Cornell U. Press

Architect of justice; Felix S. Cohen and the founding of American legal pluralism.

Mitchell (law, George Washington U. Law School) presents an intellectual biography American legal theorist Felix Cohen (1907-1953), who helped pioneer the realist theory of legal pluralism and put his theories into practice in the Solicitor's Office of the Department of Interior drafting the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946 and, as head of the Indian Law Survey, authoring the Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1941), which remains extremely influential in the development of federal Indian law. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Balancing two worlds; Asian American college students tell their life stories.

Garrod (education, Dartmouth College) and Kilkenny (social work, Simmons College, Boston) present a collection of 14 first-person narratives by Asian-American college students, aged 18 to 22, who attended Dartmouth; most graduated between 2000 and 2005. Included are essays by students of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, South Asian, and mixed racial ancestry. Their accounts describe personal struggles with assimilation, gender, religion, sexuality, family conflicts, educational stereotypes, and being labeled the "model minority." Some students discuss childhood and adolescence, while others concentrate on their college experiences. In particular, the students focus on their own identities and the process of discovering their own personalities. For educators, college administrators, students and their families. No subject index. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Banking on small business; microfinance in contemporary Russia.

It is the mid-1990s. You are running a vegetable stall in the local marketplace. You must carry your stock on your back because you cannot afford a car. You cannot get a business loan for such a small amount, and literally no one has credit cards. You are stuck, unless you learn about microfinancing at the KMB, Russia's small business bank. Buyske, who served as the chair of the board of directors of the KMB for six years, understands the process in broader terms of its importance to entrepreneurial development rather than as a tool for alleviating poverty. By way of encouraging microfinancing schemes she describes the theories and practices behind microfinance, the application of microfinancing principles to Russia's new entrepreneurs, the impact of microfinancing on Russia's larger financial sector, and the workings of the KMB Bank and its influence on transition to a market economy and development. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The best system money can buy; corruption in the European Union.

Typically, when corruption and the European Union gets discussed, it is in terms of the newly acceding states and it is assumed that the political and economic reforms that are pressed alongside accession will be sufficient to address the problem. Au contraire, suggests Warner (political science, Arizona State U.), who reviews corruption cases in the western states of the EU and shows that increased competition from economic liberalization, increased election funding demands on political parties, opportunities resulting from privatization, attempts to rig regulate regulatory harmonization, and export promotion programs are in fact driving endemic corruption in the supposedly "transparent" western countries of the Union. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A blessed shore; England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare.

Thomas (English and Germanic studies, U. of Illinois at Chicago) describes the social and cultural connections between England and Central European Bohemia between the 14th and 17th centuries. He discusses representations of Bohemia in texts by English writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare and representations of England in writings by Czechs. He also discusses relations between religious protest movements such as the English Lollards and the Bohemian Hussites and analyzes influences between the two European court cultures, among other topics. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Capitalism without democracy; the private sector in contemporary China.

Explaining how capitalist institutional transformation has come to China in the absence of regime transition or political mobilization by private entrepreneurs, Tsai (political science, Johns Hopkins U.) argues that private entrepreneurs have adopted adaptive informal institutions in collaboration with local officials that helped undermine and transform the formal institutions that were once configured to constrain the activities of business owners. In analyzing this process, he simultaneously constructs a political-economic theory of why China's private entrepreneurs are unlikely to become a force agitating for democratic change. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Chasing the American dream; new perspectives on affordable homeownership.

Given the recent burst of the sub-prime mortgage market bubble, this collection examining home ownership from various perspectives is timely. Editors Rowe (city and regional planning, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Watson (history, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) present the 12 papers in sections that consecutively examine historical, political, design and planning, economic, and social perspectives on affordable homeownership in the United States. Specific topics include the ideological origins of affordable homeownership efforts, comparison of low-income home ownership programs, federal policies promoting affordable home ownership, homeownership and political polarization, affordable housing design for community building, the use of architectural flexibility for achieving affordability in housing, the wealth creating potential of homeownership, the financial returns to low-income homeownership, the social-psychological effects of affordable homeownership, and the neighborhood benefits of homeownership. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The cinema of globalization; a guide to films about the new economic order.

They are set in Beijing, in New York, and in Berlin, or in tea fields, plastics factories, and sweatshops. Rarely do these feature-length documentaries, short films, television programs, or fare suitable for the neighborhood cineplex express the belief that globalization is a good idea, whether on a grand or small scale. As Zaniello (honors program, Northern Kentucky U. and labor studies, National Labor College) points out, these films tend to focus on just one or two aspects of globalization in hopes the aggregate effort will at least sensitize viewers. In 201 reviews Zaniello describes traditional documentaries such as The Corporation, commercial efforts such as Rollover, purely agit-prop work such as Uprooted, satirical and humorous work such as the Auf Wiedersehen, Pet series, cinema-verité (A Decent Factory) and mockumentaries such as EPIC 2014. The commentary is brisk and frequently illustrated with production stills. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A common stage; theater and public life in medieval Arras.

In the 13th century, two hundred years before the celebrated Corpus Christi cycles in England, vernacular plays were being performed and scripts being copied in the French town of Arras. Rather than merely describing the material within the categories of Aristotelian poetics or modern notions of theater, Symes (history, U. of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign) argues that the malleable forms of the scripts and performances requires rethinking the role of drama in medieval public life. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Contradiction in motion; Hegel's organic concept of life and value.

Hahn (philosophy, U. Concordia, Montréal) explains why people cannot think a contradiction, why they should try to do so, and the conceptual resources that German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831) offers to make it easier. More generally, she tries to make Hegel's doctrine of contradiction into a plausible doctrine deserving serious consideration, especially as applied to value. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Contested rituals; circumcision, kosher butchering, and Jewish political life in Germany, 1843-1933.

During the period beginning with movements for German unification and Jewish emancipation and ending with the National Socialist Party's assumption of power, argues Judd (history, Ohio State U.) ritualized markings of difference became a focal point of political struggles among Jews and gentiles within Germany. She analyzes debates about circumcision and kosher butchering, finding that they offered German Jews and non-Jews one arena in which they could understand the complicated relationships among constructions of authority, power, and governance. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Darfur; the ambiguous genocide, rev.ed.

Prunier (U. of Paris) aims to uncover the complexities of the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan and to that end discusses the history of the region, analyzes the political motivations of the contending political parties and militia groups, seeks to assess the actual numbers of deaths in the region, and explores the international response to what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis, even if it remains an "ambiguous genocide" in the eyes of Prunier. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Dishonest dollars; the dynamics of white-collar crime.

Primarily addressing business students, but integrating perspectives from sociology, psychology, public policy, and business, Leap (management, Clemson U.) presents an introduction to the economics of white-collar crime. He describes an integrative model that incorporates the events and influences surrounding white-collar crime, the decision-making processes of white-collar criminals, and the impact and aftermath of white-collar crime. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Entrepreneurial states; reforming corporate governance in France, Japan, and Korea.

In this close examination of corporate reform in Asia and Europe, Tiberghien (political science, U. of British Columbia) asks why (and when) governments get away with pursuing corporate restructuring reforms that promise little long-term but assure short-term costs. He notes that while corporation restructuring was clearly evident in the 1970s and 1990s, by the 1990s it came to represent something more than itself, including expressed the interactions of the state and private capital. He describes the new "political entrepreneur" of the era within the dilemma that became corporate restructuring, the means by which the relationship between private and public entities changed each other, and gives examples form France (in shameful reforms), Japan (in resistance) and Koreas (in systematic transformation). He closes with a case study from the automobile industry. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Frame, glass, verse; the technology of poetic invention in the English Renaissance.

Kalas (English, Cornell U.) explores how poetry uses figurative language to give visibility to things that might otherwise remain unseen, things such as time, systems of social rank, the physical properties of matter, and the processes of the imagination. Her case study is Renaissance poetry and its use of figures of framing and images of glass, both as a material and as a technical craft, to illustrate aspects of the world. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A gift of the spirit; reading The souls of Black folk.

Wolfenstein (political science, U. of California-Los Angeles) has produced psychoanalytic accounts of several writers, and here does the same for the well known book by African American W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). It unfolds as a story about black folk, with characters, scenes, themes, and plotlines told in good part as a first-person narrative, he says, but is also structured by a well-articulated theory of African-American identity and inter-racial relations. He focuses on the blending of aesthetic and theoretical achievement. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Global pressure, national system; how German corporate governance is changing.

Has globalization resulted in convergence pressures on corporate governance systems? Many empirical investigations of this question have focused on Germany because it is a paradigmatic example of the stakeholder system, but have mainly focused on the aggregate level. Borsch (a manager of international pension research in the asset management industry) on the other hand approaches the question by disaggregating the firm-level data and looking at the corporate financial, organizational, and portfolio adjustment strategies of three corporate cases most affected by financial and/or product market pressures: Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, and Bosch. His findings indicate that adjustment strategies have combined continuity in basic strategies and structures with the adoption of some shareholder value instruments that are, however, designed differently compared to shareholder system practices. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Herbert Spencer and the invention of modern life.

His fame was a product of his adaptation of evolutionary theory into social Darwinism, his embrace of the purest individualism, and his enthusiasm for a brand of capitalism without any form of restraint. However, his enthusiasm for the extreme did little to make his personal life less miserable, and his alliance with the novelist George Eliot was probably one of the least romantic relationships of the Victorian age. Francis (political science, U. of Canterbury, New Zealand) wisely focuses on the ways Spencer sought to explain all of modern life in within orderly biological, psychological and social structures, and how his thinking influenced the developers of other movements and schools of thought. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The house in the garden; the Bakunin family and the romance of Russian idealism.

Exploring the role of 19th century Russian home life as an arena of social intellectual activity, Randolph (history, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) focuses on one notable provincial manor, Priamukhino, the residence of the Bakunin family. He describes how the Bakunins came to the manor and the experimental character of family life fostered at Priamukhino. He also pays particular attention of the role of Priamukhino in the intellectual lives of three influential figures: literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), philosopher and poet Nikolai Stankevich (1813-1940), and anarchist activist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). The primary insights to be drawn from the discussion, according to Randolph, concern the degree to which Russian Idealism was bound up with the charismatic culture of the Russian nobility's private life, the engagement of Russian Idealism with the official values of the Nicholaevan era regarding manhood and paternalistic domestic norms, and the reasons why the agency of women in Russia's intellectual life has been unfairly ignored. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Juki girls, good girls; gender and cultural politics in Sri Lanka's global garment industry.

In Sri Lanka, as in many other regions, traditional women are good women. Women who are established as workers in the urban sectors are not good women but "Juki girls," vulgar and alien. However, the lines between these two groups of women are blurring as more traditional, rural women are recruited for work in the rural garment factories under globalization. To meet the standards for traditional behavior and yet support national efforts for development rural women must carefully negotiate a complex maze of national policies, traditional expectations and their own changing views of themselves and their place in Sri Lankan society. Lynch (humanities and social sciences, Olin College of Engineering) uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the lives of rural women thrust into a national cause over which they have virtually no control, and the ways with which they fight to maintain their primary identity and dignity. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)