New Books in Public Policy

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. What matters? People’s experiences with climate forces and how they are managing them now and planning to do so in the future. In his newest book, Van Noy decided not to follow the well-trodden path of trying to prove climate change science, nor did he bark about an irreversible tipping point. Instead, he provides us with a much-needed focus on communities and their responses, even if those communities dare not utter the words “climate change.” Van Noy treks across the beautiful southern landscape encountering unique culture and ecosystems, even coming face-to-face with an alligator. The best part, we get to go along with him.Throughout the book, we hear people talk about technology in different ways. For example, Van Noy discovers that creating oyster reefs off the Outer Banks of North Carolina may be more effective in slowing the rate of shoreline erosion than traditional technologies like dredging and installing hard structures like bulkheads, jetties, and groins. It’s hearing these experiences and stories that will help to shape the solutions of the future. Just as Van Noy ends with his son taking the wheel, soon another generation will come face-to-face with their own treacherous monsters. Thankfully, Van Noy makes a compelling case for learning and adapting. We can all find beauty—and perhaps new hope—in this wonderfully documented journey of adaptation to a changing climate.Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts career and becoming an arts leader. The book draws on a wealth of interview data and the experience of the Curve Cultural Leadership Programme, as well as Farhana's own reflections on imposter syndrome, motherhood, and arts leadership. These insights are now the basis for an arts mentoring programme aimed at Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic writers, and the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

American health care is the most expensive in the world, yet it produces some of the worst outcomes among developed nations. Many people offer unrealistic ideas or hot buzz words for how to fix it but implementing those fixes are unrealistic. In the book Health Care: Meet The American Dream (River Grove Books, 2018), Janis Powers offers a solution that is truly based on the American dream. In her solution she aims to eliminate health insurance and Medicare with her Longitudinal Health Care Plans. She feels insurance plans are obsolete but that the private sector is what should be driving healthcare innovation. Her Dream Plan focuses more on preventative care while shifting more outcome accountability to the patient. She envisions a more market-based economy for healthcare goods and services. In this interview you will see how Janis envisions a road forward for American health care.Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.In State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez focuses on the development and political power of  three inter-locking interest groups: the Koch Brothers-run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network (SPN). Drawing from an array of sources of data, Hertel-Fernandez shows how, since the 1970s, conservative policy entrepreneurs, large financial contributors, and major corporations built a right-wing "troika" of overlapping and influential lobbying group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than good. Join us as we discuss Papke's book Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor (Michigan State University Press, 2019) and learn about how law functions in the lives of poor people in the U.S. today.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson, in exploring the census, contextualizes her analysis within three case studies: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She examines these cases over the course of more than 200 years of history and data, and she traces the shifts and changes in terms of racial categorization on the census, noting the fluid nature of understandings of race as applied to the citizen body in each of these countries, and how race was made legible by the census. The Schematic State also digs into the state, how it makes use of the data that is gleaned from the census, and what these uses suggest in terms of the instrument of the census. This book will be of interest to a variety of scholars and lay people, since the text and the research knit together different fields within and beyond political science, including comparative politics, critical race studies, critical legal studies, political theory, public policy, institutional political development, and statistical studies.*Winner, 2017 Race and Comparative Politics Best Book Award, Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section, American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The so-called Urban Crisis of the 1970s continues to loom large in narratives of US urban politics and history, but what can we learn about the period from movies? In Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018), Nathan Holmes burrows down into some key visual texts -- including Klute, Serpico, and the Taking of Pelham 123 -- and tells us about cities, suburbs, anxieties about modernism, identity, politics, and more.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has long been disproven, but it is still a belief held onto by the anti-vaccine movement. This puts Dr. Hotez in a particularly powerful position to speak out.As the anti-vaccine movement grows and vaccine-preventable diseases continue to spread due to the misinformation spread by the movement, Dr. Hotez is on a mission to spread the truth. In the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Dr. Hotez uses his knowledge of vaccine science and experiences as a parent of a child with autism to dispel the dangerous myths the ani-vaccine movement spread.This deeply personal and passionate book is a must read for any parent who is vaccine hesitant, parents of a child with autism, as well as health and science policy experts.Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016)In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sports success to offer concrete policy initiatives for the 21st century. Previous studies have shown that GDP, population size, and even political or cultural ideologies can grant some countries athletic advantages – for example geography plays a large role in determining the winners at the Winter Games – but Reiche illustrates that these factors are not the only ones that matter. Why is Germany so successful at the luge while snowy Sweden seems to unsuccessful. The key to winning medals, Reiche’s WISE formula suggests, lay in (W) investing in female athletes, (I) institutionalization of a nation’s sports management, (S) specialization in specific sports, and the (E) early adoption of new sports or sports practices. In developing his WISE formula, Reiche called upon a wide array of secondary source material as well as his own original research in sports in the Middle East. Along the way, he offers a thorough examination of sports policies, programs, and pitfalls around the world as case studies. His examinations leads us from the institutionalization of sports in Australia to the achievements of the Chinese women’s weight lifting team. Only the United States seems to defy easy categorization. Danyel Reiche’s compelling book should be required reading for sports bureaucrats around the world but will also be of interest to scholars and lay readings fascinated by the Olympic Games.Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  He researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime.  If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rather than a broader social problem -- since the 1980s interpersonal/domestic violence has been treated as a criminal act enforced by the institutions of American criminal justice. But too seldom have we asked if this approach has actually worked. In her powerful and provocative new book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, 2018), Leigh Goodmark asks us to evaluate the effects of criminalizing domestic violence and to consider what might be gained by thinking about interpersonal violence as a problem of economics, public health, community, and human rights.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy