Veteran Public Relations expert Fraser Seitel, blogger and P.U.M.A. founder Will Bower, and author of The Big Sort Bill Bishop

Fraser P. Seitel is a veteran of more than three decades in the practice of public relations. In 2000, PR Week magazine named Mr. Seitel one of the "100 Most Distinguished Public Relations Professionals of the 20th Century."

In 1992, after serving for a decade as senior vice president and director of public affairs for Chase Manhattan Bank, Mr. Seitel formed Emerald Partners, a management and communications consultancy, and also became senior counselor at the world's largest public affairs firm, Burson-Marsteller.

Mr. Seitel is a frequent contributor to cable television. Among other programs, he has appeared on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor, Fox and Friends, Rivera Live, Fox Weekend, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren; MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams and Nachman; CNBC's Wall Street Journal Report; and CNN's Connie Chung Tonight, Inside Politics, and Larry King Live.

Mr. Seitel has counseled hundreds of corporations, nonprofits, associations, and individuals in the area for which he had responsibility at Chase–media relations, speech writing, consumer relations, employee communications, financial communications, philanthropic activities, and strategic management consulting.

Mr. Seitel is an Internet columnist at odwyerpr.com and a frequent lecturer and seminar leader on communications topics. Over the course of his career, Mr. Seitel has taught thousands of public relations professionals and students.

After studying and examining many texts in public relations, he concluded that none of them "was exactly right:" Therefore, in 1980, he wrote the first edition of The Practice of Public Relations "to give students a feel for how exciting this field really is:" In more than two decades of use at hundreds of colleges and universities, Mr. Seitel's book has introduced generations of students to the excitement, challenge, and uniqueness of the practice of public relations.

Will Bower was bred, raised, and educated in the epicenter of the Electoral Universe: Ohio. He began his political life in 1987 (at the age of 14) as a Youth Ambassador to the Soviet Union. The following year, he became a Youth Campaigner for Michael Dukakis. He went on to be chosen as a member of Boys' State Ohio (1989) and ended up winning the prestigious Delaware County Democratic Scholarship in 1990 -- which he applied to his studies as a playwright at Kenyon College, Class of '94. Will spent most of the late 1990s traveling the world, living mostly in Paris, Sydney, and Los Angeles. However, the events of 2000 and 2001 inspired him to move to Washington DC, where he intended to work for the DNC. After a series of stellar interviews there, he realized to his disillusionment that the parties are mostly about fund-raising, for which he had little interest. However, he has remained in Washington DC, where he has been learning the politico-way from such Huffingtonian friends as Steve Clemons and Scott Shrake. He is currently a chief contributor for The Huffington Post and for Florida-Delegates.com and is a researcher for Thomson CompuMark.

Bill Bishop lives in Austin, Texas. He wrote The Big Sort with retired University of Texas sociologist Robert G. Cushing. Bishop has worked as a reporter at The Mountain Eagle, in Whitesburg (Ky.); a columnist at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and on the special projects staff of the Austin (Tx.) American-Statesman. Bishop and his wife, Julie Ardery, owned and operated The Bastrop County Times, a weekly newspaper in Smithville, Texas. They now co-edit The Daily Yonder, a web-based publication (dailyyonder.com) covering rural America.

Pulitzer Prize–finalist Bishop offers a one-idea grab bag with a thesis more provocative than its elaboration. Bishop contends that as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics. There are endless variations of this clustering—what Bishop dubs the Big Sort—as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities—even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. Bishop's argument is meticulously researched—surveys and polls proliferate—and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our post materialistic society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that like does attract like becomes an exercise in redundancy.