HOW AMERICA RUNS

The subject is the machinery. How money moves through the American economy. What federal, state and local governments each actually do. How a law is made, and how it turns into a policy that reaches ordinary life. Healthcare, the military, trade and infrastructure get the same treatment, along with the culture, media and demographics that shape what any of those institutions can do.

There is no argument for one side here, and no specialist vocabulary to get past. Institutions are described as they function, then set against what they change in an ordinary week, so the large structures land as something familiar instead of abstract.

That makes it useful to a student meeting civics for the first time, a voter who wants to know what the institutions actually do, someone new to the country learning the shape of it, and a teacher who would rather have the whole picture in one volume.