Books often provide more detail and are more expansive than academic articles. Sometimes they are collections of papers or essays that are essentially what you would find as an academic article.
Library Search is the main tool for books in the Temple University Libraries system. The system uses the Library of Congress classification system, which uses letters and numbes to arrange books. Political Science is generally in the area of the call letters J, law is K, and country and state topics are generally in the range D-E-F.
A general approach to searching for a topic when you don't have a specific book in mind is this: 1) Do a keyword search on a likely word or phrase and reorder the results by date; 2) Look at the subject headings assigned to the book and; 3) either click on the link to the subject search on that heading, or 4) use parts of the subject heading as another keyword search.
See also the eBooks search page
EZ-Borrow Requests is a tool for searching and requesting books you know the title of from academic libraries primariy in Pennsylvania. The service can usually deliver a book that is available in about 4-5 days.
Google Books Search the full-text of books. You won't be able to view more than a couple pages of most of the books, but if you can use the search capabilities here to identify relevant books that you can then look-up in the library.
Academic Search Premier can also be used to find book reviews
