Locate nations on the J Curve — left for authoritarian, right for democratic. Then figure out how to force those on the left to open their societies, rather than encouraging them to shut them tighter by further isolating them. The West’s isolation of Kim Jong-il’s North Korea gives him the cover he needs to extend … Continue reading
Category Archives: Books
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – Our Kind of People
Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha’s Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – City Water, City Life
A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of political, economic, and social institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas that are a support for the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created the city. In City Water, City Life, celebrated historian … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
In the mid 1930s, North America’s Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster’s classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – Asia In The Pacific Islands: Replacing The West
A spectacular transition is in the Pacific Islands, as a result of which all our lives will be radically different. While the original Pacific people came from Asia, for most of the past century and earlier, nearly all Pacific Islands nations were colonies of ‘Western’ powers. But in the last fifty years or so, Asia … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
In this thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Kären Wigen reexamine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted, and challenge the unconscious spatial frameworks that govern the way we perceive the world. Arguing that notions of East vs. West, First World vs. Third World, and even the sevenfold continental system … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
The near-meltdown of Fukushima, the upheavals in the Middle East, the BP oil rig explosion, and the looming reality of global warming have reminded the president and all U.S. citizens that nothing has more impact on our lives than the supply of and demand for energy. Its procurement dominates our economy and foreign policy more … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds
GLOBAL TRENDS 2030 is intended to stimulate thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories over the next 15 years. The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today. By 2030, no country—whether the US, China, or any other large country—will be a hegemonic … Continue reading
HBCU Politics™ Political Book Feature – King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
Before Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., there was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. — the most celebrated and controversial black politician of his generation. An astute businessman known as “Mr. Civil Rights,” he represented Harlem for twenty-four years in the House of Representatives. He was a man of the cloth and a … Continue reading
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