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Anthony M. Orum is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously he taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin for fifteen years (1972-1986). Besides this book on Austin, he has also written two other books on cities: City-Building in America (Westview Press, 1995) and, with Xiangming Chen, The World of Cities: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Blackwell Publishers, 2002). He is the Inaugural Editor of a new quarterly journal, cosponsored by the American Sociological Association and its Community and Urban Sociology section, City & Community. He has also written on methods in the social sciences, including, Joe Feagin, Anthony Orum, and Gideon Sjoberg (coeditors), A Case for the Case Study (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and , on politics, including Anthony Orum, Introduction to Political Sociology, 4th edition (Prentice-Hall, 2001). Presently he is involved in two new projects, one, with Xiangming Chen, a study of the impact of globalization on Shanghai, and , the other, a study of the ways in which the latest generation of American immigrants has reshaped cities like Chicago.

Power, Money & the People is a fascinating chronicle of Austin's urban boom. Austin's growth was no accident. Orum traces its beginnings to the New Deal years, when congressman Lyndon B. Johnson sponsored federal capital works projects that created the springboard for expansion, starting with the building of the dams on the Colorado River. Then, as now, the Austin City Council played a central role in determining the direction of growth. Orum offers one of the most intimate views of the workings of local politics in the literature of urban America. The political and financial influences of such Austin notables as Tom Miller, Walter Long, Commodore Edgar Perry, C.B. Smith and legendary Austin populist Emma Long is vividly described.
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<br> But Power, Money &amp; the People is more than just a log of who had the money and influence to make change; it is also the powerful story of the many conflicts and controversies that have shaped that change. It is the full story of an American community's race relations. Orum's history of Austin's Black community is especially revealing, providing a model of how one Southern city dealt with integration in the years before and after Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycotts. Conflict continues in Austin today, and Orum chronicles the battles between neighborhood groups and what they consider to be rapacious real estate developers' disregard for the environment, the struggle over the development of the troubled South Texas Nuclear Project, and the "no growth" movement to stop uncontrolled and unplanned expansion,