Jon A. Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. $29.95. 198pp.

The political scientist, Jon Shields, shows, through meticulous examination of survey data complemented by interviews with more than 30 Christian conservative organizations, the nature and breadth of democratic participation by groups opposed to abortion and who are often deemed as zealots and extremists. He demonstrates the productive tension between passion and reason in matters of great national consequence.

C. Wright Mills, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings. Ed. by John H. Summers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. $21.95. 296pp.

Summers, Visiting Scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, assembles the first collection of Mills’s writings since 1963, including pieces long out of print and otherwise unknown. Summers provides a new account of Mills’ intellectual career and includes an updated and comprehensive bibliography of Mills’s published and unpublished writings.

Paul Hollander, The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. $39.95. 291pp.

Paul Hollander, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, demonstrates his acumen as a constructive critic of an extensive range of American preoccupations, including the varieties of anti-Americanism, mass culture, the relationship between the personal and the political, Michael Moore’s political celebrity, and growing old in America. All this testifies to a lifetime of interest in what defines American society in all of its most important aspects.

Diana Judd, Questioning Authority: Political Resistance and the Ethic of Natural Science. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. $49.95. 164pp.

Judd, professor of political science at William Paterson University, addresses the problem of the slow destruction of the classical liberal tradition. She revisits central questions that pertain to the marginalization of natural science and the liberal intellectual tradition in American life. What does each contribute to an ethic that questions authority? Her work attempts to provide an answer.

Henrik Svensen, The End is Nigh: A History of Natural Disasters. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. $30.00. 224pp.

Svensen, senior researcher at Physics of Geological Processes in Oslo, Norway, offers a compelling narrative account of major natural disasters from the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. His interdisciplinary approach to these events is intended to offer insight into how we know what we know about them and the implications for social policy.