The Trouble with Government. By Derek Bok. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 493p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Extract

When first presented with this book, I confess to harboring two strong reservations—both, as it turns out, badly misplaced. First, perhaps because the author is a widely known American who was once the president of Harvard and, therefore, spent considerable time among movers and shakers, I was prepared for a broad, rambling, and discursive book peppered with anecdotes, personal musings, name-dropping, and disconnected prescriptions for change. Second, no doubt because I have never been fond of the overarching evaluation exercises that so enthrall foundations, when I read in the introduction that this volume on government had been commissioned by three major foundations, I feared I was about to read another governmental report card accompanied by the obligatory and often vacuous justification for the grade assigned in each area.