American cities and communities come under close and comprehensive scrutiny in four recent reprints. They are, respectively: E. Digby Baltzell's Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called "a significant illumination of our contemporary crisis of leadership" [Beacon Press $11.95 paper]; James Borchert's Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion and Folklife in the City, 1859—1970, which one reviewer recommended to "anyone in the adult reading audience interested in urban America" [Illinois, "Blacks in the New World" series, $8.95 paper]; Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change in America, a work deemed "graceful and intelligent throughout" by the American Historical Review [Johns Hopkins $5.95 paper]; and Oliver P. Williams and Charles R. Adrian's Four Cities: A Study in Comparative Policy Making, an analysis of the political process in four middle-sized American cities 1948—57 [Pennsylvania $10.00 cloth]. The question "Why" is raised by two new paperbacks, each examining recent developments affecting the American people. The first is Why Viet Nam? Prelude to America's Albatross in which Archimedes L. A. Patti, former head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services' Indochina Mission in the 1940's, describes the U.S. involvement in the years 1940—54 when the French were dominant, a book considered "an indispensable source for the historian" by The New York Times [California $19.50 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Then there is Marvin Harris's America Now: The Anthropology of a Changing Culture, in which the author raises such questions as "why nothing works, why the help won't help you, why the women left home, why the dollar shrank, and why there's terror in the streets," a study Time regarded as "a thought-provoking vision of American Culture as a system" [Touchstone Books $4.95]. Doubleday has published a new cloth edition (the fifth) of David C. Whitney's The American Presidents, containing biographies of the chief executives from Washington through Reagan [$14.95]. The economic policies of our current president receive a caustic critique in Robert Lekachman's Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics, with Lekachman concluding the policies constitute a true God that failed [Pantheon Books $3.50]. Published originally 50 years ago and considered a classic analysis of the two principal generals of America's Civil War, Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller's Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship has been reprinted by Indiana [$25.00 cloth, $10.95 paper]. Bison Books is offering a paperback edition of Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, with an introduction by Bernard De Voto [$12.50], Johns Hopkins has come out with a paperback edition of Jack N. Rakove's The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative History of the Continental Congress, which historian J. R. Pole considered "the most convincing account of the general history of the Continental Congress yet written" [$8.95]. An additional Pantheon reprint is Edwin R. Bayley's Joe McCarthy and the Press, deemed by Publishers Weekly as "a vivid portrait of McCarthy as a master newsmanipulator" [$6.95]. Among recent Touchstone Books are these: Joseph A. Califano, Jr. 's Governing America: An Insider's Report from the White House and the Cabinet [$8.95] and Joanna L. Stratton's Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier [also $8.95].