Policymaking for Social Security is a wonderful book—perhaps the best book ever written on American social policy. Derthick's achievement is all the more remarkable when it is considered as the middle book of a “social policy trilogy,” along with Uncontrollable Spending for Social Services Grants (1975) and Agency Under Stress (1990). Taken together, these books provide as fine an introduction to American social policy as I can imagine; taken together with The Politics of Deregulation (1985), which Derthick wrote with Paul Quirk in this same period, they provide an incomparable overview of American politics.