Mark Crispin Miller doesn't mince words in his new book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), an extensive account of how the Republicans have rigged and stolen the past two presidential elections, accompanied by an ominous, though unsurprising, forecast that they are certain to continue stealing them unless and until they are stopped. "In a nation of this size, complexity, diversity and (nominal) transparency," writes Miller, a media studies professor at New York University, "the theft of a presidential race is no simple matter but requires a wide array of complementary actions national and local.... It requires the active participation of hundreds, even thousands of loyalists who value winning over democratic principle – because they believe that their opponents are demonic, beings so dangerously evil that their victory simply cannot be allowed."

For election-thieving Republican Christ-fanatics, it's also been immensely helpful to have the country's major newspapers mostly as one in dismissing suggestions of electoral chicanery as the "paranoia" of "conspiracy theorists" (from a Nov. 5, 2004, headline in the Baltimore Sun), and to have such friends in high places as Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell, a Bush-Cheney apparatchik who seems to have been the point man for ensuring, by any means necessary, the Republican ticket's "victory" in that state no matter how people who actually managed to vote actually voted. We may never know how people voted, incidentally, if they cast their ballots on one of the electronic machines made by Diebold, whose chair, Wally O'Dell, famously committed himself (in an August 2003 fundraising invitation) to "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." The software of electronic voting machines can be easily and subtly manipulated to deliver planned results, and the lack of a confirming paper trail means that, like dead men, such devices tell no tales that might cause later embarrassment or court challenges.

The intended terminus for all this is, Miller thinks, theocracy, and our would-be theocrats are increasingly unshy about declaring themselves. Nor are they concerned that the bulk of the population does not share their views. It is up to us, then, Miller says, to recognize that "our lives and liberty and happiness depend on our ability to rule ourselves – that is, our right to vote. We must start working to reclaim that right, and to do that, we must know all we can about our rights, our history and this government." And Fooled Again isn't a bad place to start. (Paul Reidinger)

Other People By Peter Campion University of Chicago Press/Phoenix Poets 65 pages $15 (paper)

Other People, Peter Campion's debut poetry collection, includes a piece titled "Population," which neatly echoes the book's title. It obliquely addresses a certain mood: "I mean the way that winter afternoons / call back those childhood sulks at the window." A few stanzas down, the poet experiences "a catch in the stomach like falling: / sweet emptiness," which, he tellingly concludes, "others must also feel." True enough; otherwise, the lyric wouldn't be a major poetic form. The assertion may also be read as a partial statement of an ars poetica, for many of Campion's poems are more about his responses to other people than they are straightforward depictions. The title poem begins in this vein, introducing his grandfather and another man, both dead. They are lifted from a dream, the verisimilitude of which makes them "just two other people" and the sunrise a "catastrophic" experience. The dead men vanish, and the speaker comes back to himself. "Then minutes afterwards, I was standing / pulling the chalky paste across my teeth."

The description of pulling chalky paste across teeth is exaggeratedly, almost surreally, concrete, and it suggests Campion's strengths and weaknesses. His poems teem with details and carefully verbalized ruminations. Their tone is casually erudite, befitting the work of a young Stanford University professor and critic. But exigencies of rhyme and rhythm occasionally lead to wordiness, and both rhymed and free verse contain extraneous adverbs. Wholly, for example pops up in two poems. In one, "so small / so wholly beautiful" convincingly works against "enormous / sprawl."

Similar analysis might justify "The life we live wholly as instrument / beneath our souls' plot-made direction?" But there's little excuse, except for a dubious attempt at forging an idiosyncratic voice, for using weirdly twice: "weirdly relevant," and "weirdly assured."

Trivial or mean-spirited as such dissection might seem, the fact is that every word matters in the best poetry. Besides, Campion's work can take it – and, indeed, deserves such close reading. His sensibilities and musical use of language suggest potential but are haphazardly realized here.

Marred by lack of rigorous self-editing, Other People is nevertheless an engaging, impressive first volume. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

How to Be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul By Adrian Shaughnessy Princeton Architectural Press 160 pages $19.95 (paper)

Adrian Shaughnessy's How to be a Graphic Designer, Without Losing Your Soul is more than seduction by color. The text easily appeals to all of life's types who might crack its binding: the student crowd who have spent four years "learning how to learn"; those weighing the decision to go in-house or freelance; the seasoned designer who wants to set up his or her own studio but gets derailed when choosing a name or setting up computer systems; those simply fishing for new work (evidently a digital projector linked to your laptop is ambrosia to any client).

The book also addresses the vagaries of human interaction: how to deal deftly with clients who want to make incessant changes and how to deal with clients who plain just don't like your work. Shaughnessy is spot-on when he says, "When an idea is rejected, it is often the presentation of the idea, not the idea itself." He recommends listening, but not pandering, to client input. Or as any Stanislavsky acting coach would say, keep the objective, change the tactic.

Shaughnessy says designers should show their portfolio to those outside the field and get feedback if they want to make it past the first interview – otherwise they clear the way for the other 230,000 competitors in their field.

Shaughnessy was the creative director of the London design firm Intro for 15 years and has also taught design at the University of Arts in Berlin. Now he works as a design writer for various British publications. He interviews typographical, digital, and book designers, the types who would read his work in the British mags Eye, Design Week, and Grafik. The statistics in the book are decidedly American, but the interviews are solidly British; only two stem from the Bay Area. People looking for inside tips from their favorite American design firms will have to hunt elsewhere.

Any book printed by a press in a university town could suffer from verbose overtones, but this book does not fall into that trap. The only place the book really fails is, ironically, in its graphics. The black-and-white images are gauzy and often too small to detect fine detail. This is unacceptable for a book about design, even if the heart of the book is writing about design. The solid bibliography, with almost 50 books and numerous design organizations, makes up for this lack of attention. (Lisa Ryers)