Government Agencies Books

A great work in regards to politics...
A must read!

To understand why the U.S. government works, and works relatively well, a bridge of understanding is needed between the principles of the founding fathers and the massive bureaucratic machine that is the modern United States. Richard Stillman's "Creating the American State: the Moral Reformers and the Modern Administrative World They Made" provides such a bridge. Stillman builds a cogent case that seven "founders" of the modern administrative state shared and applied common Protestant values of work, duty, and idealism. These founders -- little known public officials -- essentially provided functional amendments to the theoretical skeleton of the Constitution. George William Curtis influences the adoption of a merit system over patronage. Charles Francis Adams (of the other Adams family) pioneers the sunshine commission. Jane Addams parlays her Protestant beliefs into social reforms that are ultimately rewarded with the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. And, Frederick W. Taylor pioneers a system of scientific management that is still sending shock waves through government and industry. (Think TQM and Deming.) Combining biography and political science, Professor Stillwell provides a fascinating portrait of the emerging U.S. administrative state. Taken as a whole, his book provides an insight into why a complex bureaucracy is a necessary component of a successful modern society. This review provided by Dr. R. Kirk Jonas, who uses "Creating the American State" in his University of Richmond class "Reinventing Government, Again." Comments to rkjona@aol.com

Herbert Mitgang's courageous book is still very topical.
His exposure of FBI practices of secretly policing authors and their writings shows how intelligence services (and the establishment which controls them) are obsessed with free speech (free trade in ideas).
Writers, playwrights and artists figure here only as examples for those practices. There were surely other victims.

Sometimes, the author's emotions are comprehensively running high with expressions as 'an alien police state' or 'a ... sinister ... level of humiliating absurdities'. But he discovers that even librarians were asked to keep an eye on borrowers and that words like 'culture' or 'freedom' seemed to raise a red flag in the FBI. Nobel Prize winners ought to be watched by Big Brother. Some authors were even hounded to their grave.

The whole book exposes the FBI as a secret government engaged in criminal behaviour composed by an interlocking network of official spies, mercenaries, opportunists and profiteurs.
What is even more astonishing is the fact that in most cases the informants hadn't even read the works of the authors on whom they were spying!

Herbert Mitgang stresses rightly that government files are constitutionally dangerous to the US values of individual independence (the right to be let alone).
Robert Sherwood's quote summarizes perfectly the dilemma:'If our national security is to be rated above the security, the civil liberties, the dignity of every individual American, then our national security is not worth defending'.
This is a most necessary book for the defense of individual freedom.

It's all too rare that one finds a book like this. Neiman addresses nearly every aspect of government, cleverly and entertainingly explaining not why it needs to be big, but why government is an essential part of our society, despite many Americans' claims to the contrary. I've used it in many of my courses, and find my students not only interested in it, but generating new thoughts of their own. My only question is this: When will Neiman's next work appear, and where can I get it. Sincerest thanks.

NASA really began it's days in the sun with the space race with the Soviet Union. In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting earth satellite. This was before the United States was even scheduled to launch their first one. Then the Soviet Sputnik was so big. Then the Vanguard rocket NASA was using lifted off, went up beautifully for a few feet then beautifully went back down for several feet before blowing up.

Then John Kennedy gave NASA a mission - to take a man to the moon and return him saftly to the earth. It was a beautiful time. The country was filled with pride as one accomplishment after another took us to the moon.

Since then it almost seems as if NASA has been floundering. The big question has been between unmanned equipment and sending men up.

Another argument centers around the entire concept of a big agency like NASA. For a cost in the $20 million range, Burt Rutan (www.scaled.com) built Space Ship One and successfully flew it into space. NASA couldn't even write a proposal to buy such a ship for $20 million.

This book talks about the trouble NASA has had in defining a mission and makes a few guesses about the future.

Being a person of limited intellect when it comes to fuel cell technology and its' applications, I found Ms. Koval's issue paper to be not only informative, but at the same time I was able to follow the complex issues that this 21st century technology brings to the fore. Ms. Koval seems to have command of the subject matter and has exhaustively researched this topic so as to write a fair and accurate analysis of fuel cell technology.

Hans Von Sponeck was the last UN Humanitarian Assistance Coordinator in Iraq under the Oil for Food Program before the US invasion. the job of coordinator is, under any circumstances, a thankless one and Von Sponeck ultimately resigned. Written by a competent career development assistance adminsistrator for the UN Development Programme, A Different Kind of War is a highly thoughtful appraisal of what Von Sponeck saw and, more importantly, what he learned. He describes the management problems of a poltical program with multiple and, ironically, uncoordinated parts. but more importantly, he questions the efficacy (and the morality) of using sanctions as a means for enforcing political decisions in the complex multilateral environment of the 21st century. The book should be required reading for anyone concerned with the future role of the UN -- as both the Security Council as the intergovernmental decision-maker and the international public sector as the implementor of those pollicies.

This book, Donovan: America's Master Spy, is about William Wild Bill Donovan; Medal of Honor recipient while fighting with the famous New York Fighting 69th Irish regiment, Wall St. Lawyer, child of the Irish First Ward in Buffalo, confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt and the man who ran the OSS during World War II that later became the CIA under President Truman.

Richard Dunlop worked for Donovan during WWII and was given access to his private papers and spoke with Donovan for hundreds of hours in preparation for writing this biography. Truly a fantastic book about a man whose record of public service is both shadowy and well known; both amazing and hard to believe.

This should be required reading for every American. William Donovan is a man who embodies many of the qualities we all should emulate.

I came across this book when I was a freshman at Penn State browsing through the main library. I must admit that its initial attraction was its thinness, no long-winded dissertation turned into a tediously detailed book here. When I began to read the book, I found it fascinating. An ethnographic piece based on exchange theory, showing that the static, role-bound, never-changing-from-inside-forces stereotypical bureaucracy was much more myth than reality. Blau did a beautiful job of illustrating changes among workers and their relationships by focusing on the exchange of knowledge and skills in a way that rewarded some but left others feel short-shifted. Here were bureaucrats -- ostensibly the most torpid of all organizational creatures -- exercising initiative, weighing costs and benefits, and actively creating informal organizational patterns to complement formal structures. So much for Ludwig Von Mises' excesses in making the case that bureaucratic organizations were rigid, brittle, and not subject to development.

A superb and well-researched book on the complex relations between congressional committees and federal agencies, a subject that is as poorly understood as it is important.