As a result of the initiative, ingenuity, and dedicated efforts of Steven Peterson and James Schubert, and the generous support of Alfred University, the Conference on Empirical Biopolitics was held from July 18 to July 22, 1990, on the campus of Alfred University. Six empirical studies were presented and extensively discussed at this small and intimate conference, with two or more hours devoted to each. Discussion focused not only on the specific research questions under investigation, but also on the ramifications for inquiry in the entire field of biopolitics. Odelia Funke and Fred Kort were the designated discussants, but all presenters took part in the stimulating discussions of each paper.

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.

A conference on “The Infrastructure and Superstructure of the European Market: Implications for the Next Two Decades,” was held in St. Moritz, Switzerland, August 26-28, 1991. Sponsored by the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, the planning and the most important intellectual impulses originated with Margaret Gruter. In this and in matters of organization, she was considerably supported by Michael McGuire of the University of California, Los Angeles.

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.

Précis. The editors and contributors examine criminality from a biosocial perspective that conceptualizes criminal behavior as part of a continuum of pro/antisocial human responses that may have a common theoretical explanation. The book, divided into four major parts, includes chapters by contributors from the fields of psychiatry, sociology, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, and law.

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).

Précis. This volume of 16 essays originated in a conference held in conjunction with the 1988 World AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) Day. The book explores the impact of AIDS on “hospital administrators, health care professionals, and persons with AIDS.” It is written with health policy in mind. Editor Gostin warns in his introduction that “[f]ailure to implement strong policies will cost the country its most vital resource—the health and well-being of a predominantly young and vigorous population” (p. 12). The author of each essay makes policy recommendations that, when taken together, amount to a set of policy goals and objectives covering the important facets of AIDS as a chronic illness.

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.