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Reviews the book "The Use and Abuse of Time in Christian History. Papers Read at the 1999 Summer Meeting and the 2000 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical Society," edited by R. N. Swanson.

Reviews the book "Eastern Approaches to Byzantium. Papers From the Third-Party Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, March 1999," edited by Antony Eastmond.

Reviews the book "Shaping Community. The Art and Archeology of Monasticism. Papers From a Symposium Held at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, March 10-12, 2000," edited by Sheila McNally.

The book The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is a valuable contribution to the literature on post-Soviet Russian politics, as well as to identity studies. Scholars of international relations largely succeeded in demonstrating the relevance of national identities for foreign affairs. However, there are not so many works exploring their effects for domestic political regimes. Sharafutdinova explains Putin's lasting popular support by his contribution to the "sense of national identity and collective purpose that Russian citizens relate and value" (19–20). She relies on the social identity theory that posits a sense of belonging, pride, and self-esteem, provided to individuals by their respective groups, as an important driver of social behavior. According to Sharafutdinova, Putin's leadership rested upon a crafty exploitation of group emotions associated with "two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity, including a sense of exceptionalism ... and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people" (18). Such manipulations were facilitated by using the state-controlled media to broadcast the proper messages, on the one hand, and "the contextual variables" that made the Russian population sensitive to them, on the other (35). Among such variables, the author particularly emphasizes "the Russian citizen's collective experience of the Soviet collapse and the ensuing transition" (35). Of course, this is not the first work exploring the political outcomes of the national identity construction in Russia (e.g., Morozov 2009) or pointing to the contrast between the hardships of the early years of Russia's [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book 'Boris Pasternak and His Times: Selected Papers From the Second International Symposium on Pasternak,' edited by Lazar Fleishman.

Reviews the book 'Issues in Russian Literature Before 1917: Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies,' edited by J. Douglas Clayton.

Reviews the books "Improving Information for Social Policy Decisions: The Uses of Microsimulation Modelling Volume I: Review and Recommendations and Volume II: Technical papers," edited by Constance F. Citro and Eric A. Hanushek.

Carole Delaney has written a very approachable and highly readable book about Columbus for the general public, choosing to deal most thoroughly with his millenarian beliefs, ties to the Franciscan order, and the religious ideas behind his voyages. The book draws on published materials, many of them primary sources, but introduces no new archival findings. Delaney manages the sources well. The Times Literary Supplement hailed her work as one of the 100 best books of 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I start with two Routledge publications. My general remark has nothing to do with the authors but is directed at the publisher: these books are very expensive as hardbacks, so a paperback, at a third of the cost, might appear to be an attractive alternative. However, my own paperback copy of Understanding Greek Religion fell apart on the second opening and continues to disintegrate with every use because the paper is very thick and the pages are glued instead of bound. In the light of the fact that Larson's book aims to be ‘essential resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Greek culture and ancient Mediterranean religions’ (i), the publisher's ‘caveat emptor’ approach is especially jarring. In addition, the format of both books (each chapter is followed by the endnotes and a separate bibliography) is not only impractical as it forces the reader to jump forwards and backwards constantly, but also contributes significantly to the further disintegration of the book. I hope that Routledge will be able to correct this problem with its paperbacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the non-fiction books. 'Examining the Course of Southwest Archaeology: The Durango Conference, September 1995,' edited by David A. Phillips Jr. and Lynne Sebastian; 'Chaco Society and Polity: Papers From the 1999 Conference,' edited by Linda S. Cordell, W. James Judge and June-el Piper.

The Menexenus is usually described as a ‘riddle’ or ‘puzzle’. The difficulties it poses have given rise to a multitude of exegeses, revolving around two antithetical readings. On the one hand, some scholars tend to consider the dialogue an ironic critique of Athenian democracy and/or of democratic rhetoric. According to this perspective, Plato expressed this criticism through a paradoxical and somehow feverish epitaphios (the ironic reading). On the other hand, some scholars consider the funeral oration to be quite serious. According to this perspective, Plato aimed at reforming the genre and at introducing his theory of the ideal state or his theory of virtue (the strict reading). In this paper I will be moving beyond these standard readings in an attempt to supplement them by identifying the real moral issue behind the Menexenus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A. WALLACE-HADRILL, ROME’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxiv + 502, 18 pls, illus. ISBN 0-5218-9684-3/9780-5218-9684-9 (bound); 0-5217-2160-1/9780-5217-2160-8 (paper). £65.00/US$130.00 (bound); £29.99/US$49.00 (paper). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Evolution and Palaeobiology of Early Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs," edited by P. M. Barrett and D. J. Batten.

This review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]