Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 182p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

No undergraduate public administration course would be complete without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to “scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues. Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs (as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins. If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or even what it is?