The Logic of Political Survival, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003, pp. xiii, 536

The Logic of Political Survival is much more than its title suggests. Its main focus is certainly on the survival of political leaders, but its embrace extends to economic development, nation-building, democratization, war and peace, protest, civil war, and revolution. All of these topics are subsumed under a single theory that is elaborated formally and validated through a truly gargantuan exercise in data analysis. It is, without doubt, an extraordinary attempt to answer some very big questions.