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This section includes two book reviews: The first is Jack Treadway’s review of David Daley’s Ratf**cked: The True Story behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. The second is Andreea Maierean’s review of Walter M. Brasch’s Fracking America: Sacrificing Health and the Environment for Short-Term Economic Benefit.

A few years ago, optimistic estimates claimed that Eastern Europe possessed large shale formations that seemed likely to produce great quantities of natural gas. In addition, the countries in the region had strategic incentives to develop a transparent domestic shale industry in order to reduce its reliance on gas from Russia. Nevertheless, political and social factors as well as differences in physical characteristics, prevented the U.S. experience from being replicable in Eastern Europe. In the end, most multinational energy corporations announced that they had abandoned efforts to find and produce natural gas from shale rock in Eastern Europe. The paper discusses the impact of shale gas exploration on the quality of democratic governance by comparing and contrasting fracking regulations adopted in the United States with those of Eastern Europe. The main research question attempts to ask and identify: “what are the factors that influence a democratic and fair governance of public natural resources”.

We commonly tell our undergraduate students that we want to prepare them in a variety of ways. We want them to be able to understand data, think critically, write well, and know how to construct an argument. These goals should arguably be central components of a liberal arts education and political science major. However, it is difficult to directly impart these skills on students unless they are consistently part of ones program of study. In this analysis, we compare the curricula in a small department that provides flexibility to students on course scheduling and highlight areas of potential growth for building these skills throughout the 4-year degree. We find the need for further conversation regarding class design and skills developed as an important goal. Further, we highlight the importance of a multi-class approach to teaching students research design, statistical literacy, and academic writing.

First-year courses for entering university students are vital to supporting their success and fostering lasting connections between them and their academic environments. To that end, four First-Year Foundations (FYF) instructors from one small private university in northeastern United States selected a common read to use with their diverse classes, including five classes with large numbers of students from Arab countries. The team worked together to bring literature to life for these first-year students by selecting an intergenerational novel about life in Palestine entitled A Curious Land: Stories from Home, then bringing the award-winning author Susan Muaddi Darraj to campus to meet the students and discuss her novel in both formal and informal settings. The challenges involved in accomplishing this task are shared in this paper, as are the successful results. Sample study guides developed by the FYF academic team are also shared for those instructors who wish to use the same book for their own students, or who might find a model of this method of bringing literature to life useful in planning their own instructional activities.

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