Hot Off the Presses

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

By Samantha Power, Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Harper Collins (2019)

The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of U.S. foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign.

After Obama was elected president, Power went from being an activist outsider to a government insider, navigating the halls of power while trying to put her ideals into practice. She served for four years as Obama’s human rights adviser, and in 2013, he named her U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the youngest American to assume the role.

“Honest, personal, revealing… about the development of a young woman’s inner strength and self-knowledge.” —Colm Tóibín author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster

Valuing U.S. National Parks and Programs: America’s Best Investment 1st Edition

Edited by Linda J. Bilmes, Member of the Board, Belfer Center, and John B. Loomis

Routledge (2019)

Valuing U.S. National Parks and Programs develops a comprehensive framework to calculate the economic value of protected areas, with particular application to the U.S. National Park Service (NPS). The framework covers many benefits provided by NPS units and programs, including on-site visitation, carbon sequestration, and intellectual property such as in education curricula and filming of movies/ TV shows, with case studies of each included. The editors conclude with a chapter on innovative approaches for sustainable funding of the NPS in its second century. The framework serves as a blueprint of methodologies for conservationists, government agencies, land trusts, economists, and others to value public lands, historical sites, and related programs, such as education.

“Linda Bilmes, John Loomis and their collaborators have calculated a value of the priceless…. Their work makes an important case for supporting these irreplaceable assets not just for today, but to inspire generations to come.” —Sally Jewell, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, 2013–2017

Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know

By Erica Chenoweth, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Oxford University Press (Forthcoming 2020)

Civil resistance is a method of conflict through which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods (strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics) to prosecute a conflict without directly harming or threatening to harm an opponent. Sometimes called nonviolent resistance, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, this form of political action is now a mainstay across the globe. If we are going to understand the manifold protest movements emerging around the globe, we need a thorough understanding of civil resistance and its many dynamics and manifestations.

In Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Featuring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples, this book provides a comprehensive yet pithy overview of this enormously important subject.

Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For

By Susan Rice, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center

Simon & Schuster (2019)

Laying bare the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, D.C., Susan Rice also examines the ancestral legacies that influenced her. Her elders—immigrants on one side and descendants of slaves on the other—had high expectations that each generation would rise. And rise they did—in uniform and in the pulpit, as educators, community leaders, and public servants.

Rice served throughout the Clinton administration, becoming one of the nation’s youngest assistant secretaries of state and, later, one of President Obama’s most trusted advisors.

Rice provides an insider’s account of some of the most complex issues confronting the United States over three decades. With unmatched insight and characteristic bluntness, she reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges.

“… Rice achieved early success through disciplined hard work, intellectual brilliance, and friendships with the likes of Madeline Albright… Rice is able to look back on her experiences with pride, gratitude, and bracing realism.” —Booklist, Starred Review