Choice Reviews Online

This edited volume explores the role of the discipline of political science in addressing the complicated question of race in American political life. Contributors discuss previous research on race relations across the subfields of the discipline, as well as the assumptions that form the foundation of research in political science. Individual essays by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Barbara Luck Graham, and Jerry Watts offer incisive critiques on the limits of the dominant methodologies and available data in answering questions regarding race and American politics. The sections of the book exploring the impact of race on research in international relations and globalization are very strong and provide much needed nuance to the broad policy debates in these areas. Editor Rich contributes an illuminating essay on the problems facing African Americans within the discipline. This is a worthy contribution to the literature on the study of African American politics, the discipline of political science, and more broadly the study of politics in America. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper division undergraduates and above. — K. Anderson, Eastern Illinois University

Like Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy (CH, Nov’05, 43-1898), this book examines the impact of consumerism and materialism on children and adolescents. Taking a less sensational approach than some others have, Bee-Gates (adjunct, child development, San Jose State Univ.) also interviewed parents, and she scatters their views throughout the book. As a way of organizing her discussion, she defines five “forces” that drive materialism in children: the mimic, the comparer, the lonely one, “you complete me,” and the humdrum. Some of these interact, and some are more powerful at different developmental stages, but all reveal that consumerism preys on children’s insecurities. These forces also affect parents as they try to meet their children’s needs in a stressful society that demands much of them at work and at home. At the end of some chapters, Bee-Gates provides useful discussion questions to help parents and children talk together. She looks at spirituality as a counterbalance to materialism, focusing not on a particular religion but on the individual’s need to experience something beyond self and the everyday world. She advocates downshifting that requires moderate changes in consumerism. Bee-Gates supports this balanced, thoughtful discussion with solid research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; professionals; general readers. — S. Sugarman, emerita, Bennington College

Earl Black (Rice Univ.) and Merle Black (Emory Univ.) are renowned for their research on politics in the South, authoring such classics as The Vital South and Politics: How Presidents are Elected (CH, Dec’92, 30-2367) and Politics and Society in the South (2005). In this book they bring their considerable talents to an exploration of regional electoral politics. Closely divided US politics has produced a “ferocious power struggle” evidenced by two close presidential elections, seesawing control of the Senate, and recent Democratic gains in the House. This volume examines from a regional perspective the divisions between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, that have produced this power struggle. The authors examine a wealth of data to illustrate the regional realignment of voters that is driving contemporary US politics. They illustrate how the South and West have moved toward the Republican Party while the Pacific West and Northeast have become Democratic strongholds, and how the Midwest hangs in the balance. Given the centrality of Ohio in the last two presidential elections, their analysis is prescient. No student of American electoral politics, from undergraduate to faculty, casual politico to practitioner, can afford to ignore this book. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels. — S. Q. Kelly, California State University Channel Islands

The US, along with the rest of the international community, failed to respond in any constructive way to stop the killing of roughly 800,000 people in Rwanda during the spring of 1994. This book represents a commendable effort to investigate the Clinton administration’s response to evidence of genocide that seemed undeniable by that May. The story of how and why the US deliberately refused to intervene to try to end the slaughter is generally understood. Lamentably, government officials stifled even the use of the word “genocide.” In terms of policy, there was technically, perhaps, no policy failure, rather a successful avoidance of military intervention. But lesser, helpful responses were possible. Many interviews recorded here provide an account of what middle-level policy makers supposedly thought and said, and why minimal efforts to respond were thwarted by bureaucratic politics. Cohen, who now works at the US Department of State, explains why even the proposal that the US jam incendiary radio stations was rejected, and a decision to provide military vehicles to a resuscitated UN force was delayed for an interminable period of time. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through practitioners. — P. G. Conway, SUNY College at Oneonta

From German sexologist Harry Benjamin to gay theater group The Cockettes and transgender author Kate Bornstein, this fascinating book approaches transgendering from historical, sociological, and cultural studies perspectives. The authors, both British sociologists, braid together their own personal and professional tales of researching sexuality and gender with social history and qualitative research within the transgender community. They prefer the term “transgendering” with its focus on process, rather than the term “transgender,” which connotes a fairly fixed type of person or identity. Transgendering, according to Elkins (Univ. of Ulster) and King (Univ. of Liverpool), has four major modes: crossing the divide permanently; crossing it temporarily; seeking to eliminate the divide; and seeking to go beyond it. Chapters structured around these four modes focus on tales of transgendering from personal narrators and from medical, legal, media, and community sources. This book is indispensable for anyone working in (trans)gender and sexuality studies and is a vital history of the interrelationships among these various transgendering narratives in Europe and America from the early 1970s to the present. The authors deftly move across disciplines, from early sociologist George Herbert Mead to Michel Foucault and Kate Bornstein, making this book a welcome relief from some of the narrow, discipline-bound work in transgender and sexuality studies. Summing Up: Essential Upper-division undergraduates and above. — J. M. Irvine, University of Massachusetts

In recent years a lively debate has surfaced on the topic of inequality. For scholars who want to be updated or introduced quickly, this edited volume is an excellent summary. While the title is a play on Thomas Friedman’s hugely popular The World Is Flat (CH, Mar’06, 43-4141), this volume is a technical, empirical examination of the gaps between rich and poor. The book comprises six chapters on methodological issues and general patterns, and nine chapters on particular countries or world regions. The authors are interested in the link, if any, from liberalization and globalization to income distribution and poverty. The work is sophisticated enough to realize that most of what one thinks one knows is tentative, and that data limitations, differences in concept definitions, and differences in time periods under study can drive the conclusions. The concept of inequality, for example, is used to describe mean differences in national incomes, population-weighted differences in national incomes, and differences in income among the world’s individuals. This volume is steeped in questions about upper deciles versus lower deciles of income distribution, big versus small economies, and rapid globalizers versus slow ones. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate, faculty, and professional collections. — J. Gerber, San Diego State University

Galasso (economics, Bocconi Univ., Italy), a reputable scholar, addresses the critical issue of how to finance an adequate level of retirement income for the growing elderly share of the population in six countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US. Bolstered by impressive quantitative analysis, charts, and tables, he provides a comprehensive history of social security legislation in each country. This is followed by examination of the validity of reform proposals being offered worldwide. A grim picture emerges for the six countries. Taking into account the political constraints exerted by voters in aging populations, Galasso’s estimates of sustainable social security spending rise sharply in all six countries, financed by corresponding high levels of social security contributions. This pattern of high spending and taxes is more pronounced in Italy and Spain and more moderate in the US and UK. Galasso’s long-term policy recommendation is postponing the age of retirement. This limits the increase in pension spending induced by aging, while typically enlarging the generosity of the system, thereby moderating the political demand for more security by the elderly. This work is a significant addition to the existing large literature; thoughtful students of public affairs will want to read it. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections. — H. I. Liebling, emeritus, Lafayette College

Goklany, an expert on environmental issues, argues convincingly for economic growth and technological change. Such growth and change, as the book’s subtitle states, is “why we’re living longer, healthier, more comfortable lives on a cleaner planet.” Goklany supports his case with impressive illustration and documentation. He contends the best way to create conditions for environmental sustainability is to maintain economic growth buffered by technological change. Furthermore, increased affluence moves developing nations through environmental transitions, after which environmental protection takes on a greater policy priority than before the transition. Moreover, economic development will ensure greater resilience in the face of catastrophes that are certain to occur. Free markets, democratic institutions, and the protection of private property rights help foster this economic development. Goklany prefers to move climate change policy more toward “focused adaptation, and broad economic development” and less toward greenhouse gas mitigation. In this respect, he echoes G. Cornelis Van Kooten’s Climate Change Economics (CH, Oct’04, 42-1065). Goklany’s book is a stark contrast to doom-and-gloom books such as Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down (CH, May’07, 44-5116) that would halt economic growth to prevent environmental problems. Copious footnotes and large index. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; students; lower-division undergraduate and up; faculty and practitioners. — D. D. Miller, Baldwin-Wallace College

Science teacher Kelly offers a superbly readable and exceptionally well-researched volume on world crocodiles. Chapter 1 quotes Benjamin Francis Helpman’s diaries extensively in describing 19th-century crocodile populations. Chapter 2 discusses world crocodilian species, complementing the characterizations with relevant localized legends and tales. Chapter 3 offers brief, accurate descriptions of crocodilian anatomy and biology, and chapter 4 discusses scientists and studies on crocodilians. Chapter 5 summarizes investigations into paleontological aspects of these animals. Chapter 6 deals with human exploitation and efforts to protect world species. Attacks by crocodiles are the focus of chapter 7, and chapter 8 deals with crocodile farming. Chapter 9 discusses crocodile exhibition and related showmanship. The final chapter emphasizes crocodiles in popular culture, including books, cinema, and television. Appendix 1 is a taxonomically arranged list of species. Appendix 2 is a report on the saltwater crocodile, by J. E. Gray, to the British Museum. Cultural legends or tales introduce the chapters, and these often appear within chapters too. Line drawings and monochrome photographs, interspersed throughout, complement the narrative. Eight excellent color photographs and a color map of crocodilian world distribution are center-bound. This work is concise but informative and accurate. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and public libraries; lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. — E. D. Keiser, emeritus, University of Mississippi

Many popular neuroscience books emphasize the brain’s complexity using terms of purpose: this region is for emotion, that one for vision, and so forth, each interacting in a perfectly designed whole. This ambitious, engaging, and often irreverent book by Linden (Johns Hopkins Univ.) adopts a quite different perspective, instead emphasizing the evolutionary origins of the human brain. Initial chapters offer, in broad strokes, an overview of gross neuroanatomy, functional divisions, and cellular neuroscience. Somewhat surprisingly, the book provides considerable detail about basic neuroscience, which increases its potential usefulness as a classroom text. Lay readers, though, may end up skipping much of this material. The subsequent chapters introduce key topics in the neuroscience of the mind: sensation, emotion, memory, sex, and dreams. Chapters cover these topics in a well-written, enjoyable style. A short chapter speculates on the neural basis of religiosity. The book returns to its thesis at the end with a well-argued discussion of the tension between neuroscience and intelligent design. The emphasis on evolution is laudable–though not always present in the chapters on specific functions–making this book an important counterpoint to breathless paeans to brain design. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. — S. A. Huettel, Duke University

This is an exceptional coffee-table book, containing delightful photographs of Mandela at different life stages plus photographs of apartheid realities and brutalities and of Mandela’s colleagues. Other noteworthy features include copies of original documents in Mandela’s hand and about him; significant, biographically helpful testimonies from luminaries and associates from the days of the struggle against Afrikanerdom and for human dignity; letters to and from Mandela and Winnie Mandela; and important commentaries on Mandela’s place in the emerging and modernizing South Africa of the 1950s and l990s. The whole–the scrapbook of a 21st-century global icon–is at turns immensely moving, at turns deeply important from a historical standpoint. The book contains new insights into the Rivonia Treason Trial and revealing information about how Mandela’s famous speech at the end of the trial was composed. Shining throughout this big book is the truth of what Mandela told Todd and Esme Matshikiza on a fund-raising visit to London in 1961. “Surely,” Esme asked, “you can’t go back … They’ll arrest you.” Mandela replied, “I see myself as a leader of the people and the leader … must be with the people.” This book has a rudimentary index but astonishingly lacks a table of contents. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. — R. I. Rotberg, Harvard University

A refreshing, entertaining collection of essays, this book clearly and concisely defines traditional philosophical thought through examples from neo-noir films. The contributors focus on the “philosophical themes and underpinnings of neo-noir films,” examining ideas of identity, memory, morality, and nihilism. The neo-noir films discussed serve to illustrate “classic philosophy and aesthetics,” and the philosophical ideas explored help to define neo-noir film as a postmodern genre. Far from dry and boring (as one might expect from a philosophical study like this), the collection engages the reader by using such familiar neo-noir films as Chinatown, Reservoir Dogs, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Memento to explore the philosophical ideas of philosophers like Sartre, Nietzsche, and Socrates and to examine postmodern ethics and values. This collection will serve as a terrific interdisciplinary guide through the chaotic, intriguing world of postmodernist thought as it relates to film and philosophy. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. — A. F. Winstead, Our Lady of the Lake University

This book should be in every library. Its basic theme is that in spite of all best efforts, humans cannot completely model the response of complex systems such as ecological, climatic, or geological systems, or any natural system on Earth. Pilkey (geology, emer., Duke Univ.) and Pilkey-Jarvis (Washington State Department of Ecology) discuss the limitations of models, but the message is not entirely negative. Instead, the authors point out the models’ existing ability to develop more flexibly and responsively; they also point out that sociopolitical systems do not allow such flexibility. Chapters cover mathematical models and sociopolitical decisions regarding overfishing off New England, nuclear waste disposal in Nevada, rising global sea level, erosion on sandy coastlines, acid-mining waste in Montana, and invasive plant species worldwide. A final chapter discusses possible changes in modeling approaches to promote understanding of the systems’ complexity, rather than dictate inevitable failure of modeled results. The book is appropriate for all audiences. Scientific jargon has been removed so general readers can understand the issues, but the treatment is not simplistic, so professionals, students, and researchers can benefit from the overall presentation and pursue additional information in the references, as needed. Summing Up: Essential. All levels. — N. W. Hinman, University of Montana

Former junior naval officer Rose focuses on ships at sea and their actions, as well as the governments and policies that made navies the arbiters of power. Volume 1 details the rise of the industrial and social complex and the societies that made it possible through advancing technology, starting with the last decade of the 19th century, when the Anglo-German naval race began. The story, colorful and full of characters, offers little comment on those essentials of sea power–dockyards, shipbuilding, and merchant fleets and their convoys. Volume 2 covers the transition from battleship to carrier operations. Rose has an excellent technical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of classes of ships. Chapters on the imperial Japanese navy, with its super battleships, and the rebuilding of the German navy are most informative. The author delineates the revolution in the US fleet from battleships to the carrier-amphibious force that could operate in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, where at-sea replenishment was vital for mobility and surprise. Japan followed suit. More than half the book is devoted to the ramifications of WW II. In Rose’s view, the British Royal Navy was felled by its casual attitudes and prejudices, while the US Navy emerged supreme. The final volume of this tour de force starts with the US Navy developing a nuclear role for its carriers during the Cold War. A secondary power by now, the Royal Navy was still able in 1982 to win the Falkland/Malvinas War. The Cuban Missile Crisis caused the Soviets to create submarines and carriers to challenge the US Navy. The cycle of obsolescence hit in the Carter years (1973-79), but the US Navy was modernized by the Reagan administration. With the 1990 collapse of the USSR and the First Gulf War, the US Navy was once more clearly top dog. Rose has spent a lifetime immersing himself in the literature and thinking judiciously about the entwined nature of naval policy and technical developments, resulting in a readable masterpiece based upon a solid, up-to-date bibliography. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. — R. Higham, emeritus, Kansas State University

Simmons offers two books in one: The first 200 pages survey the lives and importance of 33 mathematicians, from Thales to Weierstrass, who made seminal contributions to calculus and its applications to analysis, physics, number theory, and geometry. The second 150 pages fulfill the promise of the title by treating the reader to 26 true gems of calculus. These are beautiful facts of mathematics, such as the divergence of the sum of reciprocals of all primes, or the classic result of Euler on the sum of the reciprocals of squares. The average mathematically inclined reader (faculty, graduate student, or interested undergraduate) will typically be aware of these results, but will still be amazed seeing the extremely simple and elegant proofs the author collected. Though the material of the first half of the book can be found in other sources (if in different presentation), the elegant and well-chosen examples make the second part essential–this part is a true page-turner. Summing Up: Essential. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers. — M. Bona, University of Florida

In his introduction to this posthumously published work (Simpson died in April 2005), Fred Hobson writes that this book reflects the author’s commitment to writing as a vocation. Certainly this is Simpson at his best. Though many of these essays were previously published, as a collection they remind the reader once again of the breadth of Simpson’s scholarship and the lucidity of his style. He knew many of the writers he assesses (Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy), but he keeps his subjectivity in check in his criticism. One of his most incisive observations comes from a singular thought he had at Warren’s burial in Vermont–that southerners were once spiritual New Englanders. Unfortunately, Simpson does not explore that irony any further, though he does touch on it again in a comparison of Trilling and Tate. An essay on Diana Trilling underscores that she was one of the best literary minds of the 20th century. Simpson looks at Louis Rubin’s A Charleston Jew through boat imagery, Welty through her photography. The concluding essay on Walker Percy runs to 62 pages and seems to penetrate right into that author’s soul. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. — S. W. Whyte, Montgomery County Community College

Is it morality that separates humankind from the apes, or does it connect humans to their nearest relatives? Even those who accepted the physical link between humans and their primate ancestors usually drew a sharp line when it came to the sense of right and wrong. T. H. Huxley asserted that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process … but in combating it.” Primatologist de Waal sees human morality as having evolved out of primate sociality, and rejects what he calls the “veneer theory” of human nature, in which morality is but a thin, recently acquired layer of goodness that overlays a brutish and selfish animal nature. Rather, he argues, humans share an evolutionary history with apes in which specific behaviors such as empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity, and peacemaking are the bases for sociality. This book, which is based on de Waal’s 2004 Tanner Lectures, includes critiques from science writer Robert Wright and philosophers Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer. Primates and Philosophers makes a significant contribution to a growing body of work that supports the evolutionary basis of such traits as religion, morality, and ethics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. — F. T. Kuserk, Moravian College

Whether due to their brevity or complexity, genius or madness, transparency or incoherence, lives of artists always seem to fascinate. Frith’s biography, however, has been neglected of late. Seeking to amend this, the catalog and accompanying exhibition treat this Victorian artist and his visual output in myriad ways while also serving as a historical document of the first major exhibition on Frith since 1951. The studies herein offer illuminating analyses of a compelling artist who created panoramas of diverse London crowds, as well as charming portrayals of domestic life, occasional portraits, and delightful sketches. Rich and approachable, the ten essays appeal to the specialist of Victorian culture by broadening the scope through which Frith has been viewed. Here, the artist and his works are considered variously within the contexts of print culture and ephemera as well as the frameworks of critical reception and the Royal Academy. Thorough notes are supported by a substantial chronology and index. Carefully researched and amply illustrated, this is an exceptional work that treats Frith’s life and times succinctly while offering a fresh perspective for the seasoned scholar. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through professionals. — J. Decker, Georgetown College