This book is the latest product of Georgetown University Press's outstanding American Governance and Public Policy series. Karen Mossberger embarks upon a substantial intel- lectual effort and seeks to accomplish several tasks. First, she provides a detailed account of the evolution of the enterprise zone concept and chronicles its implementation in five states.

In the late twentieth century, language conflicts became not only a central battle in public policy but also an essential medium for political expression among traditionally margin- alized groups. This is clearly reflected in a host of policy initiatives (from antiimmigrant propositions such as 187 in California, to English-only and antibilingual education move- ments in such states as Arizona, California, Colorado, and Florida) and the proliferation of studies linking language with Latino and Asian American politics (e.g., Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds., The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society, 1998; and Louis De- Sipio and Rodolfo de la Garza, Making Americans, Remaking America: Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1998).

Although political conflict is certainly no stranger to U.S. cities, the contributors to Culture Wars suggest that a new kind of conflict, heavily embued with moral overtones, is surfacing with more frequency on the urban landscape. Battles over abortion, gay and lesbian rights, hate crimes, and the like, are taking their place along side the more traditional disputes associated with service delivery, economic develop- ment, and redistribution of resources. The morality-based nature of these new culture wars has, according to the contributors, created a new type of politics that is evidenced in the way issues are presented, debated, and resolved. These differences are a function of the passion associated with moral claims, the involvement of religious organizations, and the use of nonconventional protest tactics that can be fairly aggressive. These differences between how culture wars play out and politics as usual may render existing theories of local politics insufficient.

Political theory reminds us that punishment is a fundamentally political action, an exercise of political power. This book is about penal reform and the philosophy of punishment as both were debated in postrevolutionary America. Pestritto combs through original writings of the founders and state constitutions in an effort to elucidate leading philosophies about the purpose of the criminal law and punishment. At a macro level, the book provides a window into how the American system, in Pestritto's venues of Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, mediates between the tensions of the preservation of individual liberty and maintenance of public order. The book attempts to bridge the historical gap from our founding to current issues in sentencing, such as the three-strikes rule, determinate or mandatory sentencing laws, and state experimentation in marrying sentences to available prison space, or the cost of incapacitation. Pestritto's greatest contribution is to mine new material in these historical conversations on punishment, which allows them to be heard in our contemporary debates.

Beth Reingold questions some of the conventional wisdom regarding women representing women and their interests. She does this by comparing the legislative behavior of women in the Arizona and California state legislatures in 1990, and she provides an understanding of the consequences and implications of electing women to public office. Reingold is interested in what these trends mean for the political repre- sentation of women in the United States, and it is this concern that focuses the volume.

Concern about the health of civic life in the United States has generated academic debate, journalist commentaries, several study commissions, and publications by the score. Is civil society in decline, or is it reinventing itself? That is the question addressed from a variety of perspectives by the sociologists and political scientists who contributed to this volume. The chapters, initially prepared for presentation at a conference in September 1997, examine issues at the center of the debate from several theoretical perspectives. The editors organize the contributions under three headings: the roots of civic engagement, civic life in a changing society, and the ironies of contemporary activism.

The Movers and the Shirkers is a critique and extension of a well-cited and important research program: attempts to measure the degree to which legislators shirk, or advance their own policy goals at the expense of those held by their constituents. Such analyses (e.g., Joseph P. Kalt and Mark Zupan, "Capture and Ideology in the Economic Theory of Politics," American Economic Review 74 [June 1984]: 279­ 300; John R. Lott, "Political Cheating," Public Choice 52 [1987]: 169­86) typically assume a principal-agent relation- ship between constituents and elected representatives, and they specify a regression analysis with roll-call behavior as a left-hand side variable and various measures of constituency interests and legislator ideology as right-hand side variables. Previous work (John E. Jackson and John W. Kingdon, "Ideology, Interest Groups, and Legislative Votes," American Journal of Political Science 36 [August 1992]: 805­23) shows that these analyses are bedeviled by measurement and esti- mation issues. Eric Uslaner highlights a more fundamental flaw: By ignoring important and well-understood mechanisms that tie legislators to their constituents, these analyses as- sume what should be tested.

Ted Lowi once wrote that scandals are a proper subject for the political scientist because the observer is catching the country in the act of being itself (Theodore J. Lowi, "Fore- word," in Andrei S. Markovits and Mark Silverstein, eds., The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies, 1988, p. xii). Lowi's remark seems particularly apt when applied to the study of politics in the United States. At the heart of the American political tradition lies an acute ambiv- alence concerning the nature and uses of political power.

Sandra Suarez sets out to understand why corporations choose certain political strategies rather than others. She argues that firms want to maximize profits and recognize that politics affects their ability to do so, but they cannot easily translate their interests into concrete political strategies.

This anthology opens with several compelling first-person narratives of life inside the U.S. military institution, followed by analyses by both military and civilian researchers. The academic contributors approach their topics from different disciplines, including political science, history, sociology, and literature/film. The volume seeks to bridge the gap between those inside the institution and those on the outside (p. ix). The effort to build this bridge began with a series of specialized conferences and workshops on gender and mili- tary culture spanning the 1990s. I participated in several of these and heard some of the contributors to this collection present their research. Other volumes that developed from the conferences are Mary Fainsod Katzenstein's Faithful and Fearless (1998), Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Judith Reppy, Beyond Zero Tolerance (1999), and Francine D'Amico and Laurie Weinstein, Gender Camouflage (1999).