BRILL

Truceless war; Carthage's fight for survival, 241 to 237 BC.

A specialist in Roman and Carthaginian history, Hoyos describes the war in which Rome drove Carthage from Sicily. It was the African city's first complete defeat in war for centuries, and the war had been so expensive and brutal that allies and subjects revolted and threatened the existence of the entire Phoenician enterprise in the western Mediterranean. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Western Marxism and the Soviet Union; a survey of critical theories and debates since 1917.

The Russian Question was central for Marxism in the 20th century, says Linden (history of social movements, U. of Amsterdam), but no one before him has tried to portray the historical development of Marxist thought about the Soviet Union since 1917 in a coherent and comprehensive manner. He begins with the October Revolution and proceeds through the Stalin era, World War II, the assimilation of eastern Europe, the repression of the Prague Spring, perestroika, and the 1985 collapse to the present. A Dutch edition appeared in 1989 and a German in 1992; English has been revised, corrected, and expanded. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

West over sea; studies in Scandinavian sea-borne expansion and settlement before 1300: a Festschrift in honor of Dr. Barbara E. Crawford.

Crawford is honored in this volume with 30 essays by former students and colleagues on topics concerning early Scandinavian travel and settlement. History, culture, religion, archaeology, and place names and language are the broad themes, with a common focus on material culture. Individual topics including sculpture from the Faroe Islands, Scandinavian naming systems in the Hebrides, the Church of St. Clement in Oslo, and the Celtic sea route of the Vikings. The resulting tribute provides a fitting 20-year update to Crawford's Scandinavian Scotland (1988, Leicester U. Press), which set the standard for the field. A group of plates present b&w photos of the works, sites, and monuments discussed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

White magic, black magic in the European Renaissance.

Independent thinkers of the Renaissance studied nature, argued about their interpretations of those studies, and generally sought to understand humans' capacity for controlling it, all the way up to the cosmos. Zambelli (history of philosophy , U. of Florence) examines the influence of those who studied natural magic and participated in magical ceremonies in popular rites and in witchcraft. She analyzes the work of the title scholars in astrology and magic whether their emphasis was definition and characterization of natural magic, humanist views of hermetism and witchcraft, or pseudepigraphy and prophecies, with a long glance at forgeries, and then considers Agrippa as a critical magus and an element in the radical arm of the Reformation, closing with a very interesting examination of Giordano Bruno as a reader and dealer of prohibited ideas. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The world of Ion of Chios.

He worked in so many genres you may suspect he was a compulsive writer. Then you read one of his 150 or so fragments and understand why Ion is the denizen of many a footnote and the target of constant intellectual theft. This fine collection of 17 essays on various aspects of the work of Ion of Chios was inspired by the 2003 conference of the Australian Society for Classical Studies and a September 2004 colloquium at the U. of Adelaide. The essays describe the survival of Ion's work and its impact on literature and modern scholarship, Ion's take on politics and Plutarch's take on Ion, Ion's manipulation of myth and his fragmented relationship with Athens, the logic and import of his poetic language, the commodity he and others made of tragedy, and finally, the very real possibility that Ion was a philosopher. This is lively and very much needed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The world of the Khazars; new perspectives.

This significant empire, which existed as a political entity for about 300 years to 969 AD, stretched from the middle Volga lands to the Crimea and from the Ukrainian steppe to the borders of present-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. We find references to it in contemporary Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin and Chinese. Drawn from those prepared for a 1999 colloquium at Hebrew U., these papers include such topics as the language, Hebraic epigraphic sources, the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, Byzantine records, contacts and conflicts with the outside world, the economy, historical relations between Khazaria and Rus', the influence of the Magyars, the Khuzar notif in the Kuzari of Juda Halevi, sources from Iran and Armenia, Khazars in Russian nationalist literature and in the world of Islam, and Yiddish evidence for Khazar involvement in Ashkenazic ethnogenesis. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

WTO — technical barriers and SPS measures.

Part of a series intended to explain the whole range of World Trade Organization law in authoritative and practical article-by-article type commentaries (as typical of the German legal tradition), this volume edited by Wolfrum (public law, U. of Heidelberg, Germany), Stoll (international economic and environmental law, U. of Göttingen, Germany), and Seibert-Fohr (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law, Germany) covers two significant classes of non-tariff barriers to international trade: technical barriers to trade and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures. Commentary is provided on the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, both negotiated during the Uruguay Round of the WTO and in force since 1995. The volume also covers relevant portions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: the principle of national treatment (Article III GATT 1994), the prohibition of quantitative distinctions (Article XI GATT 1994), and general exceptions (Article XX GATT 1994). (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)