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BOOKS paid parental leave, and good child care, they are being denied the right to choose in the first place. The battle for abortion rights would continue as it has—but the right to make reproductive choices more broadly would expand. Rather than the despicable strategy of tarring prolifers as criminal-promoting, let's allow our opponents to dig out of Levitt's findings and develop a prolife position they can still defend publicly—and being prolife can only be politically defensible if solid prochild policies regarding health care, poverty, and education come first. Then we can go back to fighting over abortion rights. I EVITT LIKES THE counterintuitive finding : pools are more dangerous than I guns, cars are safer than planes, naming your children DeShawn and Shanice will have no effect on their future income. As Levitt suggests, most people already have good reasons for doing what they do; he's just able to discover what those motivations are. To examine the contexts in which people make those decisions—about how to raise their kids, how to buy and sell a home, whether to fly or own a gun or even how to beat real estate agents or the Ku Klux Klan—is to engage in politics. Without engaging in politics, without tying those observations to policies that matter, these facts flutter like bright scraps of paper in the wind. Levitt and Dubner have collected the scraps, but are ready to let them blow away again. The work that remains for the reader is to apply them in useful ways. Levitt and Dubner haven't, but regular people have good reasons to. • GREG SMITHSIMON is an assistant professor of urban studies at Barnard College. Recent Books by Dissent Board Members Dissent has a policy of not reviewing books by members of its editorial board or, for the most part, collections in which they appear. Periodically, though, we inform our readers of their work. Listed below are publications that have appeared since our last listing, as well as some soon to come. We invite you to visit our Web site, www.dissentmagazine.org, where you will find links to reviews. -EDS. Joanne Barkan, Looking Good (Chelsea House, 2005); What Is Velocity?(Scholastic, 2005); Games We P/ay(Chelsea House Publications, 2005); What Is Density?(Scholastic, 2005) Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (Random House, 2006) Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—and What It Will Take to Win It Back (Wiley, 2006) Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne L. Kalleberg, eds. Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life (N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004) Todd Gitlin, The Intellectuals and the Flag (Columbia University Press, 2006) Irving Howe & the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks, edited and with an introduction by John Rodden (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Partial list of contributors: Mark Levinson, Brian Morton, Marshall Berman, Nicholas Howe, Ian Williams, Alexander Cockburn, Joseph Epstein, Robert Boyers, George Scialabba, Morris Dickstein, Leonard Kriegel, Samuel Hux. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Knopf, 2006) 106 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 BOOKS Erazim Kota: Svoboda, svedomi, souziti (Freedom, Conscience, Community) (Prague: Sociological Publishers, 2004); Erazim Kohdk: Zornym uhlem filosofa (Erazim Kohak: A Philosopher's Perspective). Selected journal articles from the years 1998-2004. Edited by Marie Skybova (Prague: Jezek Publishers, 2004) Jeremy Larner, Chicken on Church & Other Poems (Big Rooster Press, 2006) A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press: cloth & paper, 2005), edited by Thomas Cushman. Contributors: Christopher Hitchens, Jeffrey Herf, Jan Narveson, Mitchell Cohen, Roger Scruton, Mehdi Mozaffari, Daniel Kofman, Paul Berman, Ian Buruma, MientJan Faber, Jonathan 136e, Norman Geras, Richard Just, John Lloyd, Richard Herzinger, Michel Taubmann, Anders Jerichow, Thomas Cushman and Adam Michnik, Josê Ramos-Horta, Johann Hari, Pamela Bone, Ann Clwyd, Tony Blair Kevin Mattson, When America was Great The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (Routledge, 2004); paperback 2nd edition, 2006; and Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (Wiley, 2006) Deborah Meier and George Wood...

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