Joseph Kenney was born on the East Side of Manhattan in 1951, surrounded by eclectic landmarks such as the United Nations Headquarters, Grand Central Terminal and The Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He was the fifth child of seven siblings, living in a Two Bedroom Railroad Flat in a neighborhood that was a melting pot of ethnic persuasions in which most families thrived.He, though, was encumbered by alcoholism, abandonment and festering resentment and was subjected to unspeakable acts of se...

As the number of women in the U.S. Senate grows, so does the number of citizens represented by women senators. At the same time, gender remains a key factor in senators’ communications to constituents as well as in news media portrayals of senators. Focusing on 32 male and female senators during the 2006 congressional election year, Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney examine in detail senators’ official websites, several thousand press releases and local news stories, and surveys of 18,0...

Negative campaigning is a central component of politics in the United States. Yet, until now, demonstrating the impact of combative advertising on voters has been elusive. How can we reconcile the findings of a plethora of studies with the methods of politicians? This book cuts through to the central issue: how negative advertising influences voters' attitudes and actions. Focusing on U.S. senatorial campaigns, Kim Fridkin and Patrick Kenney draw from surveys, experiments, facial expressio...

In Choices in a Chaotic Campaign, Kim Fridkin and Patrick Kenney explore the dynamic nature of citizens' beliefs and behaviors in response to the historic 2020 presidential campaign. In today's political environment where citizens can effortlessly gather information, it is important to move beyond standard political characteristics and consider the impact of pre-existing psychological predispositions. Fridkin and Kenney argue these predispositions influence assessments of campaign events a...

**AudioFiles Earphones Award Winner * Library Journal Audio “Editor's Picks of the Year”An NPR 2025 “Books We Love”USA Today April PickAn Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick2026 Gotham Book Prize Finalist2026 Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List Pick**"With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Gre...

This book offers a bold, comprehensive look at how campaigns actually work, from the framing of issues to media coverage to voters' decisions. In so doing, it challenges the common wisdom that campaigns are a noisy, symbolic aspect of electoral politics, in which the outcomes are determined mainly by economic variables or presidential popularity. Campaigns, the authors argue, do matter in the political process. Examining contested U.S. Senate races between 1988 and 1992, Kim Kahn and Patri...

Negative campaigning is a central component of politics in the United States. Yet, until now, demonstrating the impact of combative advertising on voters has been elusive. How can we reconcile the findings of a plethora of studies with the methods of politicians? This book cuts through to the central issue: how negative advertising influences voters' attitudes and actions. Focusing on US senatorial campaigns, Kim Fridkin and Patrick Kenney draw from surveys, experiments, facial expression ...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!"Sexy, messy, funny and raw." —The New York Times#1 New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rowell returns with a breathtakingly honest novel about a woman who lost everything — and isn't sure she wants it back, narrated by Rebecca Lowman.Everybody knows that Cherry's husband, Tom, is in Hollywood making a movie . . .Almost nobody knows that h...

Political science scholar James M. Curry explores the inner workings of Congress's House of Representatives in this thought-provoking analysis.The 2009 financial stimulus bill ran to more than 1,100 pages, yet it wasn't even given to Congress in its final form until thirteen hours before debate was set to begin, and it was passed twenty-eight hours later. How are representatives expected to digest so much information in such a short time? The answer? They aren't.

April 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the landmark legislation that has provided the foundation of federal education policy in the United States. In Presidents, Congress, and the Public Schools, longtime policy analyst Jack Jennings examines the evolution of federal education policy and outlines a bold and controversial vision for its future.Jennings brings an insider’s knowledge to this account, of...

Some aspects of the 2014 midterm elections would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. SuperPACs spent unlimited amounts of money, candidates used Twitter and other social media to communicate with voters, and Democrats found themselves all but entirely cast out of federal office in the South. Other aspects of the midterm elections, such as primary elections, direct mail, and the hurdles faced by members of marginalized communities in making their concerns known, were more familiar. How...

From the Affordable Care Act to No Child Left Behind, politicians often face a puzzling problem: although most Americans support the aims and key provisions of these policies, they oppose the bills themselves. How can this be? Why does the American public so often reject policies that seem to offer them exactly what they want?By the time a bill is pushed through Congress or ultimately defeated, we've often been exposed to weeks, months—even years—of media coverage that underscores t...