November Series of the Month: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

We are shining the spotlight on this controversial election month, midterms, and America politics, by reading The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll as our Series of the Month.

Ingersoll was a notorious radical whose uncompromising views on religion and slavery (they were bad, in his opinion), women's suffrage (a good idea, he believed), and other contentious matters of his era made him a wildly popular orator and critic of 19th-century American culture and public life. 

Legendary as a speaker—he memorized his speeches and could talk for hours without notes—and as a proponent of freethought, Ingersoll is an American original whose words still ring with truth and power today. His most important works are gathered in this 12-volume collected edition, first published posthumously in 1901.

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The paperback retail list price for this series is: $215.88, but now our price is: $174.99 (you save $40.89 or a 19 percent discount)

The hardcover retail list price for this series is: $407.88, but now our price is: $324.99 (you save $82.89 or a 20 percent discount)

September Book of the Month: The Moynihan Report - 50 years later

With the upcoming midterm elections, supreme court nominations, and immigration issues on everyone's mind, Cosimo would like to present The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family - The Case for National Action by Office of Policy Planning and Research of U.S. Department of Labor Daniel Moynihan as our Book of the Month for September.

Against the backdrop of President Johnson's War on Poverty and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, a young civil servant with the Office of Planning and Research O at the Department of Labor, Daniel P. Moynihan, wrote in 1965 his most controversial study The Moynihan Report - The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

This report drew widespread attention from critics and supporters alike. It concluded that the conditions under which black children were being raised, generally in single-mother households, were the leading cause of black poverty.

As Moynihan wrote decades later: "The work began in the most orthodox setting, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."

Although Moynihan was a liberal politician and the report called for jobs programs and vocational training for blacks, many black and civil rights leaders found his report patronizing and that it relied on stereotypes of the black family and black men. 

The 1965 statistics, when approximately 25 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock, have not improved 50 years later, when this percentage has grown to 75 percent; with 50 percent for Hispanic babies and 29 percent for white babies. Also in other areas, such as income, employment, and incarceration, the statistics have deteriorated for blacks. The legacy of The Moynihan Report is that the debate it launched around cultural causes of black poverty is still not settled in modern day America.

August Book of the Month: A Journey through Governance, by William A. Morrill

Cosimo's Book of Month for August is a personal account from career civil servant, William A. Morrill. Throughout six combined presidencies and nearly twenty-five years working at the White House, Morrill experienced some of the most iconic American moments in history first-hand. 

Morrill's memoir, A Journey through Governance: A Public Servant's Experience under Six Presidents reveals how the United States government operates from within. Morrill guides the reader through the Capital corridors, encountering one critical national issue after another. His insights and experiences could become useful in the upcoming months for those citizens unsure about the importance of public service in determining their mid-term votes.


About the Author:
William A. Morrill has had a long distinguished career of public service in federal and local government. He served in the administrations of six presidents, from Eisenhower to Carter: at the Pentagon on the Air Force Headquarters staff; in the Executive Office of the President under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter; and as an assistant secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Presidents Ford and Carter. 

Morrill has remained engaged in public-service and public-policy matters in the private sector, including with the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration. After leaving government, he was president of Mathematica Policy Research, chief executive and chairman of Mathtech, and a senior fellow at ICF International. He can be found online on his website. 



Cosmio is proud to offer both an affordable paperback and eBook edition of A Journey through Governance at leading online bookstores including Barnes & Noble (paperback and eBook) and Amazon (paperback and eBook).