Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) ("After thirty years of neoliberal attacks, the European and American labor movements are severely weakened, many of their accomplishments are threatened or undermined. Specifically, labor issues remain important, both in the first industrialized countries and in new manufacturing complexes around the world. Unions are still formed and still fought by employers. But ordinary people also seek voice in nationalist, religious, and populist movements and a diverse range of others. They seek the survival of indigenous ways of life, languages, and religious rituals. They seek the protection of old neighborhoods slated for destruction and rights for dwellers in new slums. They seek fair treatment for migrants, recognition for sexual minorities, cleaner air, and secure land tenure. These movements are often hard to classify in Left-right terms. They do not coalesce into a single social movement answering a single social question (though with considerable effort some form coalitions to pursue common struggles). But they are the bases for resistance to concentrations of economic and political power, global capital, and corrupt states. And in each, participants express aspirations as well as grievance, and hopes for a better world as well as outrage at threats to the world they know." Id. at 315-316. To the next to last sentence I would insert an amendment or qualification: for "resistance" I would suggest that "largely ineffectual resistance" is closer to the mark. For the most part, each individual movement has its own unique and narrow agenda, which renders it difficult to form meaningful alliances with other movements. And, being relatively small, each individual movement usually has insufficient weight (or resources) to accomplish anything meaningful, sustainable, or more than symbolic. But that is a political statement/assessment, and Craig Calhoun is writing history.).
Dale Carpenter, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2012).
Robert D. Cooter & Hans-Bernd Schafer, Solomon's Knot: How Law Can End the Poverty of Nations (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Solomon's Knot, Cooter and Schafer propose a legal theory of economic growth that details how effective property, contract, and business laws help to unite capital and ideas. They also demonstrate why ineffective private and business laws are the root cause of poverty of nations in today's world. Without the legal institutions that allow innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive, other attempts to spur economic growth are destined to fail." Also see, David Cole, "The Gay Path Through the Courts," New York Review of Books, April 5, 2012, at 34.).
Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) ("In our twenty-first-century world the lethal combination of technological advances, terrorism, global crime, state-sponsored violence and socio-economic inequality has raised instability and insecurity to alarming levels. At the same time, the engine that has driven this escalation, the global arms trade, grows ever more sophisticated, complex and toxic in its efforts." "It might therefore be thought essential that the world's democratic nations should address this trade collectively and urgently. If it must exist, then surely it should be coherently regulated, legitimately financed, effectively policed and transparent in its workings, and meet people's need for safety and security?" "Instead the trade in weapons is a parallel world of money, corruption, deceit and death. It operates according to its own rules, largely unscrutinized, bringing enormous benefits to the chosen few, and suffering and immiseration to millions. The trade corrodes our democracies, weakens already fragile states and often undermines the very national security it purports to strengthen." "Global military expenditure is estimated to have totaled $1.6tn in 2010, $235 for every person on the planet. This is an increase of 53 per cent since 2000 and accounts for 2.6 per cent of global gross domestic product. Today, the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on national security with a defense budget of over $703bn. The trade in conventional arms, both big and small, is worth about $60bn a year." " The US, Russia, the UK , France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Israel and China are regularly identified as the largest producers and traders of weapons and materials." Almost always shrouded in secrecy, arms deals are often concluded between governments who then turn to manufacturers, many of which are now privately owned, to fulfil them. . . ." Many arms deals contain elements of. . . arrangements stretching across a continuum of legality and ethics from the official, or formal trade, to what I will refer to as the shadow world, also known as the grey and black markets. The grey market alludes to deals conducted through legal channels, but undertaken covertly. They are often utilized by governments to have an illicit impact on foreign policy. Black market deals are illegal in conception and execution. Both black and grey deals frequently contravene arms embargoes, national and multilateral laws, agreements and regulations. In practice, the boundaries between the three markets are fuzzy. With bribery and corruption de rigueur there are very few arms transactions that are entirely above board." Id. at xxii-xxiii. "The Shadow World is a journey of discovery into this powerful, but secretive world." "It begins with an arms company founded by a group of senior former nazi officers in the aftermath of Germany's defeat that developed into one of the most nefarious networks of arms dealers the world has known. And it ends with the ill-conceived wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been a goldmine for US and allied defence manufacturers, as well as for the shadow world." Id. at xxix.)
John D'Agata & Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2012).
David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic politics, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these elements take different forms, because constellations of value are not the same. The dream of living free is America's Polaris; fairness and natural justice are New Zealand's Southern Cross." "[H]istorian David Hackett Fischer asks why these similar countries went different ways. Both were founded by English-speaking colonists, but at different times and with disparate purposes. They lived in the first and second British Empires, which operated in very different ways. Indians and Maori were important agents of change, but to different ends. On the American frontier and in New Zealand's bush, material possibilities and moral choices were not the same. Fischer takes the same comparative approach to parallel processes of nation-building and immigration, women's rights and racial wrongs, reform causes and conservative responses, war-fighting and peace-making, and global engagement in our own time--with similar results." "On another level, this book expands Fischer's past work on liberty and freedom. It offers a sweeping look at the history of fairness and also poses new questions in the old tradition of history and moral philosophy. Is it possible to be both fair and free? In a vast array of evidence, Fischer finds that each of these great values adds strength to the other. As many societies become more open--never twice in the same way--an understanding of our differences is the only path to peace.").
Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Climate change is arguably the great problem confronting humanity, but we have done little to head off this looming catastrophe. . . . Gardiner illuminates our dangerous inaction by placing the environmental crisis in an entirely new light, considering it as an 'ethical' failure. Gardiner clarifies the moral situation, identifying the temptations (or 'storms') that make us vulnerable to a certain kind of corruption. First, the world's most affluent nations are tempted to pass on the cost of climate change to the poorer and weaker citizens of the world. Second, the present generation is tempted to pass the problem on to future generations. Third, our poor grasp of science, international justice, and the human relationship to nature helps to facilitate inaction. As a result, we are engaging in willful self-deception when the lives of future generations, the world's poor, and even the basic fabric of life on the plant is at stake. We should wake u to this profound ethical failure, Gardiner concludes, and demands more of our institutions, our leaders and ourselves.").
Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor." "Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, No Man's Land tells the history of the American 'H2' program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours." "No Man's Land puts Jamaican guestworker's experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.").
Rob Hengeveld, Wasted World: How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "A practical look at the sustainability of our planet from the perspective of a biologist whose expertise is in the abundance and distribution of species, Wasted World presents a fascinating picture of the whole process of using, wasting, and exhausting energy and material resources. And by elucidating the complexity of the causes of the current global state, Hengeveld offers us a way forward.").
David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Praised for its ability to kill insects effectively and cheaply and reviled as an ecological hazard, DDT continues to engender passion across the political spectrum as one of the world's most controversial chemical pesticides. . . . David Kinkela chronicles the use of DDT around the world from 1941 to the present with a particular focus on the United States, which has played a critical role in encouraging the global use of the pesticide." "The banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 is generally regarded as a signal triumph for the American environmental movement. Yet DDT's function as a tool of U.S. foreign policy and its use in international development projects designed to solve problems of disease and famine made it an integral component of the so-called American Century. The varying ways in which scientists, philanthropic foundations, corporations, national governments, and transnational institutions assessed and adjudicated the balance of risks and benefits of DDT within and beyond America's borders, Kinkela argues, demonstrates the gap that existed between global and U.S. perspectives on DDT. DDT and the American Century offers a unique approach to understanding modern environmentalism in a global context.").
Allan H. Meltzer, Why Capitalism? (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ('There are several reasons regulations fail. Two of the more prominent are capture (of the regulators) and circumvention (of laws meant to restrain risky, or bad, behavior). Capture occurs when the regulated become the regulators, or when regulators plan to make a lucrative career change by joining the industry they hitherto had been regulating. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is famous for the extent of movement between regulator and regulated. The SEC is not alone. Regulators often look for people with detailed knowledge of their subject. The regulated industry is a likely source, so it is not unusual to find people moving back and forth. The Federal Reserve is a training ground for bank and financial market economists. The Internal Revenue Service is a training ground for tax accountants. The list is long." Id. at 36-37. "Regulation fails when, however well-intentioned, it is poorly designed. I have put forward two laws of regulation to explain why regulation often accomplishes less than it promises. First, lawyers and bureaucrats promulgate regulations, but, if they are costly to the regulated, markets will circumvent them. Second, regulations are static whereas markets are dynamics. If regulations are inconvenient or costly, markets will learn to circumvent them, say by capturing the regulators, or carving out exemptions for themselves. Complex laws offer endless ways for effective circumvention often unnoticed." Id. at 42.).
Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("Fear's Narcissism": "Fear is primitive. We saw this even in physiological terms: fear is connected to primitive brain processes that are shared by all vertebrates, and human fear, while in many ways more complex, continues to partake of these shared animal origins. . . . That does not mean that fear is not valuable and often accurate--but its view of the world is exceedingly narrow. Unlike grief and sympathy, it has not yet conceded the full reality of other people. And in its partnership with disgust human fear is in some ways worse than animal fear: for animals don't fantasize that other groups of animals are foul and that they themselves are pure and non-animal. So human fear combines animal narrowness with a peculiarly human shrinking from animality--in other groups of people, where animality is always imaged to be." Id. at 55-56. "Fear is a 'dimming preoccupation': an intense focus on the self that casts others into darkness. However valuable and indeed essential it is in a genuinely dangerous world, it is itself one of life's great dangers." Id. at 58.).
Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2004) ("A good place to begin an investigation of intimidating fear in contemporary America is the workplace, for it is there--in the underregualted practices of hiring and firing, promotion and demotion; in the coerced and coercive intimacies between employer and employed, supervisor and supervised--that fear has an especially toxic effect. Despite the fact that adult Americans spend the overwhelming majority of their waking hours at work, and despite the fact that the business press openly confesses that 'the workplace is never free of fear, and it shouldn't be' and that 'fear can be a powerful management tool,' the workplace remains a vast terra incognita protected from public scrutiny by high towers of legal argument and political indifference. Wielding threats of firing, demotion, harassment, and other sanctions, employers and managers attempt to stifle speech and action, to ensure that workers don't talk back or act up. Employers do this not because they are cruel, but because they believe, as former Intel CEO Andrew Grove writes in his Only the Paranoid Survive, that fear spurs the fevered pace of contemporary industry, that it is an essential prop of our political economy. Workplace fear creates an internal social order that can only be described, with little exaggeration, as feudal, a world less postmodern than premodern, whose master theorist is neither Karl Marx nor Adam Smith but Joseph de Maistre." Id. at 20-21.). "It is not merely workers at the low end of the service economy who experience these forms of command and fear; so do white-collar employees. Grove, for example, liked to run Intel the way Al Capone ran Chicago. On one occasion when an aide was late for a meeting, Grove waited, 'holding a stave of wood the size of a baseball bat.' After a time, Grove slammed the wood onto the surface of the meeting-room table' and shouted, 'I don't ever, ever, want to be in a meeting with this group that doesn't start and end when it's scheduled.' Other employers are less bullying, but no less intimidating and controlling. Going high tech, they rely on computer technology to monitor their employees' every move. The Investigator software program--used by ExxonMobil and Delta--keeps track of not only workplace performance measures (like the number of employee key strokes and mouse clicks per second), but also troublemakers. Should an employee type 'alert' words like 'boss' or 'union,' Investigator automatically forwards her document--saved or unsaved, sent or not--to her supervisor. 'Back in the fifteen century,' one PR executive explains, 'they used to use a ball and chain, and now they use technology.' " "In the corporate workplace, intimidation and spying coexist with phony affirmations of individualism, while employees terrified of losing their jobs are corralled into elaborate performances of faux bonhomie and loyalty to the firm. The result can often be humiliating and degrading. After NYNEX cut its workforce during the mid-1990s, for example, it required its MBAs and skilled technicians to attend a three-day-long retreat where they were encouraged to discover their own creativity by hopping around a room in different ways. Some hopped on one leg, others on two, still others with hands in the air, and one with a hand covering his eye. According to one participant, 'The leaders would say things like 'Look at how creative you are, how many different ways you can out to manage to jump around the room.' And we all did it . . . . We all did it. A marketing executive at a radio-station chain that had also undergone a round of firings recounts how a management consultant at a motivational seminar handed out water pistols to the employees and had them squirt each other--to help them get in touch with their more playful selves. 'There were all these executives running around squirting each others,' he says. He thought about not joining in, but reconsidered after asking himself, 'If I don't squirt, will I be gone too?' Such games, he added, were 'the most uncomfortable thing for professional men and women. A lot of us felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, reluctant to play the game. But they kept at it. It was almost like it was designed to break you down. I think it was a way of humiliating us.' After a round of layoffs at the Bank of America, corporate higher-ups established a voluntary program for employees to 'adopt' an ATM machine. More than 2,800 employees signed up, faithfully cleaning their own machine and its environs--on their own time, without extra pay--just to save their jobs." Id. at 22-23. From the bookjacket: "For many commentators, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. But as Corey Robin shows in his unsettling tour of the Western imagination--the first intellectual history of its kind--fear has shaped our politics and culture since time immemorial." "From the Garden of Eden to the Gulag Archipelago to today's headlines, Robin traces our growing fascination with political danger and disaster. As our faith in positive political principles recedes, he argues, we turn to fear as the justifying language of public life. We may not know the good, but we do know the bad. So we cling to fear, abandoning the quest for justice, equality, and freedom. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a startling reexamination of fear's greatest modern interpreters--Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Arendt--Robin finds that writers since the eighteenth century have systematically obscured fear's political dimensions, diverting attention from the public and private authorities who sponsor and benefit from it. For fear, Robin insists, is an exemplary instrument of repression--in the public and private sector. Nowhere is this politically repressive fear --and its evasion--more evident than in contemporary America. In his final chapter, Robin accuses our leading scholars an critics of ignoring 'Fear, American Style,' which, as he shows, is the fruit of our most prized inheritance: the Constitution and the free market.").
David Scheffer, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "As senior advisor to Albright and then as President Clinton's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Scheffer was at the forefront of the efforts that led to criminal tribunals for the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and that resulted in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. All the Missing Souls is Scheffer;s gripping insider's account of the international gamble to prosecute those responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to redress some of the bloodiest human rights atrocities in our time." "Scheffer reveals the truth behind Washington's failure during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the anemic hunt for notorious war criminals, how American exceptionalism undercut his diplomacy. . . .").
Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality (New York & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2003) (From the bookjacket: "As various forms of social welfare were dismantled th[r]ough the last decade of the twentieth century, many thinkers argued that human well-being was best served by a focus on potential, not need." "Richard Sennett thought differently. In this dazzling blend of personal memoir and reflective scholarship, he addresses need and social responsibility across the gulf of inequality. In the uncertain world of 'flexible' social relationships, all are troubled by issues of respect: whether it be an employee stuck with insensitive management, a social worker trying to aid a resentful client, or a virtuoso artist and an accompanist aiming for a perfect duet." ". . . Sennett explores the factors that make mutual respect so difficult to achieve. First, unequal talent: Sennett acknowledges that even in a perfect world, inequalities of ability remain. Second, adult dependency: the dependent face challenges in earning both self-respect and respect from others. Third, degrading forms of compassion: both impersonal bureaucracy and intrusive volunteerism." ". . . Sennett investigates how self-worth can be nurtured in an unequal society . . . how self--esteem must be balanced with feeling for others, and how mutual respect can forge bonds across the divide of inequality.").
Richard Sennett, Together: The Ritual, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Living with people who differ--racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically--is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend to avoid engaging socially with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be some about it." "Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, social groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.").
Robert J. Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) ("An essential part of what finance professionals actually do is dealmaking--the structuring of projects, enterprises, and systems, large and small--an activity that bring convergence to individuals' often divergent goals. Financial arrangements--including the structuring of payments, loans, collateral, shares, incentive options, and exist strategies--are just the surface elements of these deals. Dealmaking means facilitating arrangements that will motivate real actions by real people--and often by very large groups of people. Most of us can achieve little of lasting value without the cooperation of others. Even the archetypal solitary poet requires financing to practice her or his art. An income to live on, publishers, printers, arrangers of public readings, the construction of suitable halls for public readings--there is a hidden financial architecture behind all of this." "All parties to an agreement have to want to embrace the goal, do the work, and accept the risks; they also have to believe that others involved in the deal will actually work productively toward the common good and do all the things that the best information suggests should be done. Finance provides the incentive structure necessary to tailor those activities and secure these goals." "In addition, finance involves discovery of the world and its opportunities which ties it in to information technology. Whenever there is trading, there is price discovery--that is, the opportunity to learn the market value of whatever is being traded. This in turn involves the revelation of people's feelings and motivations, and of the opportunities that exist among groups of people, which may in turn make even more ambitious goals possible." "Along with being the science that structure the achievement of goals, finance embodies a vital technology. As such, it has demonstrated continuous progress over the centuries, from the beginnings of money lending n the ancient world through the development of modern mortgages markets as well as the legal and regulatory structures necessary to sustain these innovations. And it will continue to progress. Finance, suitably configured for the future can be the strongest force for promoting the well-being and fulfillment of an expanding global population--for achieving the greater goals of the good society." Id. at 8. In reading Finance and the Good Society--or, for that matter, reading most of the titles listed in this blog posting--, one might consider the role of law and lawyers-- especially lawyers engaged in practice related to financial transactions--in all of this. How do law and financial/transactional lawyers impact and/or contribute to the "hidden financial architecture"? Are we social engineers? Or, are we mere social parasites? We have a choice, you know!).
David K. Shipler, Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The American system relies on a paradox. On the one hand, the Constitution restrains the whim of the official, who is supposedly shackled by the intricate web of judicial precedent enforcing the checks, the balances, and the bold restrictions on government's incursions into the people's rights. If the rule of law holds, freedom does not depend on the goodwill of those in power." "On the other hand, freedom depends on the Constitution's resonance among the citizens. The affection for liberty, animated by the written words reaches beyond their original intent or dictionary meanings, 'Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women,' said Judge Learned Hand. 'When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.' " These past two years this blogger has gotten to observe what seems to be a growing distain for liberty in American society as a collection of soon-to-be lawyers seemed to have endorsed overwhelming a policy requiring them to inform on each others' alleged wrongdoing. Can a society or community survive based of the morals of a fink? Good fences make good neighbors. I don't mind my neighbor's business. And, my neighbor does not mind mine.).
Kristin Shrader-Frechette, What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change, with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011).
Ruti G. Teitel, Humanity's Law (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Teitel offers a powerful account of one of the central transformations of the post-Cold War era: the profound normative shift in the international legal order from prioritizing state security to protecting human security. As she demonstrates, courts, tribunals, and other international bodies now rely on a humanity-based framework to assess the rights and wrongs of conflict; to determine whether and how to intervene; and to impose accountability and responsibility. Cumulatively, the norms represent a new law of humanity that spans the law of war, international human rights, and international criminal justice. Teitel explains how this framework is reshaping the discourse of international politics with a new approach to the management of violent conflict.").
Lynn Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012).
Julian E. Zelizer, Governing America: The revival of Political History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In recent years, the study of American political history has experienced a remarkable renaissance. After decades during which the subject fell out of fashion and disappeared from public view, it has returned to prominence as the study of American history has shifted its focus back to politics broadly defined. In this book, . . . Julian Zelizer [] assesses its revival and demonstrates how this work not only illuminates the past but also helps us better understand American politics today." "Governing America addresses issues of wide interest, including the rise of the welfare state, the development of modern conservatism, the history of Congress, the struggle over campaign finance, changing views about presidential power, and national security. Throughout, it addresses four big questions: How have interpretations of American political history changed over time. How have taxes and budgets constrained policymakers? How have changes in the political process defined historical eras? And how have policy and politics interacted on decisions like going to war?").
Heidi Wenk Sormaz & Bruce Tulgan, Performance Under Pressure: Managing Stress in the Workplace (Amherst, MA: HRD Press, 2003) (Needless to say, one will need to read and make use of this last book if you are a young lawyer and senior partner finds out that you "wasted" time reading any of the books listed above. Wasted time, unless you are very imaginative and are able to find some creative way to bill clients for your reading habits. (However, such creativity might bump up against the rules of professional responsibility.) So, if you are a reader, you will be stressed out in the workplace. So, you will have to be a closet reader, and simply manage the stress resulting from the fear of being outed as the worst kind of deviant--a reader of substantive books. Read these books; engage with the ideas of these books; find a few closeted readers with whom you may meet secretly to discuss these books. We have reentered the dark ages. Notwithstanding all the lip-service given to encouraging critical thinking, the authoritarian powers that be do not want you to think independently of them. They don't care what you think, and would prefer that you not think at all. So, be a rebel: READ AND THINK! Readers are our twenty-first-century's equivalent of The Dark Age's monks, the only hope of preserving civilization for future generations.).
