The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson Random House, 2010, 640 pp. In the year or so before Woodrow Wilson’s administration took the United States into the Great War raging in Europe, …
The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America’s Environment, Security, and Independence by Michael J. Graetz MIT Press, 2011, 384 pp. Michael J. Graetz’s The End of Energy is a well-documented lamentation over the forty-year failure of the U.S. political …
How to Change the World by Eric Hobsbawm Yale University Press, 2011, 480 pp. Eric Hobsbawm is one of the great historians of the past century. His books and essays are beautifully written, full of stimulating insights, and able to …
The gap between calls for parental engagement in education and institutional realities is wide. Educators say they value parent participation, but by that they often mean a junior partner role in which parents monitor homework, make sure kids get to …
For over a century, liberals and radicals have seen the possibility of change in capitalist systems from one of two perspectives: the reform tradition assumes that corporate institutions remain central to the system but believes that regulatory policies can contain, …
Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011, 528 pp. Reviewers ought not to begin apologetically. It undermines their credibility. Nonetheless, I feel diffidence in the face of Justice for Hedgehogs. It is an astonishing …
This past spring, Western and Egyptian media alike attributed the explosive Tahrir Square protests to organizing by middle-class movements of students and intellectuals, battling for political freedom and armed with social media. This popular narrative holds that it was only …
Over the last decade, talk of choice in education has reached an unprecedented pitch, and the talk has brought forth extensive dollars and human energy. Advocates for school choice, which has become a pseudonym for charter school reform, claim that …
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Viking Adult, 2001, 608 pp. Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention hit the book stands last spring with considerable buzz, given the allure that accompanied Malcolm X’s life story, …
Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America by John McMillian Oxford University Press, 2011, 277 pp. Theodore Roszak, in The Making of a Counter Culture, identified the central battle of the sixties as …
Democracy: A Man-Search, a book by Louis Sullivan, was first published fifty years ago, although he wrote it in 1908. The great Chicago architect completed what is a kind of 350-page prose poem at a moment when his career was …
Every year I teach a class called “Mind, Body, and Bioethics in Japan” to a group of Princeton undergraduates made up of students drawn to ethical dilemmas—aspiring doctors, scientists, and lawyers. The class departs from typical approaches to bioethics. Instead …
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 306 pp. In 1983, Lewis Hyde published The Gift, a meditation on gift economies where art and ideas escaped the indignity of a market value. …
The nation’s dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest public schools were also grim. Only 70 percent of first-year students entering America’s high schools were graduating, with a full 1.2 million students dropping …
If any reform promised to bring about equality of educational opportunity, it was arguably school finance reform. By eliminating the large differences in per-pupil spending among school districts in the same state, it would have leveled the playing field between …
