Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis

NY1 Online's "Inside City Hall" recently featured a lively panel discussion between Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch and authors Seymour Lachman and Robert Polner to discuss former New York Governor Hugh Carey. Lachman and Polner's new book on Carey, The Man Who Saved New York—a portrait of one of New York’s most remarkable governors, with emphasis on his leadership during the fiscal crisis of 1975—will be available next week. You can preorder a copy here or at any other online retailer. Look for it in stores soon as well. It's certainly relevant reading for these times, as New York and most states in the nation once again find themselves in major financial distress.

Watch the panel discussion over at NY1 Online.

Should lawmakers be allowed to draw their districts?

Seymour P. Lachman answers "no" in his recent New York Times op-ed piece. The former five-term New York state senator and coauthor of the forthcoming book, The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Fiscal Crisis of 1975, says that his years spent working in state government convinced him that allowing lawmakers to redraw districts can create a sort of lifetime tenure for elected officials and a near "imperial level of control for the majority leadership."

Read the full op-ed here.

Author Spotlight: Samer S. Shehata

Samer S. Shehata is Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University and the author of the new book, Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt, an ethnographic study of textile factory workers in Alexandria, Egypt. Samer's been busy promoting the book these past few months and recently shared some of his multimedia interviews with us.

Samer was interviewed by the publication for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown and you can read it here. The school's media relations office also produced a video interview with him; watch it here. Finally, you can listen to an in-depth interview where Samer explores what he learned while researching and writing the book, including how the "tools of a different discipline—cultural anthropology, specifically the discipline of ethnography—opened up the world to him in way that had great implications both for the book and for his teaching."