Stanford University Press Blog

Back to School Reading List, Part III

With many states in the midst of post-primary fever, and November 2 just around the corner, last spring's health care reform bill--which has yet to enter the implementation stage--is still very much on many people's lips and minds.  In his new book, Still Broken: Understanding the Us S. Health Care System (click here to read more), author Stephen M.  Davidson urges readers to support the reform, even though it may be "imperfect:"

  "It appears that Democrats are having a hard time persuading Americans that passing health care reform this spring, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was a good thing.  The stakes are high.  Republican Congressional candidates are running to repeal it, and while a repeal effort will fail as long as Barack Obama is president, a Congress that requires Republican support to pass anything may be able to delay implementation of key parts of the law.  The irony is that, although the law is imperfect, the case for support is very strong. "

 Click here to read more of Davidson's arguments on a recent Politico.com posting.

Back-to-School Reading List, Part II

Cole Porter loved Paris in the fall (true, he loved it in the winter, spring, and summer too); I always think of  Hemingway's  A Moveable Feast when the weather turns autumnal: "the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.  The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside..."  What is it about Paris and the fall that seem so perfect together? 

I'd like to be holed up in a café (not that one, which was "sad and evilly run," but the "good café" that Hemingway knew "on the Place St.-Michel"), with a glass of white wine and a copy of John Baldwin's Paris 1200, an exquisite  guide to the Paris of eight centuries ago.  Using only contemporary sources, the voices of the city come alive to tell the story of what everyday life was like for the students, scholars, clerics, merchants, rulers and common people of 13th-Century Paris.

Click here to read more about Paris 1200.

What's on Your Back-to-School Reading List?

The post-summer blues are generally short-lived for students (of any age), who can look forward to new notebooks (or laptops), new teachers, and fresh new ideas to take the sting out of September.  But fresh ideas are not the purview of students alone!  This fall we are launching a crop of titles to stimulate your intellect and put you in a Back-to-School frame of mind.  Here is just a sampling of what’s on offer (we'll update every Wednesday in September):

Micah Zenko’s Between Threats and War: U.S. Discrete Military Operations in the Post-Cold War World considers the increased use of limited military ops by the past five Presidential administrations, discloses some alarming facts about their cost and inefficiency, and raises some serious questions about their future use. 

Click here to read the Introduction.

Click here to listen to a recent podcast Zenko recorded for the Council on Foreign Relations.