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Inequality and Democratization
This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality.
The Runner
The Runner tells the remarkable true story of a teenage drifter and petty thief named James Hogue who woke up one cold winter morning in a storage shed in Utah and decided to start his life anew. Re-imagining himself as a self-educated ranch hand named Alexi Indris-Santana who read Plato under the stars and could run a mile in under four minutes, Hogue applied and was accepted to Princeton University, where he excelled academically, made the track team, and became a member of the elite Ivy Club. Echoing both The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of Hogue’s life before and after he went to Princeton is both an immensely affecting portrait of a dreamer and a striking indictment of the Ivy League “meritocracy” to which Hogue wanted so badly to belong. Drawing elegant parallels between Hogue’s ambitions and the American myth of self-invention, while also examining his own uneasy identification with his troubled subject, David Samuels has fashioned a powerful metaphor for the corruptions of the American dream, revealing exceptional gifts as a reporter and literary stylist.
Creatocracy
"The defining characteristic of America is our fanaticism: We dream big, we think large, we create grandeur..." And we created Elizabeth Wurtzel: A celebrated writer who has lent her voice to depression, to women scorned, to addiction, and now to the Constitution of our great states. True to form, Wurtzel brings to life the dry document that framed our nation, homing in on one key feature-the Intellectual Property clause-which she credits for everything cool in our country, from Bruce Springsteen and rock 'n roll, to Jeff Koons and his stainless steel balloons, to Half & Half in our coffee. In Creatocracy, Elizabeth Wurtzel has masterfully written a crash-course in American history and the arts, wise and witty, full of humor and insight. This is pop patriotism in book form.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Writing for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker over the last decade, David Samuels has penned a disillusioned love song to the often amusing and sometimes fatal American habit of self-delusion, reporting from a landscape peopled by salesmen, dreamers, radical environmentalists, suburban hip-hop stars, demolition experts, aging baseball legends, billionaire crackpots, and dog track bettors whose heartbreaking failures and occasional successes are illuminated by flashes of anger and humor. Including profiles of disillusioned Pacific Northwest radicals and Nevada nuclear test site workers alongside coverage of Pentagon press conferences and the Super Bowl in Detroit, Only Love Can Break Your Heart proves Samuels to be a wonderful inheritor of the great journalistic tradition established by Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion in the 1960s. This first collection of his painstakingly reported and wildly inventive writing reveals the full spectrum of his talents, as well as an unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances bubbling up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of ordinary citizens who struggle to live out their dreams.
Deadwood
After just two seasons, the HBO drama Deadwood has become one of cable's highest rated series, a symbol of how great television can be when pushed to its limits. From the masterful acting to the surprisingly credible re-creation of a Western gold-rush town to the provocative dialogue, Deadwood is television made at the highest level of craft. Now, through the eyes of series creator David Milch, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning drama comes to life like never before. Imaginatively rendered and lavishly illustrated, Deadwood- Stories of the Black Hills is an unprecedented look at the people, places, and history of Deadwood, as seen and imagined by the show's creator, chief writer, and ex...
Putting a Song on Top of It
As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernizationÑspiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity. For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musica...
Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers
This book provides a framework for analyzing the impact of the separation of powers on party politics. Conventional political science wisdom assumes that democracy is impossible without political parties, because parties fulfil all the key functions of democratic governance. They nominate candidates, coordinate campaigns, aggregate interests, formulate and implement policy, and manage government power. When scholars first asserted the essential connection between parties and democracy, most of the world's democracies were parliamentary. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most democracies had directly elected presidents. David J. Samuels and Matthew S. Shugart provide a theoretical framework for analyzing variation in the relationships among presidents, parties, and prime ministers across the world's democracies, revealing the important ways that the separation of powers alters party organization and behavior - thereby changing the nature of democratic representation and accountability.
Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans
Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship has little impact on voter behavior in Brazil; what matters most is pork-barreling, incumbent performance, and candidates' charisma. This book shows that soon after redemocratization in the 1980s, over half of Brazilian voters expressed either a strong affinity or antipathy for or against a particular political party. In particular, that the contours of positive and negative partisanship in Brazil have mainly been shaped by how people feel about one party - the Workers' Party (PT). Voter behavior in Brazil has largely been structured around sentiment for or against this one party, and not any of Brazil's many others. The authors show how the PT managed to successfully cultivate widespread partisanship in a difficult environment, and also explain the emergence of anti-PT attitudes. They then reveal how positive and negative partisanship shape voters' attitudes about politics and policy, and how they shape their choices in the ballot booth.
Comparative Politics
Debuting in its first edition and driven by a question-based approach, Comparative Politics shows readers how to do real comparative analysis while introducing them to political institutions, identities, and interests. This thematic survey uniquely balances the how-analytical knowledge-and the what-descriptive knowledge-to help readers make their own political arguments and to thus be more critically informed and engaged political participants.
Electoral Systems and Democracy
As the number of democracies has increased around the world, a heated debate has emerged among political scientists about which system best promotes the consolidation of democracy. This book compares the experiences of diverse countries, from Latin America to southern Africa, from Uruguay, Japan, and Taiwan to Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
