Book reviews

Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life. Vol. 3: The Iron Ring. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995, xxi + 393 pp., £45.00.

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. London: University of California Press, 1995, xxv + 639 pp., £45.00.

Yilmaz Akyüz, Detlef Kotte, Andràs Köves & László Szamuely (eds), Privatization in the Transition Process. Recent Experiences in Eastern Europe. Geneva: United Nations, 1994, x + 418 pp.

Jerzy Hausner, Bob Jessop & Klaus Nielsen (eds), Strategic Choice and Path‐dependency in Post‐Socialism. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1995, xiii + 330 pp. £49.95.

Wladimir Andreff (ed.), Le Secteur Public à I'Est. Restmcturation Industrielle et Financière. Paris: L'Harmattan, Collection ‘Pays de I'Est’, 1995, 238 pp.

Jonathan Klavens & Anthony Zamparutti, Foreign Direct Investments and Environment in Central and Eastern Europe: A Survey. Washington DC: The World Bank, 1995. x + 44 pp., $7.95.

Valdas Samonis, Foreign Investment in the East. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1995, 77 pp., £22.50.

Taras Kuzio, Ukrainian Security Policy. Washington DC: Praeger, 1995, xiv + 168 pp., £13.50.

Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish‐Russian Border. Chichester: John Wiley, 1996. xxi + 353 pp., £45.00.

Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904. London: Hurst, 1995, x + 342 pp. £32.50.

Hugh Poulton, Who are the Macedonians? London: Hurst, 1995, xvii + 218 pp., £12.50.

Jacob M. Landau, Pan‐Turkism. From Irredentism to Cooperation. London: Hurst, 1995, viii + 275 pp., £14.95.

Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution through Reform. New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995, xxii + 498 pp., £22.00.

Robert Benewick & Paul Wingrove (eds), China in the 1990s., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, x + 272 pp., £11.99.

A. James Gregor, Marxism, China and Development. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1995, xi + 283 pp., £34.95.

David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995, xxviii + 602 pp., $50.00.

Janet W. Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, xxxvi + 317 pp., $17.50.

Irene Bloom (ed.), Knowledge Painfully Acquired. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, ix + 226 pp., £14.95.

Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 231 pp., £18.99.

David Iosifovich Ortenberg. Stalin, Shcherbakov, Mekhlis, i drugie. Moscow: MP ‘Kodeks’, Ob"edinennaya redaktsiya MVD Rossii, 1995, 208 pp.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, xiii + 399 pp., £41.50 h/b, £16.50 p/b.

Walter S. Dunn, Jr, The Soviet Economy and the Red Army, 1930–1945. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995, ix + 256 pp., £53.95.

A. J. Heywood & I. D. C. Button, Russian Locomotive Types, The Union Legacy. Malmo: Frank Stenvalls Forlag, 1995, vi + 175 pp. Obtainable in UK from Luddenden Press, 19 Goitside, Booth, Halifax HX2 6SY, £14.45.

George Orwell, Animal Farm. London: Seeker and Warburg 1995, 180 pp.     

Portable high‐resolution automated 3D imaging for footwear and tire impression capture

The forensic science community raised the need for improved evidence recognition, collection, and visualization analytical instrumentation for field and laboratory use. While the 3D optical techniques for imaging static objects have been extensively studied, there is still a major gap between current knowledge and collecting high‐quality footwear and tire impression evidence. Among optical means for 3D imaging, digital fringe projection (DFP) techniques reconstruct 3D shape from phase information, achieving camera‐pixel spatial resolution. This paper presents a high‐resolution 3D imaging technology using DFP techniques dedicated to footwear and tire impression capture. We developed fully automated software algorithms and a graphical user interface (GUI) that allow anyone without training to operate for high‐quality 3D data capture. We performed accuracy evaluations and comparisons comparing with the commercial high‐end 3D scanner and carried out qualitative tests for various impressions comparing with the current practices. Overall, our technology achieves similar levels of accuracy and resolution with a high‐end commercially available 3D scanner, while having the merits of being (1) more affordable; (2) much easier to operate; and (3) more robust. Compared with the current practice of casting, our technology demonstrates its superiority because it (1) is non‐destructive; (2) collects more evidence detail than casts, especially when an impression is fragile; (3) requires less time and money to collect each piece of evidence; and (4) results in a digital file that can easily be shared with other examiners.     

Evidential value of injuries useful for reconstruction of the pedestrian-vehicle location at the moment of collision

The paper presents final results of the studies concerning the usefulness of knee, ankle, hip, pelvis and neck injuries in reconstructing the circumstances of car-to-pedestrian accidents. Each type of injuries was evaluated with regard to possible reconstruction of the victim's position (upright or recumbent) at the moment of collision and in the upright hits-the side of the pedestrian's body hit. In each group, a chance of proper reconstruction of the pedestrian's location (which determined the frequency of injury pattern assumed as the typical one of a given position or impact side) and error risk (percentage of cases in which the injury pattern showed improper position or impact side) were calculated. These data were compared with similarly calculated possibilities of deducing based on the classical "bumper" injuries to soft tissues and "bending" fractures of the lower limb bone diaphyses. It was shown that the bone bruises within the knee epiphyses were very specific evidence for upright hits as they confirm the limb load by body mass at the moment of pathological dislocation of joint structures on impact. The evidential value of knee injuries was found to be similar to that of other "classical" methods based on bumper injuries or even higher in lateral and front hits. The injuries to the remaining structures were less frequently found and their correlation with the victim's position or impact side was lower. Nevertheless, once the whole complex of these injuries is taken into consideration the chances of proper reconstruction of the pedestrian-vehicle location increase and the risk of opinion error is minimized.     

Factors Associated with Physician Discussion of Health Behaviors with Adolescents

Behaviors developed in adolescence influence health later in life. The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency of health care provider's discussion of health behaviors with overweight and non-overweight adolescents and identify demographic and health behaviors related to exercise, hours of television viewing, and weight issues associated with these discussions. A Cross sectional survey of urban adolescents was conducted. Trained interviewers administered surveys over a three month period in 2001 at an urban academic pediatric and adolescent clinic. The 252 adolescents surveyed had a mean age of 15 with 49% categorized as being at risk for overweight/overweight and 51% as normal weight using the CDC percentiles for BMI. While 16% of the adolescents reported that their physician or nurse discussed the amount of television they watched, rates of discussion related to exercise (58%), and weight (54%) were much higher. In multivariate analyses, health care provider discussions with adolescents regarding exercise were more common for overweight (O.R.=2.42, 95% C.I. [1.28–4.57]) and at risk for overweight (O.R.=1.98, 95% C.I. [1.03–3.81]) adolescents, whereas physician discussion of television viewing was not associated with weight. Discussions of weight were more common for female (O.R.=2.18, 95% C.I. [1.21–3.95]), African-American (O.R.=2.53, 95% C.I. [1.40–4.57]), and overweight (O.R.=3.92, 95% C.I. [1.97–7.81]) adolescents. Even after adjusting for weight, race and gender strongly influenced the frequency of discussions about weight in physician offices. Although health care providers frequently address weight and exercise with adolescents, more discussions related to sedentary behaviors such as television viewing may be warranted to address adolescent obesity.Received PhD in Epidemiology from University of California, San Diego. Research interests include smoking prevention and cessation among adolescents and health promotion interventions.Received MD from University of Missouri-Kansas City and MPH from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include health services research and research in support of measurable, systematic improvements in the quality of medical care.Received medical degree from Christian Medical College, Punjab, India and Master of Public Health from University of Kansas School of Medicine. Research interests include diet and physical activity behaviors, role of the environment in obesity and obesity prevention, especially among children and adolescents.Received MBBS from Allama Iqbal Medical College, Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan and MPH from University of Kansas Medical Center. Research interests include smoking cessation, database design, implementation, data management and analysis, and use of information technology in health care settings.Director, Cancer Prevention, Control, and Population Sciences, Kansas Cancer Institute. Received MD/MPH from Tulane University and MS from Harvard School of Public Health. Research interests include disparities in healthcare; smoking cessation among underserved populations, specifically African Americans; diet, nutrition, obesity, and physical activity.     

Reforming the U.S. Department of Transportation: Challenges and Opportunities of the Government Performance and Results Act for Federal-State Relations

This article examines attempts during 1993–1999 to reformthe U.S. Department of Transportation to hold it accountablefor achieving improved program results through performance measures.These attempts affected the department's relationships withCongress and the states. The political context, institutionalstructure, federal system, and separation of powers into whichthese reforms were introduced limited the course and outcomesof the reforms. For the reforms to succeed, changes need totake place in the behavior of state transportation departmentsand members of Congress. However, there are no clear incentivesfor either constituency to change its behavior. Instead, thestates' political interests in maintaining their flexibilitiesand the electoral concerns of members of Congress create incentivesthat undermine rather than enforce reform.     

Massive acute arsenic poisonings

Arsenic poisonings are still important in the field of toxicology, though they are not as frequent as about 20-30 years ago. In this paper, the arsenic concentrations in ante- and post-mortem materials, and also forensic and anatomo-pathological aspects in three cases of massive acute poisoning with arsenic(III) oxide (two of them with unexplained criminalistic background, in which arsenic was taken for amphetamine and one suicide), are presented. Ante-mortem blood and urine arsenic concentrations ranged from 2.3 to 6.7 microg/ml, respectively. Post-mortem tissue total arsenic concentrations were also detected in large concentrations. In case 3, the contents of the duodenum contained as much as 30.1% arsenic(III) oxide. The high concentrations of arsenic detected in blood and tissues in all presented cases are particularly noteworthy in that they are very rarely detected at these concentrations in fatal arsenic poisonings.     

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

The impact of macroeconomic and structural factors on the unemployment of young women and men

Economic Change and Restructuring - The presented article follows the research mainstream of econometric analyses focused on the assessment of correlations between youth unemployment rate and...