The approach the United States has taken to addressing teen pregnancy—a ubiquitous concern in teen education and perennial topic in popular culture—has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Specifically since the radical overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, Clare Daniel argues, teen pregnancy, previously regarded as a social problem requiring public solutions, is seen as an individual failure on the part of the teens involved.

Daniel investigates coordinated teen pregnancy prevention efforts within federal political discourse, along with public policy, popular culture, national advocacy, and local initiatives, revealing the evidence of this transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, political leaders from both parties used teen pregnancy to strengthen their attacks on racialized impoverished communities. With a new welfare policy in 1996 that rhetoric moved toward blaming teen pregnancy—seemingly in a race- and class-neutral way—on the teens who engaged in sex prematurely and irresponsibly. Daniel effectively illustrates that the construction of teen pregnancy as an individual's problem has been a key component in a neoliberal agenda that frees the government from the responsibility of addressing systemic problems of poverty, lack of access to education, ongoing structural racism, and more.

The first comprehensive analysis of the full range of antiterror initiatives undertaken in the United States after the 2001 terrorist attacks

Unlike earlier books published shortly after the September 11 attacks that focus on the Patriot Act, More Secure, Less Free? covers the Patriot Act but goes well beyond, analyzing Total Information Awareness, Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS), Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II), and a number of other "second wave" antiterror initiatives.

It's also the first book of its kind to go beyond federal measures to explain the devolution of antiterror policies to the states, and now to the military as well. Author Mark Sidel discusses the continuing debates on antiterror law at the state level, with a focus on the important states of New York, California, and Michigan, and explains how the military-through an informant program known as "Eagle Eyes"-is now taking a direct hand in domestic antiterror efforts.

The volume also discusses and analyzes crucially important aspects of American antiterror policy that have been largely ignored in other volumes and discusses the effects of antiterror policy on the American academic world and the American nonprofit sector, for example. And it provides the first comparative perspectives on U.S. antiterror policy yet published in an American volume, discussing antiterror initiatives in Great Britain, Australia, and India and contrasting those to the American experience.

More Secure, Less Free? is important and essential reading for anyone interested in an analytical perspective on American antiterror policy since September 11 that goes well beyond the Patriot Act.

Mark Sidel is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa and a research scholar at the University's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

The image of the drug-addicted American soldier—disheveled, glassy-eyed, his uniform adorned with slogans of antiwar dissent—has long been associated with the Vietnam War. More specifically, it has persisted as an explanation for the U.S. defeat, the symbol of a demoralized army incapable of carrying out its military mission.

Yet as Jeremy Kuzmarov documents in this deeply researched book, popular assumptions about drug use in Vietnam are based more on myth than fact. Not only was alcohol the intoxicant of choice for most GIs, but the prevalence of other drugs varied enormously. Although marijuana use among troops increased over the course of the war, for the most part it remained confined to rear areas, and the use of highly addictive drugs like heroin was never as widespread as many imagined.

Like other cultural myths that emerged from the war, the concept of an addicted army was first advanced by war hawks seeking a scapegoat for the failure of U.S. policies in Vietnam, in this case one that could be linked to "permissive" liberal social policies and the excesses of the counterculture. But conservatives were not alone. Ironically, Kuzmarov shows, elements of the antiwar movement also promoted the myth, largely because of a presumed alliance between Asian drug traffickers and the Central Intelligence Agency. While this claim was not without foundation, as new archival evidence confirms, the left exaggerated the scope of addiction for its own political purposes.

Exploiting bipartisan concern over the perceived "drug crisis," the Nixon administration in the early 1970s launched a bold new program of federal antidrug measures, especially in the international realm. Initially, the "War on Drugs" helped divert attention away from the failed quest for "peace with honor" in Southeast Asia. But once institutionalized, it continued to influence political discourse as well as U.S. drug policy in the decades that followed.