Liberty Books

If you are researching the life and work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman this book will be an incredible resource for you. The author of the book does a great job of presenting historical context that shaped Gilman's attitudes. Details of Gilman's life are insightful and useful for connecting her life with her works of both fiction and nonfiction. And, the reason that this is one of the best books about Gilman is that it provides a very straight-forward and concise outline of her philosophies concerning socialism and feminism. Overall, this has been the most useful and insightful book about Gilman that I have found so far, and I would highly recommend that if you are doing research about her, start with this book.

This new edition of The Politics of Bureaucracy brings a classic work in public choice back in print. Better still, this edition combines The Politics of Bureaucracy with Tullock's "Economic Hierarchies, Organization, and the Structure of Production".

The Politics of Bureaucracy is an underrated and wrongly ignored classic. Most of the modern literature on bureaucracies focuses on "principal-agent problems". According to Tullock an authority faces two problems with their subordinates "communicating his desires and seeing that these are carried out". The latter of these problems is the principal-agent problem. The former is the central focus of this book.

Modern social democratic states function through large centralized bureaucracies. The communication problems of such organizations are immense, but the solution to this problem is simple and fairly obvious. Many modern functions of government should be shifted from the Federal level to the local level. Switzerland serves as a good example of how government should work (see also Eleanor Ostrom's "Governing the Commons"). We should avoid highly centralized welfare/regulatory bureaucracies, such as those that exist in Sweden, France, Germany, and to a lesser extent the United States.

I was lucky enough to read this book as part of a class taught by Tullock himself. While few others can learn about the information problems of bureaucracy this way, anyone can read this book on their own (there is a recent reprint). The Politics of Bureaucracy should be required reading for political science students. This book also goes well with "Bureaucracy" by Ludwig von Mises and "The Road to Serfdom" by FA Hayek. Together, these three books hit at the core of the problems with public organizations. Unfortunately, these three books get little attention from Economists and even less from Political Scientists. One can only hope that there will be a resurgence of interest in great book.

Economic Hierarchies, Organization, and the Structure of Production carries Tullock's analysis of Bureaucracy further. As Tullock notes, his ideas on organization are not fully integrated into the appropriate literature. This is an unfortunate fact, but the reprinting of these books facilitates the dissemination of Tullock's ideas.

David M. Emmons, in The Butte Irish, examines the development of Butte, Montana, as an Irish town, tracing the story from the Potato Famine to about 1925. He focuses on two major questions: (a) What made Butte such a popular destination for Irish immigrants, both directly from Ireland and from other Irish areas of the US? and, (b) How did the development of an Irish enclave in Butte affect the development of the city? He goes on to examine the evolution of class relations within the Irish in Butte. Emmons describes Butte as a unique location in America for the study of an ethnic community. He argues that the town developed in such a way and at such a time that it was one of the only towns in the country to have a strong working-class, immigrant community in a position of major influence and power. There were several keys that made this path of city evolution possible. The first was the switch from silver and gold mining to copper production in the 1870's. This is key for Butte's "Irishness" on several levels. First, because of the large capital investment required for copper mining, Butte was forced to industrialize to a much greater extent than other major gold and silver mining camps of the West. Thus, Butte was the only one of these mining camps to become a major city. Immigrants from many of these camps came to Butte in large numbers. The timing of the beginning of Butte's copper era is a second major factor. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's caused huge numbers of Irish to immigrate to America. In the years immediately following the famine, the Irish were nearly forty percent of those immigrating to the United States. Large numbers of Irish continued to immigrate in the next thirty years, supplying the US with many unskilled workers. Many of these Irish went to the mining camps of the west, the coal mines of Pennsylvania, or the copper mines of Michigan, because mining was one of the only industries they were familiar with. As many of the western mining camps became "played out," or ran out of viable ore, in the late nineteenth century, the Irish looked to the developing Butte. Because Butte was becoming an established city only when the Irish started going there, it did not have a previously existing community of entrenched middle class Americans, nor did it have a prior political structure. This is another key difference between Butte and other towns with sizable Irish populations such as Boston or San Francisco. In pre-existing towns and cities, the middle class often looked down on those of the working class, or at least had control of the political and social structure of the area. It is a well-known fact that Marcus Daly was one of the main reasons so many Irish came to Butte. Daly was the owner of the Anaconda Mining Company, and a strong Irish nationalist. His hiring policies were famous throughout the West, and even in Ireland, as being very generous to the Irish. Emmons lays out these reasons, detailing them extensively. His research was thorough, utilizing "two full carloads" of primary materials including records of Butte churches and Irish social organizations, letters, newspapers. Also cited in Emmons' bibliography are extensive interviews and secondary sources. Emmons is just as thorough in his treatment of the second question. He considers the miners of Butte on many levels. One of the more interesting themes of the book is the discussion of conflicting loyalties within the Irish enclave of the Mining City. The author frames this as the question of whether the people considered themselves "working Irish-Americans" or "Irish-American workers." He examines the politics of the struggling Ireland and its relationship with England, the structure of the Butte social organizations and the way their roles and importances, both absolute and relative to one another, changed and grew during this period, and changing demographics within the Irish and the rest of Butte-Silver Bow. The only complaint to be lodged against The Butte Irish is the author's occasional use of difficult sentence structure. I can't find the quote I was going to use here, but there were a few to choose from. The Butte Irish is a well-written and well-executed account of the development of a town and community, offering many insights into working class ethnography, labor relations, Montana history, and Irish history, among others. Emmons has managed to cover aspects of all these areas, even while maintaining a strong focus and cohesiveness throughout the book.

I love this book as well as the whole series. It is written very well and incorporates WWII experiences into an individuals life. You become attached to the character as he goes through his experiences. Great book.

Taking Liebniz's proposition that God had created the best possible world, Rowe discusses the question whether God could have created a better world than the one we have and the implications of the answer to this question. The main point of the book is that if God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, he would have to create the best possible world, a world that is better than this. It was thus a necessity that he does so and not a contingency. Hence, if he could but did not it implied that he was either not all powerful or all-good. If he did, and this was indeed the best possible world, then God cannot be said to have created it out of his own free will for he had no choice, being the perfect moral being, he had to create this world rather than one that was inferior or not to create any world at all. To better understand this well argued book that also confronts the main opposing arguments against his views, the reader might like to know a little more about the idea of our own free will because many of the arguments relate also to the notion of free will as applied to us. A good source would be Robert Kane's "A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will", Oxford University Press, 2006.

Knowledgeably compiled and expertly edited by retired academician and scholar Minoru Kiyota, The Case Of The Japanese Americans During World War II: Suppression Of Civil Liberty is a comprehensive study of the incarcerated treatment of the 112,000 Japanese-Americans imprisoned in a system of camps in America after the Pearl Harbor attack that launched America's overt involvement in World War II. Illustrated by the experiences of many individual Japanese American ordeals in these relocation camps, The Case Of The Japanese Americans During World War II is an accurate and informative revelation of what daily life was like for those who were held prisoner -- some of whose sons took service in the American armed forces European Theatre campaigns. The Case Of The Japanese Americans During World War II is very strongly recommended to all readers searching for a complete, thorough, and expansive knowledge of American Government's treatment of Japanese Americans, treatment which has a continuing relevance in this present era of a "War on Terrorism" and Islamic Americans.

This is a very hands-on and literature-based Kindergarten art book. It has a story, then 5-6 ideas of creative things to make that correlate with that story. It's so much fun! Stories include: The Gingerbread Boy, Androcles and the Lion, The Little Engine that Could, The Lion and the Mouse, and The Hare and the Tortoise. What a great way to combine storytime and art time!

I just found this hiding on a library shelf & read it non-stop from cover to cover. I'll be reading it again soon. Amazon is listing it as out of print which is a serious shame. If you can get your hands on it, do so. A thoroughly brilliant work on the useful & practical aspects of Schenkerian musical theory.

Charles Johnson is a major American novelist, profound, delightful, and challenging. In Byrd, he has found an ideal expositor. This book has the twin virtues of being both very learned and very readable. Readers of Johnson, like myself, will learn a great deal. Newcomers could not have a better guide

"Christians Only" shows how all-encompassing anti-Jewish prejudice was in the 1930s: not just in elite law firms and country clubs, but in universities and in all manner of jobs. Even Jews sometimes discriminated against Jews: for example, Jewish-owned brokerage firms might limit opportunities for Jewish customers.

The book is as amusing as it is horrifying: one of the amusing stories, for example, is of a Jew named Louis Goldstein who sought to Anglicize his name. Unfortunately for him, his petition for a name change came up before -- Judge Louis Goldstein. (The petition was denied).