Glenn C. Altschuler

Review of "The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It." By Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. Princeton University Press. 279 pp. $24.95

Compromise, George Santayana once wrote, "is odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion."

Review of "Difficult Mothers: Understanding and Overcoming Their Power." By Terri Apter. W.W. Norton & Co. 240 pp. $25.95

She was "the patron saint of self-sacrifice," Alexander Portnoy complained, and "one of the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time." Ladling out prescriptions, precautions, precepts, and borscht, she...

Review of Finance and the Good Society. By Robert J. Shiller. Princeton University Press. 288 pp. $24.95.

Business confidence and credit are "singularly varying," Walter Bagehot, the editor of The Economist observed in 1896. "After a great calamity, everybody is suspicious of everybody; as soon as that calamity is forgotten,...

Review of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. By Andrew Preston. Alfred A. Knopf. 832 pp. $37.50

Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, a Lutheran minister told George W. Bush "you are a servant of God called for such a time like this." The...

Review of Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the Trillion Dollar Stimulus, The Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History. By Michael Grabell. PublicAffairs. 416 pp. $27.99

Totaling 1,071 pages, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 contained money for a wide array of projects designed to increase...

Review of Invisible Men: Men's Inner Lives and the Consequences of Silence. By Michael Addis. Times Books. 282 pp. $27.

"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," relationship counselor John Gray proclaimed in 1992, in a book that has sold over seven million copies. Endowed with reciprocally different natures,...

Review of Lawtalk: The Unknown Stories Behind Familiar Legal Expressions. By James E. Clapp, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Marc Galanter, and Fred R. Shapiro. Yale University Press. 348 pp. $45.

For lawyers, words matter. They tell stories and are literary critics. They search for "the penumbra of express statutory mandates." They...

Review of Hi, My Name is Jack: One Man's Story of the Tumultuous Road to Sobriety and a Changed Life. By Jack Watts. Howard Books. 223 pp. $22.99

It's tempting to make fun of Hi, My Name is Jack, the melodramatic memoir of a now sober marketer for Christian ministries...

Review of Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform. By Paul Starr. Yale University Press. 324 pp. $28.50

A liberal United States Senator, let's call him Edward M. Kennedy, dies. When he gets to heaven, he asks God, "Will America ever have national health insurance?" "Yes,"...

Review of In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney. Threshold Editions. 565 pp. $35.

After September 11, 2001, leaders in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate were evacuated from Washington, D.C. When Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma asked why the...

Review of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve. By Peg Tyre. Henry Holt and Company. 288 pp. $26.

Once the envy of the world, schools in the United States are now, all too often, second-rate. About one-third of public school students do not...

Review of The Next Convergence: The Future Of Economic Growth In A Multispeed World. By Michael Spence. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 296 pp. $27.

"Don't look back," Satchel Paige, the great pitcher of the 1930s and 40s, warned in "Rules for Staying Young," because "something might be gaining on you."

Review of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. By Michael Shermer. Times Books. 385 pp. $28.

In a 2009 Harris poll, 82% of adult Americans affirmed a belief in God; 76% in Miracles; 75% in...

Review of Age Of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. By Jeff Madrick. Alfred A. Knopf. 496 pp. $30.

Testifying before Congress in 2008, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged that there had been a flaw in his model...

A Reason to Believe: Lessons From An Improbable Life
By Deval Patrick
Broadway $21.99

"If you don't understand something," Harvard Dean Jeremy Knowles told his students, "the reason may be that you are simply standing in the wrong place." It took a while for Deval Patrick to learn...

Once upon a time, there was a presidential candidate named Harold Stassen. The one-time Minnesota governor sought the Republican presidential nomination eleven times, from 1948 to 2000. While his first bid was serious and competitive, he soon became something of a joke, an aging "Boy Wonder," known only as a...

Review of Arrival City: How The Largest Migration In History Is Reshaping Our World. By Doug Saunders. Pantheon. 356 pp. $27.95

Immigration may well be the most important issue of our time. Between 2000 and 2050, according to journalist Doug Saunders, the cities of the world will absorb...

Review of Known and Unknown: A Memoir. By Donald Rumsfeld. Sentinel. 815 pp. $36.

Donald Rumsfeld begins his smart, serious, slashing, and self-serving memoir with an epigraph, according it pride of place with a page of its own:

"What one needs in life...

"To every thing there is season," "The Book of Ecclesiastes" reminds us. There's a "time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." And "a time to every purpose under heaven."

The ancient Greeks observed that those times often coincided with the...

Review of "Thinking About Leadership." By Nannerl. O. Keohane. Princeton University Press. 297 pp. $27.95

Political power, James David Barber has suggested, "is like nuclear energy: available to create deserts or make them bloom." In democracies, as in all forms of government, much depends on the skill, character, and values...