An excellent book by renown author

This book is awesome! I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it to everyone with a heart for history. Dr. Feinstein is a great lady and an awesome and gifted teacher....it is great to know the author personally and know what kind of research went into this book...I know that you will enjoy reading it as well...

a book which seems quite interesting

I first became aware of Tajikistan after receiving a new globe as a wedding gift. I spun it and my finger dropped on the tiny country. I remarked to my new wife, "I wonder what they do there?" Ever since, I have been facinated by this mysterious country half a world away. The series of essays contained within "Tajikistan: The Trials of Independence" provide an in-depth, and occassionally disconcerting, picture of the pains this country has encountered in its short independent life. It provides a detailed ethnographic study that underscores the deep divisions within the population; it chronicles the struggle to combat rebel opposition from within and drug trafficers from without; it also shows how foreign aid (and, primarily, Russian military protection) has prevented total collapse. I have never been to Tajikistan; I have no ties to the country. This book, however, has given me a new appreciation for its struggles.

Outstanding book of history, lore and tales woven into a modern view of how we embelish or change history to make the story bigger than is was. Excellent book for any Texan (by birth, choice or desire). Hard to put down and a joy to read!

I found this an excellent book, discussing clearly and succinctly the French Republic during the years named in its title. This is a fascinating account of a fascinating period in French History. For a more expanded account of the time read D. W. Brogan's superlative study, France Under the Republic.

There are many biographies of aristocratic survivors of the Russian revolution. In this book we get a completely different view of the 'events' of the revolution.

The author of this book was not a person of title, but her family background was aristocratic. However, by the time she was born her family was living in St Petersburg on the edge of real poverty. Her father had left her mother when she was only a child and her mother was bringing up 3 children with no real support and hardly any income. This only got worse as time went on and more and more of the family possessions were sold to put food in their mouths, and jobs were always scarce.

By the time of the revolution Edith had already experienced dire poverty and living from meal to meal just to survive. This book chronicles a life of real hardship and survival and hope for life at its worse. That the author lived to write this at all is testimony to her ability to survive the worst human nature can inflict and the value of true friends.

While the author lived through the revolution this book does not describe the 'great events' of the revolution. Living in the milieu of ordinary life these mostly passed her over and in many cases, because of the lack of news, she never even knew what was happening.

This is the life of an ordinary person in the Russian revolution and the hardship and deprivation that the 'ordinary' survived through the early years of communist Russia. All told this is an outstanding biography and deserves the Bodley Head award it won in 1941.

The intricacies of Southern political and social thought are very well reflected in Michael P. Johnson's study of secession in Georgia. Johnson rejects the traditional explanations of Georgian secession: that Georgians misinterpreted the threat posed by Lincoln's election and fell victim to Fire-eater rhetoric or that the electorate, allowed a new role in determining state policy in the wake of the collapse of political parties in 1860, led Georgia out of the Union in a wave of passion. He follows up on Eugene Genovese's view that slavery's ascension to a priority greater than that of the Union's preservation led to secession, and that the movement was led by the planter elite. Working on the basis of contemporary explanations of the crisis, Johnson argues that secession was a rational decision made by state leaders. Significantly, though, he identifies the threat behind secession as being not the external threat posed by abolitionism so much as the internal threat within Georgian society itself. He stresses the fact that deep divisions manifested themselves in the debates over secession, in Georgia and across the South. The planter elite, he suggests, saw the crisis as a test of their hegemony in the state; they supposedly worried that their fellow slaveholders would be won over by Republican rhetoric eventually, especially if it manifested itself in the form of patronage enticements. Because slaveholders were unsure as to the long-term commitment to slavery by members of their own circle, they seceded in order to forestall the penetration of the Republican party into Georgia. According to Johnson, there was no ideological consensus behind the state's secession.

Johnson describes a double revolution in Georgia. The first revolution was one for home rule; this involved eliminating the external threat to Southern society, and it was achieved by the decision to secede from the Union. Attention was then turned to a revolution that was internal in nature, the struggle for who would rule at home. This problem was addressed by drafting a new state constitution, one guaranteeing power to the planter elite. He concludes that "secession was driven by political conflict not only between the South and the North but also between the black belt and the upcountry, slaveholders and nonslaveholders, and those who feared democracy and those who valued it." In the battle for who would rule at home, Johnson describes how the elite created a "patriarchal republic" designed so as to mollify internal discord within white Georgian society. This "patriarchal republic," free of the potential excesses of democracy, would soon be destroyed by the War Between the States.

In a very thoughtful and lucid book, Piirainen examines the economic transitions that are occurring in Russia (he focuses on the St. Petersburg region), especially the switch from a status-oriented economy to a market-oriented economy. He demonstrates how one's ability to transfer individual resources (i.e. personal connections, high level links to state industry) from the old regime to the new regime influences one's status in the new regime. He also examines the different economic resource strategies of different groups (he uses a small amount of rational choice theory to do this). Disadvantaged groups tended to devote their resources to the shadow economy while the new entrepreneurs devoted their resources to the market economy. The bulk of the citizens divided their resources up between the market economy (small entrepreneurship & 'bazaar capitalism') and the Soviet economy (keeping their old jobs for security, despite the fact that inflation ate the relative size of their salary's purchase power) to develop a 'diversified portfolio' of sorts. An excellent piece of work that's also entertaining as well..

One doesn't have to be a sports enthusiast to benefit from Prof. Brownell's book. It is a unique approach in teaching Chinese society. I had the honor of being one of her students at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in one of her Chinese society classes and I have taken many other classes not taught by her and I must say that her book has given me more insight in the cultural structure of the norms, beliefs and politics than I have ever gotten from any other college text. I also recommend this book for readers who aren't studying anthropology. It is just facinating to read about her adventures being an American college student taking part of the nation's equivalent to the Olympic Games in Beijing while studying abroad in Communist China.