NewBooks Since “diffusion of knowledge” is part of Carnegie Corporation’s mission, we would like to pass on news of four recently published books. One, hot off the presses, is a new book, edited by E.J. Dionne and William Kristol, which was distributed with foundation support. Two are co-authored by Corporation trustees, Admiral William A. Owens, co-chief Executive Officer and vice chairman, Teledesic LLC, and Marta Tienda, director, Office of Population Research, Princeton University. Another is a Corporation project that takes a look at the implementation of the well-respected “Turning Points” program for middle-school reform over the last ten years.

Bush V. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary
E.J. Dionne and William Kristol, editors
Brookings Institution Press, 2001

Supreme Court of the United States, case No. 00-949, and all the litigation preceding it, made American history. The High Court’s 5-4 decision to bar further recounting of the votes cast in Florida effectively decided the presidential contest and set off an open-ended debate about the Court’s role. Dionne and Kristol, two friends from opposite ends of the political spectrum, have pulled together an authoritative guide to the five weeks of litigation, including all pertinent legal documents, as well as reprints of commentary by many writers. The 341-page volume gives readers ample facts and interpretation to make their own informed judgment on the litigation. Issues addressed include whether the Court was, as the majority said, required “to undertake an independent, if still deferential, analysis of state law”? Or was the Court meddling, incorrectly, in state law as Justice Stevens wrote in his dissenting opinion that ended with this indictment: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

Lifting the Fog of War
Admiral William A. Owens with Ed Offley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

In his book, Admiral Owens calls the United States an “exhausted superpower” with a “top-flight force that is running on empty.” He warns of dire consequences, possibly a “total collapse of our military capability.” Owens is on familiar territory here: in the mid-1990s, he capped his 34-year Navy career as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before becoming the second-ranking executive at a satellite communications company. According to Owens, the military’s problem is that many weapons are becoming obsolete and many people in uniform are approaching burn-out due to their over-deployment in global crises. Moreover, he argues that the antiquated and costly organization of the military into four independent services, with quadruplicated support services, retards its evolution into a streamlined fighting force that could be much more efficient, effective and high-tech.

In its recent book review, The New York Times called Owens a “most notable military innovator.” Echoing some of the ideas that Owens champions in the book, President George W. Bush said in February that his administration would conduct a major review of military strategy before proposing a new budget.

Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century
Gayle A. Davis, Anthony W. Jackson
Teachers College Press, 2000

Turning Points 2000 is the sequel to Turning Points, the 1990 landmark report that accelerated reform of middle schools by drawing attention to their critical role—and, too often, their negative role—in the topsy-turvy lives of boys and girls going through adolescence. These are the years when young people experience rapid physical and intellectual growth, emotional turbulence, and, for many, sex, alcohol and drugs. This is also the time when they tend to lose self-esteem and motivation to learn, losses that are associated with leaving the elementary school nest and entering large middle schools with more challenges and fewer supports.

Turning Points set out many recommendations, including the widely adopted replacement of 7-9th grade junior highs with 5-8th, or 6-8th grade middle schools. During the 1990s, Anthony W. Jackson, a program officer at Carnegie Corporation, led a Corporation project aimed at encouraging schools to adopt the reform ideas; Gayle A. Davis was the project’s national director. In a continuing effort to make more middle schools work for young people, Turning Points 2000 synthesizes recent research and shares lessons that reformers learned in the last decade.

The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare and Work
Haya Stier and Marta Tienda
University of Chicago Press, 2001

This scholarly book by two social scientists, who first met as professor and student in Chicago, puts a capstone on their collaborative work about Chicago’s poor. Currently, Haya Stier is senior lecturer in the Department of Labor Studies and the Department of Sociology at Tel Aviv University and Marta Tienda is director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Their book builds on the work of William Julius Wilson and uses his landmark survey, called the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey, to answer difficult questions about poverty. Their six-year analysis of survey data, which included several thousand interviews of residents in impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, produced many interesting conclusions: “Early life experiences with poverty—more than racial and ethnic group membership per se—are what ultimately ‘color’ economic opportunity for black, white, Mexican and Puerto Rican parents residing in poor inner-city neighborhoods,” they write. Wilson has called their work a “tour de force” and a “major contribution to our understanding of how race and ethnicity interact with other social forces in determining the structure of families, receipt of welfare and attachment to the labor market.”

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