William Terry Couch (1901-1988) began his four-decade publishing career building the University of North Carolina Press into one of the nation's leading university presses. His editorial attacks on the social ills of the South earned him a reputation as a southern liberal. By the 1940s, his disaffection with New Deal politics turned him toward the right, resulting in his 1950 firing as director of the University of Chicago Press. As a conservative, Couch sought books and articles that would sway general readers from what he saw as an intellectual torpor that accepted the growing role of government in American life. The liberals who controlled the presses found him dogmatic and irascible. When he tried to turn Collier's Encyclopedia into a journal of conservative opinion, he was fired as editor in chief in 1959. He ended his career as publisher for the libertarian William Volker Fund, which collapsed in the 1960s under charges of Nazism. Couch was committed to publishing as a social cause and strove to disturb American complacency. This is the first book-length biography of Couch--a publisher who brought academic scholarship to the reading public to effect social, political and economic change.

When it comes to social work practice in community outreach programs, in juvenile detention centres, in prisons, in parole and probation programs, and in the inner cities, Melvin Delgado asks the question: Where are all the young men and women of color? Although many urban residents, especially persons of color, are or have been involved in the juvenile and/or criminal justice system, the topic of criminal offenders and ex-offenders has been much neglected by the human services literature. This book stands as the only work to discuss correctional supervision and the needs of individuals in a nonprescriptive manner, marking a shift toward a capacity enhancement, or strengths perspective, approach— specifically what are the strengths of individuals and how can they capitalize on them? Delgado includes a section of reflections from the field that applies capacity enhancement principles and methods to case studies.