Patrick J. McCloskey, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. $27.50. 480pp.

The journalist, Patrick McCloskey gives a narrative account of the day-to-day school life of disadvantaged (and often non-Catholic) African American males who graduate on time and get into college. He examines multiple, small acts of heroism in a battle to sustain and improve the few kinds of institutions that make a difference to the poor in America.

John M. Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. $24.95. 216pp.

Hagedorn, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois, Chicago, provides a survey of the rise of violent street gangs on a global scale. More than a billion people reside in slums where gangs have proliferated. He examines their impact in studies of Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Capetown.

Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. $39.95. 254pp.

Berman, lecturer in Bible at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, presents a challenging thesis about the origins of the American political tradition in particular. Debates about civic responsibility, small government, and social inequality will be informed by his approach to the Bible and its relevance to modern political thought.

David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. $29.95. 286pp.

Runciman, senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Cambridge, asserts the proposition that “the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. What are the limits of truthfulness in politics? And when, where, and how should we expect our politicians to be honest with us, and about what?”

Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. $24.95. 256pp.

Olga Shevchenko, assistant professor of sociology at Williams College, has written one of the first sustained ethnographies of postsocialist culture and politics. She examines the new uncertainties of everyday life that have affected a sample of the population of Moscow, who are negotiating new identities and demands as they make sense of their changing social order.