Public Policy Books

I can't imagine trying to run health care policy in any state without this book. From Alabama to Wyoming, this book has it all! Even the District of Columbia, which isn't even a state!

This is a great book for anyone involved with childcare. It is a concise review with excellent guidelines and criteria. It thoroughly integrates a dauntingly scattered literature and as it does, it develops a useful and practical set of standards for childcare that practitioners, funders, evaluators, and yes even parents will appreciate. Very readable and accessible.

Adolescents, Sex, And The Law: Preparing Adolescents For Responsible Citizenship examines the reality of adolescent life through the social and legal history of adolescence in the United States; the legal precedents in regulating adolescent sexuality; the most common areas of legal control (school, the media, sexual victimization, sexual offending, parenthood); and Roger Levesque's proposal for social and legal reforms to ensure the adolescent's legal rights complement their social reality. Adolescents, Sex, And The Law is informative, scholarly, thought provoking, highly recommended reading for students of the legal, social, and sexual implications of adolescent behavior in American society and culture today.

This book guides students in the human services & psychology fields to work successfully in internships, organizations, and group settings. This step-by-step manual also provides sample forms for meetings, intakes, and initial evaluations used in therapeutic sessions. Both Lupe and Randy Alle-Corliss do a fine job in explaining the key elements and challenges of practicing in this field.

This is an excellent collection of essays on issues facing professionals in the field of public administration. I particularly enjoyed Chapter 7, stories from street-level actors. Also, it is one of those books where the introduction and the concluding remarks are valuable additions and should not be overlooked in their own right. You don't need to read every essay or read it cover-to-cover, but instead choose those essays that particularly appeal to you.

Frank Schwartz demonstrates a keen knowledge of Japanese policy-making and the "art" of consensus in Japan--a methodology which has led to the dismal economic environment the country now suffers. He shows that although consensus may be worthwhile, leadership is more often required to steer a nation towards growth and prosperity.

The AFB Directory of Services for Blind and Visually Impaired Persons in the United States and Canada is the definitive resource book for agencies serving this population. This 575 page collection of services is divided by state/province and service category. It has a very useful index, and is well laid out and easy to use. Each agency entry contains information on the mission of the arency, geographic area served, budget, staff, number of clients, hours of operation, fees, eligibility, types of services, as well as basic contact data. Each state is divided into sections including state rehabilitation services, state educational services, early intervention services, low vision clinics, libraries, instructional materials centers, information and referral, This Directory is of tremendous assistance to persons involved in national social services, information & referral, research and direct service to persons who are blind or visually impaired and their families.

This is a very good, and concise history of African states. The book includes great photos and maps. It is a great reference piece. Easy to read and very interesting. Especially helpful to a student of African society, or someone with little knowledge about the continent.

This new volume of essays on the emerging field of African American political economy is both provocative and remarkably comprehensive. It features articles by many of the leading thinkers in the field, such as Manning Marable, William Darity, Thomas Boston, Richard America, Cecilia Conrad, Patrick Mason and James Stewart (the last three are also among the book's editors). The book will make an excellent text for courses in political economy, history, sociology and economics which focus on the African American experience, as well as more general courses which seek a solid historical and theoretical analysis. The book was also selected as one of Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005.

As the preface notes, the book is premised on two basic themes: first, the idea that race matters. Second, the idea that history matters. A reader outside the field of economics may be excused for wondering why these commonsense ideas could possibly be considered provocative. The simple answer is that most of the economics profession views both race and history as unimportant; race is seen as a temporary effect of market power, which perfect competition will eliminate, while history is seen as secondary to theory. A major theme of the book is the many shortcomings of this view.

The book is divided into nine sections, which take the reader through a rich set of theoretical and historical arguments, providing a deep context for understanding the current economic situation for the African American community. Early sections focus on the development of the `black labor force', discussing slavery, sharecropping, the uneven economic development of Europe and Africa, and the complex relationship between organized labor and African Americans.

The book is an extremely important attempt to grapple with the problem of race in the U.S. today, in all its complexity. It is recommended to all serious students of social theory.

The lives of 4 Kenyan bureaucrats are used as the backdrop of a scholarly analysis of success in African policy. Policy meets biography and I left much the wiser for the experience. Why did these men care to "do the right thing", what gave them ability to do so, and what did they learn? After you read about Napoleon, Kennedy or Lincoln, come down to earth and read about how average people changed the lives of their country-men in an environment where so few have succeeded.