The Politics of Upheaval, 1935-1936, volume three of PulitzerPrize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr."sAge of Roosevelt series, concentrates on the turbulent concludingyears of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term. A measure of economicrecovery revived political conflict and emboldened FDR's critics todenounce "that man in the White house." To his left were demagoguesHuey Long, Father Coughlin, and Dr. Townsend. To his right were thechampions of the old order ex-president Herbert Hoover, theAmerican Liberty League, and the august Supreme Court. For a time,the New Deal seemed to lose its momentum. But in 1935 FDR ralliedand produced a legislative record even more impressive than theHundred Days of 1933 a set of statutes that transformed the socialand economic landscape of American life. In 1936 FDR coasted toreelection on a landslide. Schlesinger has his usual touch withcolorful personalities and draws a warmly sympathetic portrait ofAlf M. Landon, the Republican candidate of 1936.

Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years ofconflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not onlyabout how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawingfrom thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and stillclassified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels ofthe American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is aninsightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these finalyears. Through his exclusive access to authoritative materials,award-winning historian Lewis Sorley highlights the dramaticdifferences in conception, conduct, and-at least for a time-resultsbetween the early and later years of the war. Among his mostimportant findings is that while the war was being lost at thepeace table and in the U.S. Congress, the soldiers were winning onthe ground. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better Warsheds new light on the Vietnam War.

In the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, power was expressed interms of nuclear missiles, industrial capacity, numbers of menunder arms, and tanks lined up ready to cross the plains of EasternEurope. By 2010, none of these factors confer power in the sameway: industrial capacity seems an almost Victorian virtue, andcyber threats are wielded by non-state actors. Politics changed,and the nature of power—defined as the ability to affect others toobtain the outcomes you want—had changed dramatically. Power is notstatic; its story is of shifts and innovations, technologies andrelationships. Joseph Nye is a long-time analyst of power and a hands-onpractitioner in government. Many of his ideas have been at theheart of recent debates over the role America should play in theworld: his concept of "soft power" has been adopted by leaders fromBritain to China; "smart power” has been adopted as thebumper-sticker for the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. Thisbook is the summation of his work, as relevant to gene

The twenty-first century has brought a renewed interest indemocratic theory and practices, creating a complicatedrelationship between time-honoured democratic traditions and newforms of political participation. Reflecting on this interplaybetween tradition and innovation, Aletta J. Norval offers freshinsights into the global complexities of the formation ofdemocratic subjectivity, the difficult emergence and articulationof political claims, the constitution of democratic relationsbetween citizens and the deepening of our democratic imagination.Aversive Democracy draws inspiration from a critical engagementwith deliberative and post-structuralist models of democracy,whilst offering a distinctive reading inspired by contemporary workon the later Wittgenstein. This is a creative and insightful workwhich reorients democratic theory, elucidating the character of thecommitments we engage in when we participate in democratic lifetogether.