Sunday, April 24, 2016

Sunday Book Roundup

Hello from Providence, Rhode Island and the Brown University Graduate Student Legal History Conference! It has been a long day, so this Sunday's Book Roundup is brief:

From New Books comes an interview with Jefferson Cowie, who discusses The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press).

The Guardian calls Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press) the "magisterial" "prequel to Michelle Alexander's ... The New Jim Crow."
"Hinton doesn’t only blame the police, though. She tracks how money is spent on building prison-like security features to public housing in St Louis (which terrified residents), charts money spent on job training programs, and demonstrates how the LEAA grows 13-fold. And yet, “a federal employment drive to create jobs for black men never materialized” in the manner of the Works Progress Administration, which rescued impoverished white people during the Great Depression. At the same time, in allocating generous funding through the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, the Johnson administration did underwrite robust hiring in nearly all-white police departments – some of which also began patrolling inner-city school campuses."
And, The Nation prescribes five books of essential reading: "Five Books: These Histories of Black Struggle Should Inform Us in 2016," including: