Book reviews

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Instructions From the Centre. Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), 238pp.

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (eds.), More 'Instructions from the Centre': Top Secret Files on KGB Global Operations, 1975-1985 Intelligence and National Security (London, Frank Cass) 130pp. £24 hb.

Gunnar Skogmar, Nuclear Triangle: Relations between the United States, Great Britain and France in the Atomic Energy Field 1939-50 (Copenhagen, Political Studies Press, 1993), 240pp.

K.S. Sandhu, Sharon Siddique, Chandran Jeshurun, Ananda Rajah, Joseph L.H. Tan, Pushpa Thambipillai (eds.), The ASEAN Reader (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), xxvi + 582pp. S$58/ US$39.90 (soft cover); S$89/US$59.90 (hard cover). ISBN 981-981-3016-41-8 (soft cover), 981-3016-42-6 (hard cover).     

The committee outlier debate: A review and a reexamination of some of the evidence

An ongoing and controversial topic of congressional scholars is the question “Are committees ‘preference outliers’ vis-a-vis their parent chamber?” Despite numerous research efforts showing isolated cases of outlying committees, little evidence shows a systematic tendency for committees to be unrepresentative of their legislature. A paper which comes close to being an exception is Weingast and Marshall's (1988) analysis of “the industrial organization of Congress,” which reports evidence of many and very strongly outlying committees. However, the apparently strong evidence is due more to the authors' incorrectly executed methods than to a general tendency for committees to be outliers. In this note I review the state of the committee-outlier debate and also show that Weingast and Marshall's empirical results cannot be replicated. I accordingly provide the correct results once their statistical tests are properly executed.     

Suicide by gunshot while driving an automobile

Suicide by a motor vehicle occurs more commonly than is realized, and may be difficult to prove. Suicide by other means while driving a vehicle is far less common. An automobile driven by a young woman left a road at high speed, became airborne, and came to rest on its top in a front yard. This was initially assumed to be a fatal traffic accident. Upon righting the vehicle, a .357 revolver was found on the ground beside it. A single, fatal, self-inflicted gunshot wound was found in the decedent's midanterior thorax. A suicide note was found in her purse. She had been chronically depressed and had twice attempted suicide. Vehicular suicides may constitute 10-30% of fatal single-vehicle crashes, and must be considered in any vehicular mishap lacking another reasonable explanation. Suicide by other means while driving is far less common than suicidal vehicular collision and suicidal death from carbon monoxide in motor vehicles. An autopsy should be performed in each of these sometimes-low-priority single-vehicle deaths in order to certify vehicular accidents correctly; to discover and document vehicular suicides; and to detect homicides disguised as vehicular mishaps.     

A single fatal penetrating chest wound from shattered wind-blown glass

The great majority of penetrating wounds of the thorax result from firearms and bladed weapons. Penetrating wounds of the heart and of the great vessels still have a high immediate mortality. While penetrating chest wounds occasionally result from fragments of glass; most severe and fatal wounds from glass result from one's falling into or through architectural (plate) glass, sustaining wounds of abdomen or extremities, or both. A single, fatal penetrating chest wound resulting from a wind-blown fragment of glass is distinctly uncommon. The unique case of this type reported herein is that of a 12-year-old youth who was struck in his home in the left anterior chest by a single, sharp, slender fragment of glass blown from a window which shattered in a thunderstorm. This resulted in a rapidly fatal penetrating wound involving thoracic viscera. The forensic pathologist must thoroughly investigate and document such accidental deaths, modifying his/her autopsy procedure as necessary for these purposes and to avoid accidental injury at the autopsy table.     

The unreliability of using a urine ethanol concentration to predict a blood ethanol concentration

Of approximately 5,000 forensic cases with a positive ethanol result, over 1,000 were available in which both blood and urine were present for comparison of ethanol content. Data were examined for calculation of the urine to blood ethanol concentration ratio, with the intent of evaluating the validity of predicting a blood ethanol level given a urine ethanol level. The overall urine to blood ethanol concentration ratio was 1.57:1 with a range of 0.7 to 21.0:1. The extremely wide range of values implies that a large degree of error would be introduced if a mean ratio was used when predicting a blood ethanol level from a urine ethanol level.