Frank Carlson Library

"Squeezed" weaves together intimate reporting with sharp and lively critique to show how the high cost of parenthood and our increasingly unstable job market have imploded the middle-class American Dream for many families, and offers surprising solutionsfor how we might change things. Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular...

"This book examines the struggle between President Obama and the United States Congress to manage federal spending and tax policy for the three and one half years between 2009 and the summer of 2012. More than half the book focuses on the intense 44-day crisis in June and July 2011 when the United States came to the brink of a potentially catastrophic default on its debt."--Note to readers.

A bold plan to help the middle class, by the New York Times bestselling author of An American Son. For generations, the belief that if you work hard you can offer your children a better life has been known as the American Dream. That dream is on life support today, and not just because of the economic downturn and bad leadership from Washington. America has undergone an economic transformation that our schools, our workers, and too many of our families...

Twentieth-century Europe was an intense laboratory of capitalist experimentation. Confronted with economic booms and crises, technological revolutions, and economic globalization, Western Europe's governments constantly explored alternative ways of managing domestic economic systems and international commerce. Bridging comparative and international political economy, Creative Reconstructions compellingly expands our understanding of the historic relationship...

Progressive politics finds itself in an incredibly testing era. The accelerating economic, social and political shifts put vast pressure on progressive movements. Being electorally challenged by the conservative right and the radical left they struggle to appeal to voters or bear the fruits of their time in government. The coming decades offer both great opportunities—the chance for entrepreneurs to develop new, efficient and innovative businesses...

In this concise volume, leading economist John B. Taylor offers empirical research to explain what caused the current financial crisis, what prolonged it, and what dramatically worsened it more than a year after it began. The evidence he presents strongly suggests that specific government actions and interventions are largely to blame and that any future government interventions must be based on a clearly stated diagnosis of the problem and a rationale...

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001" Adam D. Sheingate is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. A long-dominant reading of American politics holds that public policy in the United States is easily captured by special interest groups. Countering this view, Adam Sheingate traces the development of government intervention in agriculture from its nineteenth-century origins to contemporary struggles...

Hezbollah provides a new, grounded analysis of the controversial and misunderstood Lebanese party. Where previous books have focused on aspects of the party's identity, the military question or its religious discourse, here Joseph Daher presents an alternative perspective, built upon political economy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Lebanon and dozens of interviews, as well as new archival and other primary sources, Daher's analysis confidently...

Stephen Krasner's assumption of a distinction between state and society is the root of his argument for the superiority of a statist interpretation of American foreign policy. Here he challenges the two dominant and rival interpretations of the relationship between state and society: interest group liberalism and Marxism. He contends that the state is an autonomous entity acting on behalf of the national interest, and that state behavior cannot be...