On the waves: a new kind of surf in Rio de Janeiro

Surfmen are thus called young daredevils who climb to the roof of suburban trains in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and vie with each other in agility and prowess, some of them often falling on the railway tracks and being killed. The practice started as a need to hang on anything outside the crowded train and became a sport of sorts. Even though repressed by the railway authorities and punished by fines and imprisonment, the practice has been going on since the eighties and developed into a competition with rules, code of honour, grading of achievement. It became a means of improving self-esteem as well as securing leadership and social prestige by people who otherwise carry on lives devoid of any charm or ludic stimulus. A substitute behavior, it results from processes of cultural elaboration at work in the youth culture of our cities.     

“Comorbidity” of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive problems in adolescence

The purpose of this study was to examine in a sample of 11,516 secondary school students the extent to which different behavioral, emotional and cognitive problems (a) reflected one or more underlying common factors; (b) actually cooccurred; and (c) were single problems. Principal Component Analyses were performed and percentagewise techniques were used. PCA demonstrated that one or more general syndromes could not by far account for all of the variance of the variables. The results suggest the existence of adolescent subgroups with divergent comorbidity patterns: those who primarily report one single symptom; those who report concurrent symptoms either exclusively in the category of behavioral problems or exclusively in the category of emotional and cognitive problems; and those who report concurrent symptoms in both categories. This distinction between different subgroups has important theoretical, diagnostic, and treatment implications.     

Reviews

Stephen White, Alex Pravda & Zvi Gitelman, eds, Developments in Soviet Politics. London: Macmillan, 1990, xvii+310 pp., £35.00 h/b, £9.99, p/b.

Jiri Valenta & Frank Cibulka, eds, Gorbachev's New Thinking and Third World Conflicts. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990, xxxiii+352 pp., $34.95, £25.95.

John Bushnell, Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xii+263 pp., £28.00 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

Susanne Oxenstierna, From Labour Shortage to Unemployment? The Soviet Labour Market in the 1980s. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1990, 311 pp., SEK 206.00.

E. Biberaj, Albania, A Socialist Maverick. Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1990, viii+157 pp., £22.95.

Christopher Cerf & Marina Albee, eds, Small Fires: Letters from the Soviet People to Ogonyok Magazine 1987–1990, with an introduction by Vitaly Korotich, editor‐in‐chief of Ogonyok, and an afterword by Andrei Sakharov. New York: Summit Books, 1990, 303 pp., $22.95.     

The challenges of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Since it came back into power in May 2008, the Berlusconi government has undertaken a number of important initiatives in foreign policy, especially in relation to the European Union. Three cases concern the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the war in Georgia and the climate change/energy package. Rather than following a pro- or anti-Europe line, it is argued that the link between all these initiatives is the development of a pragmatic foreign policy, in which the ultimate aim is to promote Italy's economic interests. This means that in some cases the Berlusconi government is supportive of the European integration process, especially when no specific Italian interest is at stake, whereas it does not hesitate to undermine it should it clash with Italy's economic interests.