Alemneh Dejene has aptly subtitled this book “A View from the Village.” Its contribution is in providing the detail borne of experience in one of the world's least forgiving economic environments. It uses extensive personal interviews with peasants to penetrate the logic of existence in rural Ethiopia without relying on emotional or superficial impressions from the interviewer. The author found the right questions to ask and presents the answers he received clearly. He modestly avoids the error of deriving the solutions to Ethiopia's problems from a limited set of observations, even though the observations represent an important addition to the international literature.

My PLS article, “Risk Factors and Predictability of Famine in Ethiopia” (February, 1991), focused on one nation's experience with the complicated phenomenon of famine, but it suggested that microstudies were needed to investigate more fully those groups of people within a nation who are vulnerable to famine's ravages (Vestal, 1991). Alemneh Dejene's book is such an investigation based on field work that involved interviews with peasant heads of households, survey questionnaires, participant observation, and case studies of villages and families in Wollo Region and in resettlement sites (for settlers from Wollo) in Illubabor and Keffa in 1987-89. His village level data that identify local, place specific processes that fuel environmental degradation are a welcome addition to famine literature.

The authors assume that costs can no longer be contained in the United States health care system and that the present system cannot be sustained beyond the near future. Three of the authors are affiliated with an applied economic research and consulting firm, and the fourth is president of the Healthcare Financial Management Association. They are trained in business and city planning. The bibliography lists articles from such journals as Hospitals, Business & Health, Business Insurance, and Medical Economics.

The book is directed to members of hospital governing boards and other hospital administrators, but it will be of interest to students of health policy. Part I highlights tensions between what the authors call the worlds of doctors and hospital administrators struggling to survive, on the one hand, and health care planners worried about spiraling costs on the other. Part II contains five chapters that suggest reasons for growing costs and that criticize cost shifting as a remedy.

In Part III the authors evaluate alternative health care systems by presenting four future scenarios: incremental change, universal access, consumer choice model, and single payer system. In these chapters they also approach the fundamental purpose of the book—to “help physicians, hospitals, and health plans take the next steps to position themselves for the future.” While not highly analytical, the book is a readable and thoughtful supplement to more abstract critiques of the impact of today's health care system on distributive justice.

I was a few days late completing this review, as the book editor can attest. Yet I did not labor under an unreasonable deadline. Nor did the book languish upon myshelf unopened until a last minute sense of professional obligation stirred. The difficulty, rather, was that I had a hard time keeping the book in my hands long enough to read it through.

The central message of this timely book is that the U.S. health insurance system does not work and must soon undergo fundamental change; therefore, providers and payers must plan for such change. The configuration of the change will be up to policymakers in government and the private sector, but the possibilities can be narrowed down to four scenarios, each of which the authors analyze for its impact on participants.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Degler analyzes the reasons for Darwinism's fall from favor among American social scientists throughout the early and mid-twentieth century and for its revival in recent years. The work is divided into four parts. In the first part, Degler reviews the impact of Darwin on turn-of-the-century social science and its association with the politics of IQ testing, eugenics, and racism. He denies, however, that social scientists of either Darwinian or anti-Darwinian stripe had any real impact on policies like restrictive immigration laws. In Part II, Degler reconstructs the history of the rise of culture as an explanatory concept and its dissociation from biological roots. Degler explains that much of this movement is attributable to ideological factors and not merely to the results of research. Special emphasis is placed upon the influence of Franz Boas, but the work of Margaret Mead, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner is also examined. Part III examines the resurrection of biological modes of thinking in sociology, psychology, philosophy, and political science in the 1960s and 1970s, largely as a result of the convergence of two factors: (1) dissatisfaction with prevailing social science theory, and (2) new discoveries in the life sciences. Degler finds recent use of biology in the social sciences less deterministic and more egalitarian in orientation than the social Darwinism of an earlier era. In his epilogue, Degler explores recent studies in animal awareness to discern future patterns in biologically based social science, including the potential for greater understanding of the biological roots of human morality.

As he makes clear in his preface, Degler sets himself two tasks: first, to describe the decline and, then, the subsequent revival of Darwinism in American social thought; second, to explain why these two changes occurred. He has accomplished both objectives in exemplary fashion. Still, there are grounds for modest disagreement in both areas.

To find oneself cited sympathetically along with one's colleagues—notably Roger Masters, Glen Schubert, and Fred Willhoite—in an intellectual history by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is pleasant discovery. But it also constitutes something of a conflict of interest in pronouncing a judgment upon the work—it could, after all, turn out to be a disappointing dud. So it is doubly a pleasure, even allowing for an inevitable bias, to report that Carl Degler's In Search of Human Nature is a masterly account of the influence of Darwinism upon American social thought. (I was a bit troubled, though, by one or two omissions; there was no mention, for example, of Ellsworth Huntington among early Darwinis ts.)

In 1989 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a five-part radio series, “It's a Matter of Survival.” Anita Gordon was the originator and executive producer of the series. David Suzuki is Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia and the host of “The Nature of Things,” a science television program. This book grew out of the radio series and is described on the jacket cover by Edward O. Wilson as “the best piece of extended environmental journalism I've seen to date.” Cited in the end notes are publications in the popular press (e.g., The New York Times) and CBC interviews with a range of environmental commentators such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich. The book indicts the environmental irresponsibility of human beings as a species and is intended as a response to the radio listeners who wrote to the CBC following the 1989 broadcasts asking what they could do to forestall environmental catastrophe.

Gordon and Suzuki begin with a hypothetical glimpse into the “nightmare world of 2040.” Subsequent chapters question how we reached the stage of environmental crisis, explore myths that have blinded us to the crisis, predict future growth trends, describe the ethic of domination over nature, and review the devastation wrought by prevailing definitions of “progress.” The authors end with an alternative (and positive) look at the year 2040 that can be possible if the resolutions they discuss are sought. They conclude that humans as a species have “lost the ability to hear the warning cries of nature” (p. 234), but they hold the hope that humans can emerge from the crisis with a “new collective image of ourselves as a species integrated into the natural world” (p. 238).

It's a Matter of Survival is sure to induce a degree of eco-angst in any person who cares enough about the planet to pick it up and read it. Even if Gordon and Suzuki are only half right—or even 25 percent right—in their dire forecast of the future of the planet, we should pay heed, and quickly. Our own complacency and willingness to accept an optimistic view of the future is also likely to allow too many people to ignore the messages of this book. And there are many messages.

This is a hard-hitting book. Cogently, engagingly, authors Gordon and Suzuki warn us that the course we as a species are now on must end in ecocide. It is a major strength of the book that it not only charts the physical, biological, and economic trends but shows the interlocking psychological patterns of denial and loss of will that together make the present situation look exceedingly grim.

The author is Professor of Political Science at Linfield College and Clinical Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health Science University. In this book he traces a recent and “important shift in the debate over how people can maximize their chances of staying healthy” (p.7). Populations in both the United States and Great Britain for most of the century have regarded equitable access to health care as the basis for individual health. Within the last two decades, however, assumptions have shifted. Health is now thought to be a preventive exercise to be secured by reducing dangerous and foolish behaviors. In seeking to regulate dangerous behaviors of citizens, policymakers confront deeply seated values of individualism and choice.

Leichter advances the thesis that policies that regulate life-styles are fundamentally different from other health policies. As a consequence, a distinct framework for evaluation is necessary, which he presents and elaborates upon throughout the book. He uses historical experiences in two countries—the United States and Great Britain—to develop and refine his thesis.

Following historical overviews of the two health revolutions (access to health care and personal life-style monitoring), Leichter deals with four areas in which governments have sought to limit individual activities: smoking, alcohol control, road safety, and behaviors relating to AIDS. In his final chapter he evaluates “when and under what circumstances [it is] appropriate for the state to intervene in life-style decisions” (p. 31). This literate book is supplemented by four figures and thirteen tables.

Government policy can further the health of the public in four ways, notes Howard Leichter: “It can support biomedical research; improve, guarantee, or subsidize access to health care; regulate environmental and product hazards; and encourage people, through education or regulation, to adopt more healthy life-styles” (p. 6).

As the editor reports in the introduction, this volume has three goals: (1) to acknowledge the influence of sociobiology in a wide number of disciplines and areas of inquiry; (2) to illustrate the ways in which practitioners of these disparate disciplines employ sociobiological approaches in their own fields of study; and (3) to introduce major principles of sociobiology.

Contributors assess the current and potential influence of sociobiology in their own fields, including psychiatry (Randolph M. Nesse), law (John H. Beckstrom), management theory (J. Gary Bernhard and Kalman Glantz), anthropology (William Irons), economics (Robert H. Frank), primatology (Birute Galdikas and Paul Vasey), history (Laura Betzig), political science (Roger D. Masters), ethical philosophy (John Chandler), cognitive psychology (Douglas Kenrick and Robert Hogan), epistemology (Michael Ruse), religious studies (Vernon Reynolds), studies of conflict (Johan M. G. van der Dennen), Marxist thought (Regina Karpinskaya), aesthetics (Charles J. Lumsden), sociology (Pierre L. van den Berghe), linguistics (James R. Hurford), and psychology (Charles Crawford). The introductory essay includes a glossary of sociobiological terms.

Mary Maxwell, in The Sociobiological Imagination, sets an admirable array of tasks: “to acknowledge the remarkablywide influence ofa central idea, to demonstrate that the research of human biology takes place in disparate fields, and to introduce the major principles of sociobiology” (p. 9). Her unstated task is to help legitimate the presence of the paradigm of evolutionary biology in the social sciences by allowing practitioners in many social disciplines to demonstrate the usefulness of this paradigm in their work. In all these endeavors, I think she succeeds.

Mary Maxwell set out to accomplish three things with this book: to “demonstrate the wide influence sociobiology has had on other academic disciplines,” “to show that the majority of developments in human sociobiology have in fact taken place in various disciplines outside of biology,” and “to introduce the major principles of sociobiology” (pp. 1-2, reiterated p. 9). To do this, she enlisted a set of expert sociobiologists who work in a variety of academic areas and asked each of them to contribute a chapter demonstrating the impact ofsociobiology in their field. Despite the expert help and the fact that the overall quality of each contribution is excellent, Maxwell has failed to achieve any of her three goals.