Nicholas Henry, Deborah Stone, and

Nicholas Henry, Deborah Stone, and the team of Michael E. Milakovichand George J. Gordon write public administration textbooks that cover the contemporary United States, stretching from the era of the Great Society to President Barack Obama’s refusal to take the nation’s economy over the economic cliff. In these books, Americans are portrayed as patriotic, respecting then nation (including by participating in national elec¬tions), and engaging more or less willingly in civil society. All three books provide voluminous informa-tion concerning public administration and policy making. These are invaluable guides to our field—and, of course, they are creations of a particular time and place.

This trio of books should be placed in a time capsule. They arc that good. (Each was originally published at least a quarter-century ago; this review treats each, in its current edition only.) Yet they also represent the complexities that invariably arise when modern-style bureaucracy is imperfectly merged with democracy. Public administrators encounter deficits, debt, wars, diatribes, paradoxes, scandals, markets, authorities, skills, incompetence, chance, and much more. In wrestling with such vast variation, compromises are unavoidable. None of those texts includes case study analyses, apart from Stone’s concluding study of affirmative action in practice. None forges comparative