Learning About Politics in Time and Space: A Memoir - Paperback

by Richard Rose (Author)

Richard Rose's memoir vividly describes first-hand experience of the transformation of politics in Europe and the United States since 1940. He has been teargassed in Chicago, seen walls go up in Belfast and come down in Berlin. The author's education in the streets and in the corridors of political power give a unique perspective on discrimination by race, religion and class, and the world in which political scientists live today. Rose has distilled a 500-page book into a three-minute Oval Office explanation to George W Bush of why America's intervention in Iraq was a disaster. He gives practical advice to political scientists about how to make words into concepts and communicate what you know to others inside and outside universities. The book's photographs show memorials to the dead, and living evidence of how election forecasting has changed since Delphi. Using skills developed since teaching himself to type at the age of eight, Rose describes his 20 years of working in newspapers, radio and television before publishing his first book. Since then he has combined social science methodology, along with the methodologies of comparative drama and the applied arts, to write many innovative books. This is the latest.

Author Biography

Richard Rose is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, and Visiting Professor at European University Institute, Florence. He has acted as consultant to global organisations including the World Bank, UNDP and the OECD. His work has been translated into 17 languages and Samizdat, and he has contributed widely to print and television media. He has been awarded seven lifetime achievement honours in countries across the world. In his outstanding six-decade career, Rose has written more than forty books about comparative politics and public policy. His broad knowledge - gained from working as a newspaper reporter and from his experiences in the corridors of power - allows him to combine the bottom-up perspective of the ordinary citizen with the views of presidents and prime ministers. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Professor Rose has published six books on post-Communist countries, most recently Understanding Post-Communist Transformation: a Bottom Up Approach.