L. K. Smith or the twisted Jew-hating which sprouted in some corners of the militant black movement...
...Tareq Y. Ismael, Syracuse Univ...
...Joseph W. Esherick, ed...
...Putnam, $7.95...
...Waitin Out a War: The Exile of Private John hcciano...
...For example, he dismisses George Reedy’s portrait of the courtier-like atmosphere around Johnson as just being motivated by pique over “Why didn’t Lyndon talk to me?’ Some Vezy Special Men...
...William Morrow, $7.95...
...Charles Fager...
...Not much new in these stories of corporate wrong-doing, but they are told with spirit and their cumulative effect is appalling...
...An important book about the culture of bureaucracy and its impact on foreign policy...
...The book presents three perspectives on the heroin scene-those of the junkie, the law, and the rehabilitators...
...Prentice-Hall, $10...
...Although Harrison persuasively argues that there is not a serious job exodus from city to suburb, he fails to see anything depressing in the finding that “from two out of ten to over seven out of every ten new jobs in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas were in federal, state, and local government...
...These personal recollections of the creation of several modern countries (Indonesia, Israel, etc...
...Doubleday, $7.95...
...Columbia, $14.95...
...Jack Newfield...
...David E. dskoff...
...Staten W. Webster...
...who] still see[s] nothing immoral about fighting to contain aggressive totalitarianism...
...The editor is one of the nation’s leading legal scholars and most of his authors are of similar caliber...
...Kaplan wisely avoids drawing them in the book, but one of the most provocative is the apparent aimlessness with which Steffens drifted into first the journalism of exposure and later his elegies to the Soviet state...
...Kaplan, author of a superb earlier biography of Mark Twain, does not get as far inside his subject this time as he did before...
...Lucinda Franks...
...This collection of his diplomatic dispatches is a surprisingly engrossing and vivid portrayal of the era, about not only the struggle for China but also the folkways of American diplomacy...
...The Politics of Law Enforcement...
...Especially apropos after the Solzhenitsyn affair...
...The press may have been less than vigilant in some cases, but to make their point the authors have to keep recycling the same handful of bigots, which include radicals, whose support of the Arabs makes them de facto anti-Semitic, and the producers of Jesus Chrbt Superstar...
...I sometimes went with Lennie on his rounds...
...Univ...
...Justice Under Fire: A Study of Military Law...
...of Chicago, $15...
...Dirty Business: The Corporate-Political Money-Power Game...
...The Crime Control Establishment...
...John Day, $6.50...
...Selma 1965: The Town Where the South Was Changed...
...Etok: The Story of Eskimo Power...
...Lawrence R. Krivit...
...Henry J. Abraham...
...John R. Coleman...
...Frank J. Merli, Theodore A. Wilson...
...Praeger, $7.95...
...The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations George Scott...
...Buell Gallagher...
...Philippa Strum...
...The bulk of this collection of magazine pieces by the only former president of Americans for Democratic Action to serve loyally in Lyndon Johnson’s White House deals with two rather shopworn subjects-Vietnam and campus radicalism...
...Urban Institute, $10/$4...
...John Service, hounded from the State Department largely because of his reports that Mao was on the rise in China, has lived to see his own vindication...
...In other words, Douglas wanted to know the celebrities...
...Mortgage on America...
...Random House, $10...
...Macmillan, $8.95...
...His account of the experience is consistently interesting, his analysis of it consistently bland...
...Morton T. Schussheim...
...Lippincott, l7.95...
...Makers of American Diplomacy...
...Cy Egan...
...Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics 1942-1950...
...Sentenced to Life...
...John P. Roche...
...Gallagher...
...The New Anti-Semitism...
...The Makin of Campaign Strategy...
...The Su reme Court and “Political Questions’’: 5; Stud in Judicial Evasion...
...Ihe Philanthro oids: Foundations and Society...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $6.95...
...Lexington, $13...
...Harper’s Magazine Press, $10.95...
...Philip B. Kurlan!, ed...
...Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy...
...The Ruling Minority 1974...
...Ihe Su reme Court Review, 1973...
...At times, however, he places too much faith in the ability of “enlightened” taxation to remake the body politic...
...Cruel and Unusual Justice...
...Harper’s Magazine Press, $25...
...Karl Marx on Freedom of the Press and Censorship...
...Ro ce Hanson, et al...
...The book’s occasionally well-chosen examples are marred by its continually shriU tone: “We are running out of time...
...Institutions serve inadequately, and at the same time exercise a tyrannical control over lives, generating an alienated state of mind...
...A competent analysis of the historical roots of the urban-problem syndrome: pollution, slums, over-crowding, congestion, sprawl, etc...
...Charles M. Hardin...
...The New Journalism meets formal social science, and the combination turns out far better than anyone might have anticipated...
...Alan Sorkin...
...Abraham’s objectivity is such that it carries some weight for him to say of the Carswell nomination, “With the calm hindsight of history, President Nixon’s choice still merits the characterization of a spite nomination...
...J. Philip O’Hara, $6.95...
...This hard-working author has taken extraordinary pains to state the obvious, beset by that blindness which seems to plague the social sciences-the inability to distinguish between trivial and significant information...
...Attempting to embrace the whole of recent economic and political history, Aron produces a book that, while sound in detail, lacks the unity or drive a more focused book might have...
...Lost Chance in China: ‘Ihe World War I1 Despatches of John S. Service...
...A. Doak Barnett...
...Justices and Presidents...
...Alan Edward Bent...
...of Chicago, $7.95...
...Marjorie Randon Ifershey...
...Yarborou&iyardL ivin in a City That Time Forgot...
...Etok, a.k.a...
...Charles Edwardsen, Jr., is a young Eskimo who according to this account has spent the last 10 years fighting to establish his peoples’ claim to Alaskan territory...
...Jessup, one-time roving ambassador and judge at the International Court of Justice, is one of diplomacy’s more refreshing figures, especially for his plainspoken prose...
...That is the only source of disappointment in a generally well-done biography...
...Half of this book is a wellwritten history of how Presidents since Washington have chosen their Supreme Court nominees...
...Random House, $10...
...Imperceptibly the city has begun to die, shortchanging its poor, its middle class, its old, its young-the groups from which these portraits are drawn...
...Education, Unemployment, and Economic Growth...
...Brookings, $9.95/$3.95...
...94 per cent of all grants go to old, established institutions, and only three per cent each to individuals and new institutions...
...Sterling Quinlan...
...another 21 were federal judges), why the Senate turns some of them down (as it has in 26 cases), and what kind of justices make the most and least of their term on the court...
...A valuable resource for comparisons between Marx’s ideals and the policies of many Marxist states...
...Ben &taker...
Vol. 6 • April 1974 • No. 2
