Who would have thought that Joycelyn Elders, born into a family that chopped cotton and trapped raccoons to survive, would grow up to be Surgeon General of the United States? Or that Clarence Thomas, brought up by his barely literate grandfather, would someday be a Justice of the Supreme Court? Certainly not statisticians, who tell us that impoverished backgrounds are fairly accurate predictors of impoverished futures. This book seeks out the stories behind the exceptions: those who, against all odds, have made the American myth of rags-to-riches a reality.

For more than ten years Charles Harrington and Susan Boardman explored the life histories of successful Americans forty to fifty-five years old--those from poor homes, whose parents had not completed high school, and those from the middle class. Comparing the routes to success of these two groups--the one by various courses of their own construction, the other by a well-laid path--the authors are able to show where their efforts and qualities diverge, and where they coincide.

Joycelyn Elders and Clarence Thomas are examples of the "pathmakers" of this work. While Paths to Success reveals certain consistencies between these pathmakers' approaches and those of their middle-class counterparts, it also exposes striking differences between men and women, blacks and whites. These differences, fully described here, illuminate the ways in which opportunities, serendipities, and impediments intersect with personal resources, strategies, and choices to produce success where we least expect it.

The rise of modern public finance revolutionized political economy. As governments learned to invest tax revenue in the long-term financial resources of the market, they vastly increased their administrative power and gained the ability to use fiscal, monetary, and financial policy to manage their economies. But why did the modern fiscal state emerge in some places and not in others? In approaching this question, Wenkai He compares the paths of three different nations—England, Japan, and China—to discover why some governments developed the tools and institutions of modern public finance, while others, facing similar circumstances, failed to do so.

Focusing on three key periods of institutional development—the decades after the English Civil Wars, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion—He demonstrates how each event precipitated a collapse of the existing institutions of public finance. Facing urgent calls for revenue, each government searched for new ways to make up the shortfall. These experiments took varied forms, from new methods of taxation to new credit arrangements. Yet, while England and Japan learned from their successes and failures how to deploy the tools of modern public finance and equipped themselves to become world powers, China did not. He’s comparative historical analysis isolates the nature of the credit crisis confronting each state as the crucial factor in determining its specific trajectory. This perceptive and persuasive explanation for China’s failure at a critical moment in its history illuminates one of the most important but least understood transformations of the modern world.

It is rare indeed for one book to be both a first-rate classroom text and a major contribution to scholarship. The Pathway for Oxygen is such a book, offering a new approach to respiratory physiology and morphology that quantitatively links the two. Professionalism in science has led to a compartmentalization of biology. Function is the domain of the physiologist, structure that of the morphologist, and they often operate with vastly disparate concepts and procedures. Yet the performance of the respiratory system depends both on structural and on functional properties that cannot be separated.

The first chapter of The Pathway for Oxygen engages the student with the design and function of the vertebrate respiratory organs from a comparative viewpoint. The second chapter adds to that foundation the link between cell energetics and oxygen needs of the whole animal. With Chapter 3 the excitement begins—new ideas, fresh attacks on old problems, and a fuller account of the power of the quantitative approach Dr. Ewald Weibel has pioneered.

The Pathway for Oxygen will be read eagerly by medical students, graduate students, advanced undergraduates in zoology—and by their professors.

While civics textbooks describe an idealized model of “how a bill becomes law;” journalists often emphasize special interest lobbying and generous campaign contributions to Congress; and other textbooks describe common stages through which all policies progress, these approaches fail to convey—much less explain—the tremendous diversity in political processes that shape specific policies in contemporary Washington.

Bridging the gap between textbook models of how public policy should work, and how the process actually works in contemporary Washington, Pathways of Power provides a framework that integrates the roles of political interests and policy ideals in the contemporary policy process. This book argues that the policy process can be understood as a set of four distinctive pathways of policymaking—pluralist, partisan, expert, and symbolic—that draw upon different political resources, appeal to different political actors, and elicit unique strategies and styles of coalition building.

Revealing the strategic behavior of policy actors who compete to shift policies onto pathways that maximize their resources and influence, the book provides a fresh approach to understanding the seeming chaos and volatility of the policy process today. The book’s use of a wide universe of major policy decisions and case studies, focused on such key areas as health care, federal budgeting, and tax policy, provides a useful foundation for students of the policy process as well as for policy practitioners eager to learn more about their craft.

Our journey to language begins before birth, as babies in the womb hear clearly enough to distinguish their mother's voice. Canvassing a broad span of experimental and theoretical approaches, this book introduces new ways of looking at language development.

A remarkable mother-daughter collaboration, Pathways to Language balances the respected views of a well-known scholar with the fresh perspective of a younger colleague prepared to challenge current popular positions in these debates. The result is an unusually subtle, even-handed, and comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of language acquisition, from fetal speech processing to the development of child grammar to the sophisticated linguistic accomplishments of adolescence, such as engaging in conversation and telling a story.

With examples from the real world as well as from the psychology laboratory, Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Smith look in detail at the way language users appropriate words and grammar. They present in-depth evaluations of different theories of language acquisition. They show how adolescent usage has changed the meaning of certain phrases, and how modern living has led to alterations in the lexicon. They also consider the phenomenon of atypical language development, as well as theoretical issues of nativism and empiricism and the specificity of human language. Their nuanced and open-minded approach allows readers to survey the complexity and breadth of the fascinating pathways to language acquisition.

The Patient Self-Determination Act of 1990 required medical facilities to provide patients with written notification of their right to refuse or consent to medical treatment. Using this Act as an important vehicle for improving the health care decisionmaking process, Lawrence P. Ulrich explains the social, legal, and ethical background to the Act by focusing on well-known cases such as those of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, and he explores ways in which physicians and other caregivers can help patients face the complex issues in contemporary health care practices.

According to Ulrich, health care facilities often address the letter of the law in a merely perfunctory way, even though the Act integrates all the major ethical issues in health care today. Ulrich argues that well-designed conversations between clinicians and patients or their surrogates will not only assist in preserving patient dignity — which is at the heart of the Act—but will also help institutions to manage the liability issues that the Act may have introduced. He particularly emphasizes developing effective advance directives. Ulrich examines related issues, such as the negative effect of managed care on patient self-determination, and concludes with a seldom-discussed issue: the importance of being a responsible patient.

Showing how the Patient Self-Determination Act can be a linchpin of more meaningful and effective communication between patient and caregiver, this book provides concrete guidance to health care professionals, medical ethicists, and patient-rights advocates.

The painful sixty-year process that brought Nicaragua from colonial status to incipient nation-state is the focus of this fresh examination of inner struggle in a key isthmian country. E. Bradford Burns shows how Nicaragua's elite was able to consolidate control of the state and form a stable government, resolving the bitter rivalry between the two cities Le&oacu;n and Granada, but at the same time began the destruction of the rich folk culture of the Indians, eventually reducing them to an impoverished and powerless agrarian proletariat.

The history of this nation echoes that of other Latin American lands yet is peculiarly its own. Nicaragua emerged not from a war against Spain but rather from the violent interactions among the patriarchs of the dominant families, the communities of common people, and foreigners. Burns is eloquent on the subject of American adventurism in Nicaragua, which culminated in the outrageous expedition of the filibuster William Walker and his band of mercenaries in the 1850s. It was a major breach of the trust and friendship Nicaraguans had extended to the United States, and the Nicaraguans' subsequent victory over the foreign invaders helped forge their long-delayed sense of national unity.

The decimation of Nicaraguan archives for the period prior to 1858 renders the study of early nineteenth-century history especially challenging, but Burns has made ingenious use of secondary sources and the few published primary materials available, including travelers' accounts and other memoirs, newspapers, government reports, and diplomatic correspondence. He provides valuable insight into Nicaraguan society of the time, of both the elite and the folk, including a perceptive section on the status and activities of women and the family in society. This book will appeal not only to professional historians but to general readers as well.

Since 1783, patriotic societies have become an integral part of American history. The great number of Sons, Daughters, and Dames, and the alphabetical jungle of G.A.R., D.A.R., V.F.W., U.C.V., U.D.C., W.R.D., etc. are well known--and are often subjects of controversy. Wallace Evan Davies here recounts, in fascinating detail, the activities and attitudes of both veterans' and hereditary patriotic societies in America up to 1900. In a lively manner, he explores their significance as social organizations, their concept of patriotism, and their influence upon public opinion and legislation.

At the close of the American Revolution a group of officers formed the first patriotic veterans' society, The Society of the Cincinnati--open to all officers who had served for three years or were in the army at the end of the Revolution. Thus it began. Then, after the Civil War, came the numerous organizations of veterans of both sides and of their relatives. And as some Americans became more nationalistic, others, becoming absorbed in family trees, started the many hereditary societies. After discussing the founding of men's, women's, and children's patriotic societies, the author describes their organizational aspects: their size, qualifications for membership, officers, dues, ritual, badges, costumes, and the like. In hereditary groups, membership wasdeliberately limited, for exclusiveness was often their strongest appeal. The veterans' groups, however, were usually anxious to be as large as possible so as to enhance their influence upon legislators.

The appearance, beginning in the 1860's, of nearly seventy patriotic newspapers and magazines testifies to the rising popularity of these groups: prominent publications of the patriotic press included The Great Republic, The Soldiers' Friend, The Grand Army Record, The Vedette, National Tribune, and American Tribune. Many people turned to patriotism as to a sort of secular religion in which their increasing differences--in national origin and in religious and cultural inheritance--could be submerged; many others joined these societies primarily for social reasons. Once members, however, all became devoted campaigners for such projects as pensions for veterans, care of war orphans, and popular observance of national patriotic holidays; they also took to the field over desecrations of the flag, sectional animosity, the teaching of history, immigration policy, labor disturbances, military instruction in schools, and expansionism.

In Patriotism on Parade we have a cross-section of American social and intellectual history for the period 1783-1900. In writing it, Davies quotes liberally from contemporary letters and newspapers which make lively reading, and he has had access to the many scrapbooks and voluminous papers of William McDowell--prominent in the founding of several hereditary groups--which shed new light on the early years of the D.A.R. and the S.A.R. in particular. His book will be read with interest by the general public, by historians, and especially by persons who have belonged to any of the organizations he describes.

Ranging widely from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the little-known stories of five patriots and critics. He shows how law and constitutionalism have powerfully shaped and been shaped by the experience of nationhood at key moments in American history.

Founding Father James Wilson's star-crossed life is testament to the capacity of American nationhood to capture the imagination of those who have lived within its orbit. For South Carolina freedman Elias Hill, the nineteenth-century saga of black citizenship in the United States gave way to a quest for a black nationhood of his own on the West African coast. Greenwich Village radical Crystal Eastman became one of the most articulate critics of American nationhood, advocating world federation and other forms of supranational government and establishing the modern American civil liberties movement. By contrast, the self-conscious patriotism of Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard Law School and trial lawyer Melvin Belli aimed to stave off what Pound and Belli saw as the dangerous growth of a foreign administrative state.

In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape and constrain the directions of legal change. Yet their engagements with American nationhood remade the institutions and ideals of the United States even as the national tradition shaped and constrained the course of their lives.

In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries B.C., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. In this detailed study, the author makes the claim that artifacts are never neutral: as a distinctive possession, each object—through the abstracting function of style—offers a material template for scales of value. Likewise, through style, pictorial forms can make claims about material “referents,” the things depicted. By manipulating these scales and their referents, artifacts can shape the way status, social role, or identity is understood and enforced. The result is a kind of “spatial epistemology” within which the identities of persons are constructed. Powers thereby posits a relationship between art and society that operates at a level deeper than iconography, attributes, or social institutions.

Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice. This latter development, essential for bureaucratic organization and individual achievement, challenges the conventional opposition between “Western” individuals and “collective” Asians.

Historical landmarks, such as wars, coups, and revolutions, seem to arise under unique conditions. Indeed, what seems to distinguish history from the natural and social sciences is its inability to be dissected or generalized in any meaningful way. Yet even complex and large-scale events like the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution can be broken down into their component parts, and, as Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme show, these smaller modules are rarely unique to the events they collectively compose.

The aim of this book is to analyze clusters of similar "elementary" occurrences that serve as the building blocks of more global events. Making connections between seemingly unrelated case studies, Roehner and Syme apply scientific methodology to the analysis of history. Their book identifies the recurring patterns of behavior that shape the histories of different countries separated by vast stretches of time and space. Taking advantage of a broad wealth of historical evidence, the authors decipher what may be seen as a kind of genetic code of history.

A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence, enshrined in law, are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system—from mass incarceration to police brutality.

We take for granted that some crimes are violent and others aren’t. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues that legal notions about violence—its definition, causes, and moral significance—are functions of political choices, not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures of our criminal justice system.

The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts, for example, played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet to this day, with more crimes than ever called “violent,” this distinction determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense, as well as the perpetrator’s debt and danger to society. Similarly, criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual character. But in other areas of law, including the procedural law that covers police conduct, the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies, and of society’s unique fear of violence since the 1960s, has been an application of law that reinforces inequities of race and class, undermining law’s legitimacy.

A Pattern of Violence shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration, blunted efforts to hold police accountable, constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse, pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons, encouraged toleration of prison violence, and limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an essential step toward justice.

This uniquely comprehensive study analyzes genetic and cultural variation in a human population of extraordinary diversity. The author measures the relationship between patterns of biological and patterns of cultural variation as a way to test the contribution made by natural selection to genetic variability. If linguistic similarity and migration history serve to predict biological patterns, support is provided for the hypothesis that forces other than natural selection are responsible for the diversity observed.

The data for this study come from a group of eighteen villages located in eight neighboring language areas that are clustered in a small region of Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. Biological and anthropological data are analyzed with a battery of sophisticated statistical and taxonomic methods: multiple discriminant analyses, principal coordinates analyses, principal components analyses, and Gower's R2 comparison. Diverse biological properties of the Bougainville Islanders prove to be closely related to their patterns of migration. Although this result in no way refutes the role of natural selection in the evolutionary process, it highlights the extent to which genetic diversity can be molded, at least in human populations, by nonselective events.

General George S. Patton’s legendary image was carefully crafted during World War II and continues to shape our understanding of American history and culture today. Historian Nathan C. Jones explores the creation of the Patton legend and its enduring legacy in Patton’s Shadow.

A new reading of Pauline theology, ethics, and eschatology grounded in social-identity theory and sociorhetorical criticism

Readers often think of Paul’s attitude toward the resurrection of the body in individual terms: a single body raised as the climax of an individual’s salvation. In Paul and the Resurrected Body: Social Identity and Ethical Practice, Matt O’Reilly makes the case that, for Paul, the social dimension of future bodily resurrection is just as important, if not more so. Through a close reading of key texts in the letters to the Corinthians, Romans, and Philippians, O’Reilly argues that resurrection is integral to Paul’s understanding of Christian social identity. In Paul’s theological reasoning, a believer’s hope for the future depends on being identified as part of the people of God who will be resurrected.

Features

• A clarification of the eschatological basis for Paul’s ethical expectations
• Exploration of the social significance of Paul’s theological reasoning
• An integration of ancient rhetorical theory with contemporary social-identity theory

Explore the significance of maternal metaphors in the writings of a first-century male missionary and theologian

Paul employed metaphors of childbirth or breastfeeding in four out of the seven undisputed epistles. In this book, McNeel uses cognitive metaphor theory and social identity analysis to examine the meaning and function of these maternal metaphors. She asserts that metaphors carry cognitive content and that they are central to how humans process information, construct reality, and shape group identity.

Features:

• A focus on “identity” as the way in which people understand themselves in relation to one another, to society, and to those perceived as outsiders
• Examination of metaphor as part of Paul’s rhetorical strategy
• Integration of the work of philosopher Max Black with the work of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

A luminous, groundbreaking biography of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, best known for the poem “Death Fugue.”

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was recognized as the greatest poet of the German language shortly before his tragic death just shy of his fiftieth birthday, when he drowned himself in the Seine. He described his “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) as a “tombstone” for his mother, who perished in the Holocaust. Celan’s work is often viewed as a rejoinder to Theodor Adorno’s dictum that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

While the commentary on Celan’s contributions to poetics and Holocaust literature is voluminous, little has been written about his life itself. Anna Arno provides the definitive biography. Paul Celan: A Life follows the poet from his birthplace, Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to Bucharest, where he was part of an important circle of Surrealists, then onto Vienna, where he met and fell in love with Ingeborg Bachmann, and finally to Paris. Although in his final years he was haunted by bouts of mental illness, his life cannot be defined by its implosion. Paul Celan was an ardent, inveterate romantic whose many meaningful relationships left their mark on his poetry. He also cultivated intense, often fraught dialogues with such thinkers as René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Martin Heidegger.

Drawing upon a linguistically wide range of archival sources and the most up-to-date research, Arno presents a complete picture of Celan’s life. Here is the essential story of a towering figure in modern poetry.

Concentrating upon the composer's first three US concert tours and his thirteen years at Yale, Luther Noss brings to life a observant, energetic, stubborn, and wry personality. Hindemith's journals offer detailed commentary on his experiences at Tanglewood while Noss draws on archives to describe the composer's groundbreaking Collegium concerts, classes, controversial plans to reorganize the School of Music, and other activities. Noss also delves into professional activity that included a huge number of commissions, writing four theory textbooks, an expansion of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, and numerous world premieres and other events.

Paul Lafargue, the disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French Marxist party in 1882. Over the next three decades, he served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. During these years, which ended with the dramatic suicides of Lafargue and his wife, French socialism, and the Marxist party within it, became a significant political force.

In an earlier volume, Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882, Leslie Derfler emphasized family identity and the origin of French Marxism. Here, he explores Lafargue's political strategies, specifically his break with party co-founder Jules Guesde in the Boulanger and Dreyfus episodes and over the question of socialist-syndicalist relations. Derfler shows Lafargue's importance as both political activist and theorist. He describes Lafargue's role in the formulation of such strategies as the promotion of a Second Workingmen's International, the pursuit of reform within the framework of the existent state but opposition to any socialist participation in nonsocialist governments, and the subordination of trade unionism to political action. He emphasizes Lafargue's pioneering efforts to apply Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Despite the crucial part they played in the social and political changes of the past century and the heritage they left, the first French Marxists are not widely known, especially in the English-speaking world. This important critical biography of Lafargue, the most audacious of their much maligned theorists, enables us to trace the options open to Marxist socialism as well as its development during a critical period of transition.

Paul Lafargue, disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, was among the most important persons giving organized political expression to Marxism in France. He helped found both the first French collectivist party and the first French Marxist party. He was the first Marxist to sit in the French legislature and for three decades served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. With his wife, Laura, he translated the Communist Manifesto and other works, introducing and applying Marxist thought in France.

Demonstrating an almost seamless web between intellectual and family history, Leslie Derfler relates ideas and family identity in this account of the first forty years of Paul Lafargue’s life. Lafargue, like his famous father-in-law, called for ideological purity and demanded total hostility to anarchists and reformists. He insisted on economic determinism, the primacy of the concept of the class struggle, and the theory of surplus value. But he made his own contributions as well, particularly in his insistence on rejecting the domination of bourgeois values. Lafargue’s most famous pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy, showed the advantages that labor could derive by rejecting the bourgeois work ethic. An intellectual of power, he pioneered in the application of Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism.

Born in Cuba of mixed racial descent, Lafargue joined in demonstrations as a medical student in Paris in the 1860s and was forced into exile. Resuming his studies in London, he became a fixture in the Marx household until he married Laura Marx and moved to Paris. There he worked to expand the influence of the International Workingmen’s Association, but fled to Spain following the general repression after the fall of the Paris Commune. He continued his efforts on behalf of Marxism in Spain and then for ten years in London before returning to France, where he helped to found the new Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français, in 1882.

Actor and singer Paul Robeson's performances in Othello, Show Boat, and The Emperor Jones made him famous, but his midcentury appearances in support of causes ranging from labor and civil rights to antilynching and American warmongering made him notorious. When Robeson announced at the 1949 Paris Peace Conference that it was "unthinkable" for blacks to go to war against the Soviet Union, the mainstream American press declared him insane. 
 
Notions of Communism, blackness, and insanity were interchangeably deployed during the Cold War to discount activism such as Robeson's, just a part of an array of social and cultural practices that author Tony Perucci calls the Cold War performance complex. Focusing on two key Robeson performances---the concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949 and his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956---Perucci demonstrates how these performances and the government's response to them are central to understanding the history of Cold War culture in the United States. His book provides a transformative new perspective on how the struggle over the politics of performance in the 1950s was also a domestic struggle over freedom and equality. The book closely examines both of these performance events as well as artifacts from Cold War culture---including congressional documents, FBI files, foreign policy papers, the popular literature on mental illness, and government propaganda films---to study the operation of power and activism in American Cold War culture.

Ancient iconography of Paul is dominated by one image: Paul as martyr. Whether he is carrying a sword—the traditional instrument of his execution—or receiving a martyr's crown from Christ, the apostle was remembered and honored for his faithfulness to the point of death. As a result, Christians created a cult of Paul, centered on particular holy sites and characterized by practices such as the telling of stories, pilgrimage, and the veneration of relics. This study integrates literary, archaeological, artistic, and liturgical evidence to describe the development of the Pauline cult within the cultural context of the late antique West.

"As long as there are readers of Paul, there will be always be other perspectives."

The essays in this second edition of Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle provide introductions to Paul's relationship to and views on the Roman Empire, first-century economic stratification, his opponents, ethnicity, the law, Judaism, women, and Greco-Roman rhetoric. Contributors Warren Carter, Charles H. Cosgrove, A. Andrew Das, Steven J. Friesen, Mark D. Given, Deborah Krause, Mark D. Nanos, and Jerry L. Sumney have added addendums to their original essays and updated the bibliography to take into account scholarship produced in the decade since the publication of the first edition. The collection provides essential background and sets out new directions for study useful to students of the New Testament and Paul's letters.

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders.

Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives.

This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiancé. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it," Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in vivid detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.

Drawing on findings from a five-year interview study, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton bring us to the campus of "MU," a flagship Midwestern public university, where we follow a group of women drawn into a culture of status seeking and sororities. Mapping different pathways available to MU students, the authors demonstrate that the most well-resourced and seductive route is a "party pathway" anchored in the Greek system and facilitated by the administration. This pathway exerts influence over the academic and social experiences of all students, and while it benefits the affluent and well-connected, Armstrong and Hamilton make clear how it seriously disadvantages the majority.

Eye-opening and provocative, Paying for the Party reveals how outcomes can differ so dramatically for those whom universities enroll.

A revealing, data-rich exploration of how American legislators transformed from active policymakers into party fundraisers.

Lawmakers in Congress and state legislatures across the United States spend enormous amounts of time and effort fundraising, not just for their own seats but for the party. Whether dialing for dollars or hosting high-priced fundraising events, the pursuit of campaign funds is now a massive part of the American legislator’s job description. What explains this transformation, and what are the consequences for public policy?

In Paying for the Party, Michael Kistner uses new theory and new data to answer these questions. He shows that state legislative party organizations—Democratic and Republican caucuses in capitols across the country—are responsible for turning their members into single-minded seekers of money. Parties reward legislators who contribute the most with powerful leadership and committee positions. Consequently, the members who now hold these agenda-setting positions are increasingly neither the most productive nor knowledgeable lawmakers, but rather those who can raise the most money. And when legislators are asked to raise more money, they skip committee hearings for fundraising events, enacting fewer substantive policies as a result. Paying for the Party shows that parties in contemporary American legislatures have hollowed out the policymaking capacity of their institutions and empowered a decidedly non-representative set of legislators.