Here are 100 books that Where Have All the Voters Gone? fans have personally recommended if you like
Where Have All the Voters Gone?.
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Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I found this book so helpful in explaining why it wasn’t “the economy stupid” but values that moved voters. His work was helpful in illuminating my own extensive work on how values move voters.
Frank is especially good at describing the role of the evangelical movement in putting cultural issues, including abortion, front and center in our politics. I found that he was onto something important and that has helped my understanding of today’s politics. A very readable, down-to-earth book.
Reveals how conservatism became the preferred national political ideology, exploring the origins of this philosophy in the upper classes and tracing its recent popularity within the middle class.
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I knew Richard Wirthlin very well back in the 1980s. I loved the stories about his encounters with Ronald Reagan and how illuminating they were in describing the characters of both men.
The lessons Reagan imparted to Wirthlin explain why Reagan was so successful in politics and his ability to understand his audience. No one knew Reagan better or understood him as well than Richard Wirthlin.
The outpouring of grief and heartfelt tributes following Ronald Reagan’s death demonstrated the love and admiration people still have for our nation’s 40th president. Now, in this affectionate memoir, Reagan’s chief political strategist and friend for 36 years offers a fascinating close-up portrait of the Great Communicator. Taking us inside the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns and beyond, Dick Wirthlin shares illuminating anecdotes, off-the-record remarks, and private moments that reveal the true Ronald Reagan. Through it all, Wirthlin points out the unique qualities and talents that made Reagan such a strong leader-and such a great communicator. For anyone who has…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I loved the story Burns tells in this book of how John F. Kennedy began a trend of bucking the party establishment that told him to “wait his turn.” Kennedy’s ambition led him to overcome the establishment and win the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination.
Burns shows how subsequent presidents, to varying degrees, built upon the same trends. I found this book helpful as it contained powerful insights into Donald Trump.
Since mid-century, America has witnessed an ominous decline in presidential leadership, culminating in the failing presidency of George W. Bush today. How did this happen? In Running Alone, the distinguished political scientist and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns finds the origin of the problem in John F. Kennedy's presidential style-and its influence on his successors in the Oval Office. Kennedy rejected collective leadership in favor of a highly personalized executive branch, run by a small group of hand-picked advisors. His successors followed his lead; each in his own way ran and governed alone, exploiting the party base while often ignoring…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
Hubert Humphrey was a hero of mine. I met him a few times as a teenager. I loved this book and learned things about him, especially his hardscrabble childhood, that I did not know before.
Traub describes his rise to power at the 1948 Democratic Convention when he gave a powerful civil rights speech and his later frustrations as vice president under Lyndon Johnson. I love good biographies, and this is an especially good one.
A celebrated historian recounts Hubert Humphrey's role as a liberal hero of twentieth-century America
Hubert Humphrey was liberalism's most dedicated defender, and its most public and tragic sacrifice. As a young politician in 1948, he defied segregationists and forced the Democratic Party to commit itself to civil rights. As a senator in 1964, he made good on that commitment by helping pass the Civil Rights Act. But as Lyndon B. Johnson's vice president, his support for the war in Vietnam made him a target for both Right and Left, and he suffered a shattering loss in the presidential election of…
I have immersed myself in the study of seventeenth-century philosophy for almost forty years. Over that time, I have become particularly devoted to Spinoza. This is because, first, I think he got it all pretty much right; his views on religion, on human nature, and especially on what it is to lead a good life have always struck me as correct and relevant. You can be a Spinozist today, three and a half centuries after his death, and it would make perfect sense. Second, Spinoza is endlessly fascinating. I find that every time I read him⎯and I’ve been reading and re-reading him for a long time now⎯it gets more difficult. Just when you think you know him, there are always new questions that arise and new puzzles to solve.
It is impossible to read Spinoza and not think often of Thomas Hobbes. Spinoza read Hobbes’s works and was clearly influenced by the English philosopher both in his account of human nature and, especially, in his political thinking. This is, as far as I know, the first book devoted explicitly to the two thinkers together. Field’s focus is on the political, and she does a beautiful job of analyzing and distinguishing different conceptions of ‘power’ (both in the individual and in the group), as well as illuminating similarities and contrasts between these two of the most important early modern thinkers on politics and the state.
We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms.
Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a…
I have been a student of the history of ideas, with a particular interest in political thought, for over forty years. I have read countless books, both ancient and modern, and in several languages, that explore themes related to public life. I am a dedicated citizen of a contemporary liberal democracy, but today, I live in fear of a growing backlash against liberal democracy. The risk of democratic backsliding in the contemporary US is real as citizens become more disillusioned with politics. In other liberal democracies, some party leaders are adopting populist rhetoric to enhance their electoral appeal, but in doing so, they are undermining some of the established norms of public life.
Aristotle offers a classic statement and argument for politics as an extension of ethics. For people to live well and strive for good things, they need to live in a political community. How politics is done has a direct impact on the quality of people’s lives.
I am always inspired by Aristotle’s recognition of how peaceful discussions over the nature of justice constitute the central feature of political life and how good politics necessarily implies reciprocity and efforts to advance the well-being of all citizens.
One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle's masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. For almost three decades, Carnes Lord's justly acclaimed translation has served as the standard English edition. Widely regarded as the most faithful to both the original Greek and Aristotle's distinctive style, it is also written in clear, contemporary English. This new edition of the Politics retains and adds to Lord's already extensive notes, clarifying the flow of Aristotle's argument and identifying literary and historical references. A glossary defines key terms in Aristotle's philosophical-political vocabulary. Lord has made revisions to…
Joseph D’Agnese grew up in the Bicentennial-fueled excitement of the 1970s, and spent 1976 fake-playing a fife and sporting a tricorn hat in various school events. Besides teaching him how to get in and out of Revolutionary-period knickers, this experience awakened in him a love for the Founding Era of American history. He has since authored three history titles with his wife, The New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
What’s fascinating about the making of the Constitution is how every point the framers debated in 1787 rang down through the ensuing years.
Should a state’s power be determined by its land size and resources—or the size of its population? Should we abolish slavery, or pass the buck to another generation? Who should get the right to vote—rich men or all men? Deciding these big three questions consumed much of the squabbles, and led to compromise. State’s rights, for example, led to creation of the bicameral structure of Congress.
The slavery question ultimately led to war in the 19th century, and the stinging legacy of the infamous Three-fifths Compromise. Their decisions on voting rights later resulted in amendments granting African Americans and women the right of suffrage. It’s almost as if you can glimpse America’s future in those 1787 debates.
The late Richard Beeman, then a professor at the University…
In May 1787, in an atmosphere of crisis, delegates met in Philadelphia to design a radically new form of government. Distinguished historian Richard Beeman captures as never before the dynamic of the debate and the characters of the men who labored that historic summer. Virtually all of the issues in dispute—the extent of presidential power, the nature of federalism, and, most explosive of all, the role of slavery—have continued to provoke conflict throughout our nation's history. This unprecedented book takes readers behind the scenes to show how the world's most enduring constitution was forged through conflict, compromise, and fragile consensus.…
While I grew up in New Jersey, the “Crossroads of the Revolution,” with a passion for history, I was ignorant to the amount of fighting that happened in my home state. My decision to write coincided with a renewed interest in the American Revolution: when I realized how many stories of the Revolution remained untold, the die was cast. My passion for history, love for soldiering, wartime experiences, and understanding of tactics and terrain came together to produce something special. Now I can often be found, map, compass, and notebook in hand, prowling a Revolutionary battlefield so I can better tell the story of those who were there.
If you want to know what motivated ordinary British colonists to pick up a musket, spear, or sword and take on the most powerful military in the world, read Thomas Paine’s essays Common Sense and The Crisis. Common Sense was the ideological underpinning of the movement toward independence. Paine’s experiences with the Continental Army during the dark days of late 1776 inspired The Crisis, and Washington ordered it read to the troops to encourage them to stay by the Colors for one last great gamble at Trenton. In my research, I found that the average American soldier truly believed in the cause of Independence; that belief has much to do with the writings of Thomas Paine.
A special gift edition of one of the most important and influential documents in our nation's history-featured in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Hamilton: An American Musical-stylishly packaged for twenty-first-century readers. According to John Adams, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain." With Common Sense, Thomas Paine energized colonial support for the armed rebellion that would make the American experiment a reality, using common sense to argue for colonial independence. Today, this cornerstone of the American Revolution has once again been rediscovered by ardent fans of…
So many of the problems we face as a society stem from the way our economy works. But the economy is presented as something technical and dry, or even simply the ‘natural state of things’. It makes it hard for people to understand where power lies, or even to imagine how it could be otherwise. If we want things to be different – and we really need things to be different – we’ve got to find better ways of communicating what’s going on. I’ve chosen some books that do this – to explain how economic decisions are made. And always to point to the possibility of it all being very different and much better.
It’s impossible to understand the modern economy without grasping the importance of debt, and no one understands debt better than Ann Pettifor.
Pettifor spent more than a decade campaigning to cancel the unjust and unpayable debt of African, Asian, and Latin American countries – debt that was causing mass impoverishment and robbing people of their rights and livelihoods. Then she turned her attention to the damage that debt was doing in the West, predicting the financial crash of 2007-8.
For Pettifor, the problem started in the early 1970s, when the financial system was ‘freed’ by politicians from the constraints which had forced it to behave in a more reasonable way up to that point. Pettifor argues that we won’t be able to deal with our economic problems until we constrain our banks once more.
In this book, Ann Pettifor examines the issues of debt affecting the 'first world' or OECD countries, looking at the history, politics and ethics of the coming debt crisis and exploring the implications of high international indebtedness for governments, corporations, households, individuals and the ecosystem.
I have been studying Japanese since 2008, studied in the country twice, and then finally made my home here in 2011. Over the years, I have been to 43 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, writing articles about my experiences and constantly searching for new, hidden places where I could still find a touch of the Japan of yore. With so many people visiting the country, I want to do my part to give folks options that are off the beaten path and away from the crowds.
I have a hard time keeping track of all the main events of Japanese history, and among the many (MANY) tomes I have read, this one gets the balance just right without being overwhelming.
It gave me a good general overview that now allows me to explain the most important points of the country’s history to others and wasn’t boring or overly academic.
In a rare combination of comprehensive coverage and sustained critical focus, this book examines Japan's progress through its entire history to its current status as an economic, technological, and cultural superpower. A key factor is a pragmatic determination to succeed. Little-known facts are also brought to light, and the latest findings used.
