A book series that examines the questions and issues at the heart of American democracy

 

Praise for the books

Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting by Raymond Strother

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"Strother has made some brilliantly successful commercials, a very good living, and now a memoir whose ultimate message is that helping someone get elected does not mean that you should help the winner govern. . . . The characters here are Louisiana scoundrels, redneck-hating snobs from the Dukakis campaign, politicians he regrets having worked for, like Bill Clinton, and some he deeply admires, like John Stennis and Lloyd Bentsen."—New York Times Book Review

"An utterly honest book about the human price of politics. . . . Strother's funny, blunt, affecting memoir should stand as one of the best books on politics for a very long time to come."—Boston Globe

"There's as much useful political education [here] as in any standard political science textbook."—Texas Observer

"An inside-baseball examination of the world of the political consultant."—Washington Post Book World

Telling Others What to Think: Recollections of a Pundit by Edwin M Yoder, Jr.

"[Yoder] tells of his gentlemanly southern upbringing, his days as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and the shaping of a personal ideology as ‘an Adlai Stevenson conservative and a Sam Ervin liberal.' . . . At times, his writing is as elegant and scolding as the work of an earlier North Carolina essayist, the doomed and sainted W.J. Cash."—Washington Post

“A Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editorial writer, Yoder is a man with a reputation for pundritry and demonstrates it with the mince-no-word title of his memoir. For 45 years he has set others straight in newsprint, and now he’s doing it with a memoir.”—Dallas Morning News

“A splendid memoir.”—Wall Street Journal

Freeing the Presses: The First Amendment in Action, Edited by Timothy E. Cook  

"Cook's collection of essays offers a thoughtful, provocative, and timely account of the meaning of a free press in the United States. These essays deliver on the book's promise to explore in insightful and useful ways the relationship between press freedom and press performance."—Theodore L. Glasser, coauthor of Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue

"Freeing the Presses aims to liberate the norms and policies governing the media from the captivity of a narrow tradition of First Amendment law. Cook has put together an exemplary collection that brings into sharp focus the tensions within the U.S. tradition of freedom of the press. Merging the contributions into a coherent dialogue, he invites us to move forward in thinking about policies that will help realize the democratic potential of the media."—John Nerone, author of The Form of News: A History

Money, Power, and Elections: How Campaign Finance Reform Subverts American Democracy by Rodney A. Smith

“A stunning critique of how the current regulatory structure has strengthened millionaires, strengthened incumbents, and weakened the middle class.”—Newt Gingrich in Human Events

“I read Smith’s book with great interest. While I do not agree with all of his conclusions, I believe this is a well-researched book that will hopefully open a much needed dialogue on this subject.” —Martin Frost, former Democratic Congressman from Texas and Chair of the House Democratic Caucus

“This book documents the unintended consequences of campaign finance reform and argues powerfully that while disclosure has been a force for good, regulation has not.”—Brit Hume, Washington Managing Editor, Fox News Channel