Reviews

Joseph M. van Brabant, Remaking Eastern Europe—On the Political Economy of Transition. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990, xiv+223 pp., £57.00 h/b.

Ronald J. Hill, Communist Politics under the Knife: Surgery or Autopsy? London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1990, 224 pp., £30.00 h/b; £9.95 p/b.

Andrei Akatovich Belykh, Istoriya sovetskikh ekonomiko‐matematicheskikh issledovanii. Leningrad University Press, 1990, 141 pp., 2 rubles.

Gregory Gleason, Federalism and Nationalism: The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR. Foreword by John N. Hazard. Boulder, CO: Westview Press: Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1990, xiv+170 pp., £17.50 p/b.

James Hughes, Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, xiii+260 pp., £30.00

Joan Sokolovsky, Peasants and Power: State Autonomy and the Collectivization of Agriculture in Eastern Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, 181 pp., £18.95.

Louis Guy Michael, More Corn for Bessarabia: Russian Experience, 1910–1917. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1983, 245 pp., $18.95.

P. Pomper, Lenin, Trostsky and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, xiii+446 pp., $19.00 p/b.

Tony Cliff, Trotsky, 1923–27. Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy. London: Bookmarks, 1991, 306 pp., £6.95 p/b.     

Reviews

Pekka Sutela, Economic Thought and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 197 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Stephen White, Gorbachev and After. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ix+310 pp., £27.95 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Catherine Merridale & Chris Ward, eds, Perestroika. The Historical Perspective. London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1991, xiii+253 pp., £12.95 p/b.

Guy Standing, ed., The New Soviet Labour Market. In Search of Flexibility. Geneva: ILO, 1991, xiv+440 pp., SF45.00.

Leonard Geron, Soviet Foreign Economic Policy under Perestroika. London: Chatham House Papers, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Pinter Publishers, 1990, 126 pp., £19.50, h/b, £7.95 p/b.

Malcolm R. Hill, Soviet Advanced Manufacturing Technology and Western Export Controls. Aldershot: Avebury, 1991, xv+256 pp., £35.00.

Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post‐Stalinist Society, translated by K. and O. Forster. Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, xvii+483 pp., £22.50 p/b.

A. Kemp‐Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia 1928–39. London: Macmillan, 1991, vi + 338 pp., £45.00.

Jelena Milojkovic‐Djuric, Aspects of Soviet Culture: Voices of glasnosf, 1960–1990. New York: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1991, iv+190 pp., $29.00.

Landon Pearson, Children of Glasnost. Growing up Soviet. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1991, xv+505 pp., $16.95, p/b.

Robert Rand, Comrade Lawyer. Inside Soviet Justice in an Era of Reform. Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, x+166 pp., £9.50 p/b.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch & Richard Stites, eds, Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, viii+344 pp., £22.50 h/b, £9.50 p/b.

Efraim Karsh, Soviet Policy towards Syria since 1970. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991, 229 pp.+index, £35.00.

Ronald D. Bachman, ed., Romania: A Country Study, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: US Library of Congress Federal Research Division, 1991, xxxvi+356 pp.     

Book reviews

John P. Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xv+305 pp., $59.95, £40.00.

Michael Ellman & Vladimir Kontorovich, eds, The Disintegration of the Soviet Economic System. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, xv+281 pp., h/b £45.00., p/b £14.99.

Paul R. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, xix+423 pp., $39.95.

Hélène Carrère D'Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State 1917–1930. Nancy Festinger, Trans., Richard Pipes, Foreword. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1991, xviii+262 pp., $39.95.

Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Stalin's Secret Chancellery and the Comintern. University of Copenhagen, Institute of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1991. 116 pp.

Christoph Bluth, Soviet Strategic Arms Policy Before SALT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 317 pp., £40.00.

Roger E. Kanet, Deborah Nutter Miner & Tamara J. Resler, Soviet Foreign Policy in Transition. Cambridge University Press, 1992, xvi+308 pp., £40.00, $59.95.

M. A. Babkina, ed., New Political Parties and Movements in the Soviet Union. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1991, 156 pp., $35.00.

S. Berglund & J. A. Dellenbrandt, eds., The New Democracies in Eastern Europe: Party Systems and Political Cleavages. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991, xii + 237 pp., £39.95.

Gyorgy Csepeli & Antal Örkény, Ideology and Political Beliefs in Hungary: The Twilight of State Socialism. Trans., Brian McLean & Julianna Parti, London: Pinter, 1992, viii+148 pp., £35.00.     

Pursuing justice in a free society: Part one—power vs. liberty

John Kaplan, The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, xi + 247 pp.     

Small Gestures and Acts of Grace: An Interview with Germaine Koh

Knitwork is an 80-metre long work generated by unraveling cast-off garments, and reknitting them into a wide blanket. The piece is visually rich: bands of bright colours, softer shades and painterly mixes. The artist Germaine Koh, who lives and works in Canada, conceived the piece in February 1992 as a life-long project. It has since been shown in galleries across North America, Australia and, most recently, in 2002, at the British Museum in London, where it cascaded down marble steps in the Great Court. Knitwork is reminiscent of the work of feminist artists of the 1970s (such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in the United States, or the Feministo group in Britain), work that commented on the devaluation of both domestic labour and craft, particularly with regard to textiles, traditionally associated with women. Although Koh intends this reading, Knitwork is one of a series of-what might be described as-conceptual art projects that she has exhibited over the last decade. These focus on the ways in which we invest time and effort in seemingly mundane activities, what Koh describes as 'the weighty psychic accretion of everyday habits and mundane debris'. By using commonplace objects, abstracting them or changing their context, she aims to stimulate reflection about how we interact, and the tokens or gestures we use. Sometimes Koh knits alone, privately; and, at other times, publicly, when the piece is on exhibition, transforming it from object to performance. By 1998 the piece had 'consumed' more than 260 garments and was over 60 metres long. By 2002 it had grown to 80 metres, including nearly 300 garments, and weighing 400 pounds. Koh describes Knitwork as a comical object, somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet, because it has both its past and future written into it, it contains a certain melancholy. It is a measurement of a life, its output, and also its duration, each stitch a record of a decision, and of a moment in time.     

Repeated arson: data from criminal records.

The criminal careers of all arsonists convicted in former West-Germany between 1983 and 1985 who were found not to be responsible due to diminished responsibility for psychiatric reasons and a random sample (every third) of all criminally liable arsonists during the same period of time were followed up until 1994 by means of their trial records. Reappearance before the court for arson did not differ between the groups. When subjects are grouped by the additional occurrence of crimes other than arson, however, arsonists with diminished responsibility are the most problematic group: In comparison with all other subgroups, the arsonists who were partly responsible who did not commit any crimes other than arson showed the highest number of fire-setting incidents. Among the arsonists who committed other crimes as well, arsonists with diminished responsibility had the highest number of additional offences.     

Infectious disease surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom: from public goods to the challenges of new technologies

Infectious diseases are a long-standing and continuing threat to health and welfare, with their containment dependent on national disease surveillance and response capacities. This article discusses infectious disease surveillance in the United States and the United Kingdom, examining historical national traditions for identifying and controlling infectious disease risks and how globalization and technical advances have influenced the evolution of their respective approaches. The two systems developed in different but parallel ways. In the United States, surveillance remained quite localized at the state level until the early twentieth century and still retains many of those features. The U.K. approach became centralized from the latter part of the nineteenth century and has principally remained so. In both cases, disease surveillance was traditionally conceived as a public good, where national or local authorities held sovereign rights and power to protect public health. With the increasing globalized nature of infectious disease, such notions shifted toward surveillance as a global public good, with countries responding in turn by creating new global health governance arrangements and regulations. However, the limitations of current surveillance systems and the strong hold of national interests place into question the provision of surveillance as a global public good. These issues are further highlighted with the introduction of new surveillance technologies, which offer opportunities for improved disease detection and identification but also create potential tensions between individual rights, corporate profit, equitable access to technology, and national and global public goods.