Reviews

Michael Mandelbaum (ed.), Post‐Communism: Four Perspectives. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996, vi + 208 pp.

Raymond Taras, Consolidating Democracy in Poland. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, xii + 276 pp., £44.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Jane Leftwich Curry & Luba Fajfer (eds), Poland's Permanent Revolution: People vs. Elites, 1956–1990. Lanham: American University Press, 1995, x + 294 pp., $64.50 h/b, $27.50 p/b.

Ben Slay (ed.), De‐monopolization and Competition Policy in Post‐Communist Economies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, ix + 245 pp.

Éva Ehrlich & Gabor Révész, Hungary and its Prospects, 1985–2005. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1995, 166 pp., $29.00.

Simon Clarke (ed.), Conflict and Change in the Russian Industrial Enterprise. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996, ix + 298 pp., £45.00.

Maurice Ernst, Michael Alexeev & Paul Marer, Transforming the Core: Restructuring Industrial Enterprises in Russia and Central Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, xx + 315 pp., £13.50.

John S. Strong & John R. Meyer, Moving to Market: Restructuring Transport in the Former Soviet Union. London: Harvard University Press, 1996, ix + 237 pp, £19.95.

Raymond J. Struyk (ed.), Economic Restructuring of the Former Soviet Bloc. The Case of Housing. Washington: The Urban Institute Press, 1996, xviii + 373 pp., £51.95 h/b, £22.95 p/b.

Istvan Pogany (ed.), Human Rights in Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, xv + 255 pp., £39.95.

Lucjan Dobroszycki & Jeffrey S. Gurock (eds), The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi‐Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1993, xii + 260 pp., $59.95 h/b, $24.95 p/b.

Robert Bideleux & Richard Taylor (eds), European Integration and Disintegration: East and West. London and New York: Routledge, 1996, xii + 298 pp., £45.00 h/b, £13.99 p/b.

F. Stephen Larrabee (ed.), The Volatile Powder Keg: Balkan Security after the Cold War. Washington, DC: The American University Press, 1994, xxviii + 320 pp., $27.50.

John F. Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg & Richard Schofield (eds), Transcaucasian Boundaries. London: UCL Press, 1996, vii + 237 pp.

Juris Dreifelds, Latvia in Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, ix + 214 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Alfred Erich Senn, Gorbachev's Failure in Lithuania. New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, xx + 188 pp., $39.95.

Neil Melvin, Russians beyond Russia: The Politics of National Identity. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995, vi + 170 pp., £11.99.

Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin's Victims. Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, xv + 220 pp., £23.50.

Martin McCauley, Stalin and Stalinism, 2nd edn. London and New York: Longman, 1995, xiii + 142 pp., £5.99.

Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets. The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–1921. London: UCL Press, 1996, vi + 330 pp.

C. M. Hann, The Skeleton at the Feast. Contributions to East European Anthropology. Canterbury: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1995, xv + 250 pp., £10.00.

Irena Maryniak, Spirit of the Totem: Religion and Myth in Soviet Fiction, 1964–1988. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, Texts and Dissertations Series, Volume 39, 1995, x + 186 pp., £25.00.

Nancy Condee (ed.), Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth‐Century Russia. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995, xxv + 179 pp., £14.99.     

Audience Costs and Interstate Crises: An Empirical Assessment of Fearon's Model of Dispute Outcomes

In a recent article, James Fearon advances an innovative approach to the study of interstate crises. He adds to the traditional view (that crisis outcomes are influenced by the balance of capability and the balance of resolve) the notion that domestic political audiences exert a strong influence over which state in a crisis is likely to achieve a successful outcome. His game-theoretic analysis yields a number of interesting hypotheses, which are tested in this study using data on militarized disputes, the structure of polities, and national capability. In general the results strongly support Fearon's model, though we find that relative national capabilities do tend to affect the outcomes of crises. This study highlights the importance of combining formal models of political events with large-N empirical tests.     

Fatal brodifacoum rodenticide poisoning: autopsy and toxicologic findings.

This report details the pathologic and toxicologic findings in the case of a 15-year-old girl who deliberately and fatally ingested brodifacoum, a commonly used rodenticide. The mechanism of death, massive pulmonary hemorrhage, has not been previously reported. Brodifacoum was quantitated in liver, spleen, lung, brain, bile, vitreous humor, heart blood, and femoral blood using HPLC with fluorescence detection. The highest brodifacoum concentrations were detected in bile (4276 ng/mL) and femoral blood (3919 ng/mL). No brodifacoum was detected in brain or vitreous humor. A brodifacoum concentration of 50 ng/g was observed in frozen liver while formalin fixed liver exhibited a concentration of 820 ng/g. A very high blood:liver brodifacoum concentration ratio suggested acute poisoning but the historical and pathologic findings suggested a longer period of anticoagulation. Though most cases of brodifacoum poisoning in humans are non-fatal, this compound can be deadly because of its very long half-life. Forensic pathologists and toxicologists should suspect superwarfarin rodenticides when confronted with cases of unexplained bleeding. Anticoagulant poisoning can mimic fatal leukemia or infectious diseases such as bacterial sepsis, rickettsioses, plague, and leptospirosis. A thorough death scene investigation may provide clues that a person has ingested these substances.     

Is Television Bad for Your Health? Behavior and Body Image of the Adolescent “Couch Potato”

This article examines the potential health effects of television. A survey of 1035 Flemish 17- and 18-year-olds shows that eating snacks and drinking regularly accompany viewing. Television was also shown to influence sleeping and family meals. Heavy viewers did not, however, appear to be more passive than lighter viewers. Their indulgence in sports did not differ, but content-specific relationships with going out appear to exist. In this group no link between viewing and obesity was found, but viewing was significantly related to various aspects of people's self assessments regarding their weight, their ideal weight and their looks. Particular attention was given to those television programs that portray idealized bodies. Generally, a distinction was made between men and women because many body-, weight-, and health-related factors may be culture and gender specific.Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders)     

Gaining and seeking access: The European adaptation of domestic interest associations

Abstract. The multilevel governance literature on European politics argues that supranational governing arrangements have increased their autonomy vis–à–vis national governments. As private interests increasingly bypass national levels and become active in transnational Euro–level policy networks, national governments are no longer the sole interface between supranational and national levels. In contrast, the European Union might also be conceptualised as a two–level interstate negotiation system, an approach assuming that interests are formed and aggregated at the national level. Societal interests enter the fray of European negotiations via national executives, and private interests bypassing the national level are considered as a rather marginal, even irrelevant, phenomenon. In addition, both accounts expect different outcomes regarding which sorts of private interests – diffuse or specific – seek and gain access to both domestic and European public actors. By analysing the varying network strategies of domestic private actors, in particular interest associations, this article explores some propositions held by these two approaches. After a more comprehensive outline of some hypotheses, evidence collected among public and private actors at both the domestic (Belgian) and European levels will be analysed. In general, the results suggest that Euro–level networks of domestic interests are substantially related to their structural location within the domestic realm, that network strategies tend to be quite bureaucratic and that the sort of interest represented – diffuse or specific – has a considerable effect on gaining and seeking access.     

Continuity in crime: Sex and age differences

This study deals primarily with the question of continuity in serious criminality. The study follows a cohort consisting of 15,117 individuals from the age of 15 years through the age of 30 years. The age-based transition probabilities are studied, both for males and for females, showing that the transitions for females conform to a first-order Markov chain, so that the original matrices can be seen as estimates from a single parent matrix. This was not the case for males. The predictive power of prior criminality for later transition probabilities is also studied. Finally, the difference between stating that a given percentage will relapse in crime and the ability to make real prediction is emphasized.