A Wide Range

To learn more about the books to your left, roll over their covers with your mouse.

Senator Tom Daschle

Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's

Senate Majority Leader and the original nominee for Secretary of Health, Tom Daschle proposes a studied solution to the problem of healthcare in the US.  Critical delineates the weaknesses of previous attempts at national health coverage, outlines the complex economic factors and medical issues affecting coverage and sets forth plans for change. The book has been praised by then-Senator Obama, Harry Reid, and Bob Dole, among many others.

Richard Louv

Last Child in the Woods

Algonquin/Workman

Journalist and advocate Richard Louv was awarded the 2008 Audubon Award for this groundbreaking national bestseller.  Last Child in the Woods diagnoses “nature deficit disorder”—the growing chasm between children and nature as a generation learns to play indoors, increasingly “plugged in” to electronic games.  Hailed as "an absolute must-read" by the Boston Globe and "too tantalizing to ignore" by Audubon magazine, Last Child in the Woods is the inspiring work that proves children need nature as much as nature needs children. 

Nancy Sherman

The Untold War

W.W. Norton

A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” that examines the moral and emotional lives of soldiers.  Trained as both a philosopher and psychoanalyst, Nancy Sherman was the first ethicist at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Joe Bageant

Deer Hunting with Jesus

Crown/Random House

In 1999, progressive columnist Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia after a thirty-year absence.  Deer Hunting With Jesus relates the lessons he learned coming home in this oft-unseen part of America, the same America that helped re-elect George W. Bush in 2004 and gave Obama a run for his money in 2008. Mother Jones says, “Enough fine Southern storytelling for ten volumes is distilled into this fantastically readable explanation of why working-class America has given up on liberalism.” Film and TV rights have been optioned by HBO.

Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel

More Than Good Intentions

Dutton/Penguin Group

When it comes to solving global poverty, people are passionate and polarized.  At one extreme: invest more resources. At the other: stop throwing money down a sinkhole. In More Than Good Intentions, Karlan and Appel present a pioneering, realistic, and hopeful approach. By combining behavioral economics with worldwide field research, they show how taking human irrationality into account when providing banking, insurance, health care, and education can significantly improve the well-being of poor people everywhere.

Ken Ballen

Terrorists in Love

Free Press/Simon & Schuster

The founder of the nonpartisan not-for-profit Terror Free Tomorrow, Ken Ballen spent five years as a pollster and a researcher with rare access, interviewing more than a hundred Islamic radicals, asking them searching questions about their inner lives, deepest faith, and what it was that ultimately drove them to jihad.  An extraordinarily gifted listener and storyteller, Ballen takes us where no one has dared to go—deep into the secret heart of Islamic fundamentalism, providing a glimpse at the lives of those whose mission it is to destroy us.