POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June. An American Journey : The Presidentia American Odyssey. Robert Conot. Morrow, $14.95. This ambitious book tries to...
...Behind the Front Page...
...Knopf, $6.95...
...Little, Brown, $10.95...
...just a touch of the overgrown surfer, but with more than just the customary California veneer of alertness passing for intelligence”), but refuses to pursue the intriguing question of why a man like this would see nothing wrong in meeting with Ehrlichman in the middle of the Ellsberg trial...
...Daniel Lang...
...Lanny J. Davis...
...Eventually, the horror stories begin to numb (they range from the Friends of the FBI to a score of shady health charities) and the reader begins to wish for some evaluation of less dramatic charitiesthe ones that don’t waste 80 per cent of their income on fund-raising...
...The historical narrative is absorbing, but the fiction (designed to highlight ordinary life) reads like an extended version of the 100 Neediest Cases...
...Yale, $10...
...Mario Cuomo...
...Flying...
...The terrain is familiar, the conclusions not startling, but the account is intelligent...
...Kate Millett...
...The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits...
...The author, an expert on food and global economic trends, has been ahead of the times on a good many topics in recent years...
...Although sometimes marred by an excessive reliance on Marxist jargon, this collection of essays on political economy is often stimulating...
...Cambridge...
...Relying on polls to build his case for “the inherent decency of a majority of American voters,” Davis merely fuels the false optimism of Democrats who believe that Watergate is the only issue they need for 1976...
...See “Making It with Millett, Mailer, and Capote” by James Fallows in this issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Mary McCarthy . Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $7.95...
...Another fascinating study of men in organizations, this time the subject is an elite newspaper (rumored to be The New York Times), by the author of Some Causes of Organizational Ineffectiveness Within the Department of State...
...Patriotism Without Flags...
...MIT, $12...
...Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the, Rituals of Secret Government...
...Two of the intellectual leaders of the war on poverty have collected these essays on poverty...
...A workmanlike, although quicky, biography of the new Vice President by a reporter for a chain of Michigan newspapers...
...Originally intended as the customer’s friend, Blue Cross has turned into a transmission belt for rising medical costs...
...Blue Cross: What Went Wrong...
...Political Women...
...Give: Who Gets Your Charity Dollar...
...Lexington...
...Into this void comes Harvey Katz with his investigative reporter’s eye focused on some of the worst charity abuses in the country...
...Norton, $6.95...
...Sylvia A. Law...
...Race Relations and the New York City Commission on Human Rights...
...The only problem is Professor Argyris’ weakness for such jargon as “the feedback service as a validity check of the living system model...
...Harvey Katz...
...McKay, $7.95...
...George Vecsey...
...Organizing Public Services in Metropolitan America...
...John P. MacKenzie...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in June...
...Philip Brenner, Robert Borosage, Bethany Weidner...
...Here, the central event is the Ellsberg trial and Schrag follows its convolutions right to their inconclusive end...
...Saturday Review, $7.95...
...The Appearance of Justice...
...Jean Kirkpatrick...
...Law, Morality, and Vietnam: The Peace Militant and the Courts...
...Robert Presthus...
...Prophets with Honor...
...Pantheon, $10...
...Protest by the Poor: The Welfare Rights Movement in New York City...
...There are few new conceptsin his latest book, prepared for the UN Conference on Population, but it does cover all the major implications of population growth...
...The Politics of Turmoil...
...One Sunset a Week: The Story of a Coal Miner...
...Exploring Contradict ions : Po lit ical Economy in the Corporate State...
...and the urban issues...
...Arthur P. Solomon...
...Simon &. Schuster, $9.95...
...Larry R. Jackson, William A. Johnson, eds...
...Often provocative, but often dated...
...This study of how the nation’s leading insurer lost its independence could not be more timely, since the Administration’s proposals for national health insurance rely heavily on private insurers...
...Random House, $6.95...
...Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies...
...Basic, $10...
...More and more of the high-level story of Vietnam has become public, but the subtle changes in individual values have not been well explored...
...Forest Hills Diary: The Crisis of Low Income Housing...
...The prose, however, makes Professor Argyris (above) seem like E. B. White...
...Peter Schrag...
...A collection of essays, sound and moderate in tone and reasoning, on the 1972 election and the future of the Republican Party...
...This ambitious book tries to trace the development of urban problems in one city (Detroit) through a mixture of history and fiction...
...The writing is consistently intelligent, but unlike Murray Kempton’s The Briar Patch, the book refuses to go far beyond the chronology of the trial and deal with larger issues...
...Ripon Society, Clifford W. Brown, Jr...
...Lexington...
...Jaws of Victory...
...Richard N. Billings, John Greenya...
...Thomas P. Murphy, Charles R. Warren...
...Lester R. Brown...
...In the Human Interest, a Strategy to Stabilize World Population...
...Bud Vestal, et al...
...Jerry Ford, Up Close: An Investigative Biography...
...The six essays in this volume do one of the best jobs yet...
...race...
...Alan Barth...
...Cornell, $12.50...
...Davis, a 28-year-old political wunderkind currently seeking a Maryland congressional seat, is at his weakest when he attempts to refute Kevin Phillips...
...Morris P. Fiorina...
...For example, Schrag provides some fascinating, brief glimpses of Judge Byrne (“he had...
...Power to the Public Worker...
...The first half of the book is better-an insider’s account of what went wrong with the 1972 Muskie campaign...
...Except for a small flurry of foundation-funded studies in the early 1950s, charity remains the one major American institution immune from critical scrutiny...
...Knopf...
...An adapted excerpt appeared in the May issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Scribner’s, $7.95...
...Stein & Day, $8.95...
...John F. and Rosemary s. Bannan...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $7.95...
...A perfect example of the dangers of set-piece journalism...
...A well-researched, comparative study of interest-group behavior in the American presidential and Canadian parliamentary systems...
...Richard A. Cloward, Frances Fox Piven...
...Nothing here jars the image of Ford as the apostle of small-town virtues (“I am the first Eagle Scout Vice President of the United States”) or as the victim of big-city hustlers (Robert WinterBerger...
...Housin the Urban Poor: A Critical Evaluation of Federal Housing Policy...
...Luce, $7.95...
...Norton, $6.95...
...Lexington...
...Jossey-Bass...
...Elsewhere Davis acknowledges that liberals must look beyond the New Deal and the Great Society, but his caveats are far too brief and muted...
...Gerald Benjamin...
...Elites in the Policy Process...
...Doubleday, $6.95...
...Reviewed by James Fallows in the May issue of The Washington Monthly...
...The Emer$ng Democratic Ma’ority: Lessons and Legacies from the New bolitlcs...
...Indiana, $10...
...Chris Argyris...
Vol. 6 • June 1974 • No. 4
