Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. By Stephen Biddle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 312p. $37.50.

Stephen Biddle has written a worthy book on the never-ending debate over why land wars are won and lost. It contributes to the academic literature, and his policy judgments deserve attention. He puts forth the theory that “force employment” (i.e., doctrine for using military forces in battle) plays a major role in determining outcomes, as big a role as the size of contending forces and the sophistication of their technologies. He further argues that modern employment doctrine, which enables skilled ground forces to negate the effects of lethal fires against them, was born in late World War I, when attackers finally overcame entrenched defenses. A skilled operations research analyst of tactical battles, Biddle offers a multimethod approach that combines logical reasoning, case studies, mathematical models, statistical analysis, and dynamic simulations. His book can be read by nonspecialists, but many of its technical discussions (e.g., Lanchester equations) require expert knowledge.

I recognize, as will my readers, that I'm in a fairly strange—but hopefully not untenable—position in attempting to assess the studyand teaching of politics. Having been a member of Congress, and in various positions of congressional leadership, for 16 years, and having been more recently a teacher for 10 years, I am, for this purpose, both the student and the studied, the bug and the entomologist. I do understand that it is difficult for me to view this relationship between scholar and subject in a completely objective manner; I hope to do justice to both sides of this exchange, but I recognize that I am much more likely to bring to this discussion a bug's-eye view, gazing up at the scientist as he squints through his microscope and shaking my head in wonderment as he purports to find great complexity in my most simple movements, and great simplicity in my most complex undertakings. Nonetheless, as one who occupies a position on the inner periphery of the academic circle, I am pleased to have been asked by the editors of this journal to share a few thoughts on the relationship—and on the present and potential value of the relationship—between the two distinct worlds of political science and political practice.

Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies. By Fred M. Frohock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 272p. $69.95.

While authors such as Michael Perry challenge liberal thinkers such as Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls to move beyond their neutral rendering of political discourse in order to foster an ecumenical politics between secular and spiritual perspectives, Fred Frohock contends that the public discourse of liberal theory cannot grasp the supernatural basis of sacred discourses. Instead, Frohock contends that “thin” realism (p. 159), found in international relations theory, can better negotiate the tensions between secular and religious discourses in pluralist democracies: “[R]elationships between secular and the sacred, religion and politics, church and state, are settled by the great political languages of stability, efficiency, equity, and power (among other collective level terms), not the metaphors of walls and spheres” (p. 197).

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. By Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 345p. $35.00.

One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

Relevant No More? The Catholic/Protestant Divide in American Electoral Politics.

We live in a world laced with forms of political violence. Kristen Renwick Monroe's latest work develops an interesting social psychological account of the conduct of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of the most extreme form of violence—genocide. It also employs an interesting narrative approach that contributes to broad methodological discussions in political science about the ways in which subjective experience can best be understood. We have thus invited a diverse group of political scientists and historians to comment on the book's analysis of political violence and on its broader approach to the study of politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The economist Amartya Sen has said that world development ought to focus on the capabilities that people achieve, and not simply on aggregate economic indicators. In that spirit, the United Nations since 1990 has published several Human Development (HD) reports that assess nations in terms of health and education conditions, as well as income or wealth. Many countries have assessed their own HD. In The Measure of America, Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins apply this approach to the United States. They describe variation in health, education, and income conditions across American states, congressional districts, and social groups.