In The Boat Captains Conundrum, author Tom Corbett completes an intellectual journey that reflects on his four-plus decades as a scholar and doer of social policy. That journey starts with Ouch, Now I Remember in which he recounts his early days growing up in a closed, working class, ethnic community from which he underwent several transformative experiences that broadened his worldview. In Browsing Through My Candy Store, the author shared his struggles while confronting many of the most vexing poverty and welfare battles of the last half century. This final volume, the Boat Captains Conundrum, completes the trilogy. This work takes the reader on quite a different journey, a path that goes deeper into how to think about the big policy issues and social challenges of our times. In the end, Corbett makes a number of compelling points. Becoming a successful policy wonk is more than conquering the technical skills of doing quantitative analysis. It demands that we do more than merely dissect issues with analytical acumen. Rather, doing good policy work requires creativity, imagination, breadth of interests, a nimble and acquisitive mind, historical depth, and just a little rebellious risk-taking. But if you can conjure up such traits, there is no better way to spend your professional life. Follow the author as he shares his take on how to do policy work well and even make a contribution to the public good. Get inside his head as he struggled to make sense out of the more daunting social challenges of the late twentieth century. Above all, enjoy his wistful and sometimes witty wanderings as seen through a policy wonks eye where he touches upon mind-numbing conundrums with deft insight. It is a great journey to be enjoyed both by students of policy and all those concerned with public life.

Jeremiah Joshua Connelly is about to retire from his academic position at the University of British Columbia. He anticipates a small ordinary affair of conventional speeches, farewell dinners, and the usual parting gifts and well-wishes. Instead, his past visits him in unexpected ways. He not only confronts people from the mists of a distant era he thought long lost but also accepts some truths about himself. Over the next week, Josh Connelly comes to terms with who he really is, with a past he tried to avoid, and with the people he had run away from for so long. This work takes us deep into the scars left by a war that tore the United States apart in the 1960s and which left an indelible mark on many who lived through that turbulent time. While a work of fiction, the novel touches upon the real emotions and struggles that many young people endured during this conflicted period. It explores the inner turmoil with which they contended as they fought to make sense out of competing claims upon their loyalty. This was a time where easy answers were not available, where each young man and woman who cared about this country had to arrive at their own interpretation of events. Each had to decide the contours of their personal character and for what principles they would stand. Each had to articulate their own moral compass. Tenuous Tendrils is the story of one such young man as he journeys from exile and isolation to reconnect and embrace a life he thought long lost.

The contributors to this book review the postindustrial subculture, emphasizing cross-disciplinary and cross-contextual inquiry, a central idiom of postindustrial organizational life. The essays consider alternative methods of understanding media that add variety to "meanings" within and without organizations. This multi-method approach in the search for meaning and the limits of words and symbols to express meaning generates a personally interpretive basis to science.