European-Union

In the entry on Nicola Ceausescu this work offers the following: "Because he was basically an arrogant, rude man, it did not take him long to treat everyone around him with disdain. After 1974, there was unprecedented terror in Romania. Ceausescu ruled by relying on the Securitate, as the secret police was called, and he succeeded in intimidating almost everyone in society. He eventually resembled an oriental despot, and nepotism, the hallmark of oriental despotism, became a means through which he conducted his everyday business."
The problems with such a claim are several. Although Mr. Held would be hard-pressed to dig up people who actively loved Ceausescu, he still needs to offer some, any, support for the statement. As for the second sentence, ok but where's the proof? Nobody doubts that he as a brutal dictator but the hallmarks of scholarly works are proof and objectivity. This offers neither. As to the last sentence, one finds it difficult to believe that this was published in the 1990's and not the 1890's. The term oriental despot is patently absurd and disgustingly racist. It ignores the variety of dictatorships that have abounded throughout the years in areas that could be called, "The Orient". Would one really group together the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Mao Tsetung and Genghis Khan together? A proper dissection of the term would involve a history of the evolution of the state in Asia.
This volume is filled with such drivel. The author has a very strong anticommunist bend that keeps this work from anything resembling objectivity. That he defiles the term dictionary by applying it to this screed is nothing short of offensive. All authors are entitled to their opinions but those who really care to make a contribution to historical discussion make an attempt to not allow their own views to color their work. All that said, there are a huge number of entries in this work that provide a great name list for further research. However, any research that accepts as authoritative anything beyond the names in this work is doomed to mediocrity.

The book is a collection of papers from a 1997 workshop. The main objective of the workshop was to integrate research results on pesticides, minerals, global warming, and landscape and nature into practical methods to identify and operationalize environmental indicators within the European Union (EU). Moreover, the editors emphasize in their introduction (preceding the individual contributions that are presented as chapters) that cross-national and long-term comparisons of environmental indicators require consistent methodologies.

Although this is certainly not the first time that the central idea of "...we need one consistent methodology to identify and operationalize indicators..." is expressed, the introduction to the book raises hope that, finally, a book is published that at least attempts to formulate such a methodology.

The book is divided into five parts: a general introduction to environmental indicators in the European Union, a discussion on biodiversity and landscape indicators, a discussion on pollution indicators, different perspectives on the relation between policy and sustainable development, and a discussion and conclusions.

The quality of the paper varies widely. Only few papers are well-written and contain clear practical illustrations. Several papers are too general to be translated into practical methods. Others are too wordy and too muddled to even finish reading them at all. In general, more accurate articles and books on qualitative and quantitative aspects concerning identification, selection, and operationalization indicators have been published.

What especially attracts attention while reading the various papers in this book is that there is no general agreement on how to identify and operationalize environmental indicators. Recalling that the editors hold out the prospect for a "consistent methodology," the discussion of the individual contributions is a disappointment. It is certainly not easy to integrate the wide variety of opinions expressed, but this book provides no new outlook at all on a consistent methodology. Moreover, the discussion refers more to external literature than reviewing contributions in the book itself.

The publisher's claim on the back of the book that "it is essential reading for agricultural and environmental economists and policy makers," therefore, is out of proportion. Although some chapters are well worth reading, "Environmental Indicators and Agricultural Policy" at best is a reasonable reference work on the current status of environmental indicators in the EU.

My advice: borrow, don't buy...

If you have the patience to read all 600+ pages of this book, you may come out of the experience with a considerably warped understanding of Muslim life in the Soviet Union and of Islam in general. The author does not appear to have had any exposure to religious studies, Islamic studies, and the history of Central Asia.

The flaws of this book and the Bennigsen school have been covered in Devin DeWeese, "The Legacy of Sovietological Islamology: A Review of Yaacov Ro'i's Islam in the Soviet Union", a 30-something page article which appeared in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies last year. This article is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about Islam in the Soviet Union. One thing DeWeese doesn't mention, and which serves as an example of the kinds of flaws evident in almost every sentence of this book, is Ro'i's repeated, unsubstantiated, and entirely incorrect references to the Takht-i Sulaymon pilgrimage site in O'sh, Kyrgyzstan as "the most popular shrine in Central Asia." A religious studies approach would have afforded the author the understanding that it is not legitimate to make generalizations, especially vis-a-vis religious life and shrines in particular, about a region as vast and culturally diverse as "Central Asia" (which term is itself an ill-conceived child of the Great Game).

Another telling example, also mentioned in DeWeese's review, is the consistent and uncritical repetition of Soviet statistics on the number of shrines in the various Soviet republics. At one point, we are told that in one year there were 23 shrines in Kazakstan. This number is not only "meaningless", as DeWeese says, but absolutely ludicrous. There are more shrines than that in the area of a radius of 100 km around the town of Turkistan in southern Kazakstan. There are (and certainly were) more than 23 shrines in the area around Almaty. Ro'i does the right thing by quoting the Soviet statistics, for no part of history is without value in a study such as this, but misses a precious opportunity to analyze what these ridiculous numbers say about the whole project of studying religious life using Soviet methods of analysis. He at least could have discussed possible differences between the ways the Soviets defined a "shrine" and the perspectives local people had. (Admittedly, such research would have required actual interviews with real people.) In the same vein, Ro'i assumes that words such as "unofficial", "unregistered", and "association" can have any actual applicability to Muslim life.

As DeWeese mentions, Ro'i follows other disciples of the Bennigsen school (e.g., Martha Brill Olcott) in excluding works written in the languages of Central Asia, the Caucasus, or Tatar or Bashkir from the bibliography. How can we be expected to learn anything substantial about as nuanced and complex a topic as religious life in Central Asia (or anywhere else) from skewed and biased works written in the language of its most recent conquerors (the Russians) who had uncompromising preconceptions about the nature of religion and could not be expected to understand or appreciate the people of "Central Asia" or other regions on their own terms because of their "nationalities"-based view of the world and history? And the problems associated with relying on English language source, almost all of which rely on Russian sources as well, are obvious.

The list of problems goes on and on. Still, the work earns two stars because no one else has had the courage or time to embark upon such an intimidating enterprise before. Ro'i deserves respect for that. His analysis of the purely Soviet (mostly meaning bureaucratic) realms of the topic are also insightful. As DeWeese writes, this book is essential for students of Islam in the Soviet Union. But if you are just learning about Islam and/or Central Asia, PLEASE do not read this book until you have gained a grounding in Islam, Central Asian history, and religious studies. Edward Allworth's The Modern Uzbeks is an accessible if somewhat outdated intro. DeWeese's Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde and Adeeb Khalid's book about Jadidism are also valuable. Other recommendations are McChesney's 400 years in the history of a Muslim shrine, and David Tyson's article at www.chalidze.com entitled Shrine Pilgrimage as a means of understanding Islam among the Turkmen. Bruce Privratsky's Muslim Turkistan is really a fine work which lacks a nuanced perspective on purely historical topics (e.g., the watered-down discussion of ethnicity) but has valuable insights on Muslim life in southern Kazakstan. Perhaps other reviewers could do us all favor by recommending other works.

The fact that this review has mostly focused on recommending other works will hopefully reveal the danger of relying solely on Islam in the Soviet Union for an understanding of Muslim life in this region.

If you are doing a Phd dissertation on the topic of licensing intellectual property, this could be the right book for you. If you are looking for a practical, day-to-day overview of these concepts and how to leverage IP assets for your business, I would not recommend this book. I'm still looking!

I've never read such a boring book! It takes ages before you start understanding what this guy is actually saying. After reading a few pages you'll be fast asleep... At least I did.

This is a total contrast to american books. It is without colors, pictures. You can hardly find a graph in it. Besides this, that the book is not interesting to look at and it is also written in a totaly ununderstandable way. It wants to be sophisticated, but it is a crap! I would not recomend this book to anyone who does not really need it.

This book is seasoned economists only... It IS badly written, the theory is unnecessarily complicated, but then again it was certainly not intended to be an elegant political essay. If you want to know about the scientific depths of economic integration between nations, this is the right reading for you. But be prepared to take a lot of aspirin.

While I did not expect the contributors to this collection of essays necessarily to be Europhiles, I found little emphathy that anthropologists usually show towards their object of study, in this case the European Union, as a result of their long-term and in-depth research. One author, Marc Abélès, still speaks of a virtual Europe for what in fact is already very much reality, whether one likes it or not (and I speak here as the citizen of a European country that is not a member of the European Union). At times, the editors and several authors even strike me as Europhobic, rehashing old arguments about the problems of a unifying Europe rather than focusing on its achievements and opportunities. I thus find disappointingly little about either experiencing or imagining and building Europe in this book, and the question arises: Where is the anthropology here? Sadly, this collection of essays also lacks historical depth at either the micro or macro level. Yet a truly anthropological discussion of unifying Europe could benefit much from examining for contrast the very developments of earlier multilingual-multicultural federations such as Switzerland in 1848. Anthropologists furthermore have much to contribute by providing a broader historical context for understanding modern Europe, i.e. the development of complex societies into international conglomerates of states from an evolutionary perspective. Ultimately, this collection of essays fails in this respect as well, and does not offer any new insights into what other social scientists (economists, political scientists, sociologists, etc.) have already described and analyzed for some fifty years.

Emanuel J. Drechsel, Professor, Liberal Studies, University of Hawai'i

The CE Marking Handbook offers a loving philosophical defense of the European Community's (EC's) ideas on product safety, but little in the way of practical resources needed by people who have to sell products in the EC which comply with the appropriate safety standards. After several hours of reading, I had gleaned virtually no useful information, and was ready to send the book to the circular file. The book's organization is obscure and confusing, and the prose more like a novel than a handbook; a difficult and confusing read. The book has a glaring lack of the SPECIFIC, DETAILED, product requirements for the EC (not a single safety standard, nor even a summary of a standard, is printed in the book, as far as I can tell) and a mountain of non-sense about the differences between US and EC safety values. WHO CARES?! Readers who would consider buying this book need help, not moralizing lectures on safety philosophy. Don't waste your time and money, buy something else. I am going to have to.

The writer used this book to prove things that exist only in the writers mind. She tries to prove things that can not be proven, because there are no records of those events. The writers knows this, but still insists that tou can write a historical studie, without the right sources. Well, you can not. The subject is verry interesting, but it can not be proven. Untill then it is a typpical case of wishfull thinking. Don't write any more, untill you have prove. When you have prove, find a descent writer to put it on paper.