This is a very academic study of the French Armée du Nord in 1791-4. There are only two maps and no useful appendices. Lynn follows the non-military approach of Janowitz, looking at small group dynamics, political education, etc. There is useful analysis of French doctrine on use of columns, bayonets, artillery, etc. Would have been much better if he had analyzed French forces using more extensive methodology; Lynn ignored intelligence, command control, engineers and only touched on logistics. Lynn also ignored Austrian and Prussian enemies: how good were they? He should have analyzed key battles in greater detail. This was a distinctly non-military study of a military issue. Lynn concludes that the French had developed a new, flexible tactical doctrine by 1794 that when combined with revolutionary élan, made them a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield.

Despite the ready availability of material in print, very little is actually understood about the French tactical system that was developed, in both theory and practice, from the period beginning with the disastrous French defeat in the Seven Years' War until the advent of Napoleon as French head of state in 1799. The system has been described as merely 'column versus line' and as the made-up term 'impulse tactics' in other volumes on the period. Here, a case study has been done, and quite succinctly and successfully, by the author on the French Armee du Nord during the period 1793-1794.

The French Revolution, besides being a somewhat tumultuous experience for the French nation, was convulsive for the French army. Inheriting a dispirited force from the ancien regime, with a good proportion of its officers deciding to emigrate, and commanded by thoroughly unwashed sans culottes, old Royalist officers who had courageously decided to stay at the risk of their own lives, and recently promoted sergeants and junior officers, these elements were infused with the 'levee en masse' with no time to train them into the steadiness demanded by the 1791 Reglement. Undaunted, those in command, remembering the experiments between the two wars in the use of battalion columns and skirmisher swarms, reverted to this on the battlefield, finally hammering out victories over the armies of reaction and the kings. This excellent volume chronicles the experiences of only one of the myriad revolutionary armies and its progress in the military art. In those parameters what results is fascinating.

Officers tried diffeent methods of employing troops in open order; how to assault strong points; coordinate the operations of artillery and infantry on the battlefield; as well as setting up schools of instruction to better facilitate training before letting the troops loose on the battlefield. What we see is a succession of experiments and trial and error, which ended up with a tactical system, if employed properly, would be extremely difficult to defeat.

This volume is highly recommended for all who are interested in this fascinating period. Some of what Nord learned would later be incorporated into the tactics of the Napoleonic armies, cross fertilized with the knowledge and experience gained in different theaters and terrain by the other revolutionary armies and their commanders, culminating in the magnificent Grande Armee that marched away from the English Channel in August 1805 and ended up stabling its horses in every capitol of continetal Europe.

Jan does a good job in outlining the course of events that occurred over a long period of time. My main complaint about his work is that he maintains a focus on the intelligentsia to a point where I as a reader felt that there was a large void left to be filled. Nevertheless, this book is filled with interesting tidbits that will well feed a historical mind. Even though he quite clearly writes as a patriot and does little to explain the current clamboring for Belarus to reunite with the Russians, he manages to maintain something of a level hand through the course of the book in regards to the Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Poles. Especially towards the end, he provides some insightful analysis into the current mood of the country, though his economic analysis is, at best, limited. Should Mr. Zaprudnik ever choose to extend his writings on this rather interesting country, I would like to see him write more on the trends of society at large, for I think he would provide a very intriguing insight into a rather obscure field.

Jan Zaprudnik poignantly records what was and what might have been in his beloved Belarus. He writes from a nationalist point of view about a country which finds it hard to be nationalistic, currently preferring a wider slavic entity in wishing to unite with Russia. The book attempts to unify a shifting geography and disparate history of Lithuanians, Russians and Belarusians into that of a single nation. The result is as incohesive as modern Belarus. Therein may lie its genius or dearth.

In theory, this would be a great travel guide -- it goes into far greater detail than other guides about the sights and their historic importance. However, in pratice, this guide is very difficult to use. The entire guide is written in narrative form, as if you were following a walk. Unfortunately, the walks are irritatingly not indicated on a map, so they're difficult to follow or visualize. Moreover, the guide constantly uses compass directions in its descriptions -- difficult enough to follow outdoors when the guide directs you down meandering paths, and downright useless when it describes building interiors in the same way. Who can tell from the darkness inside of a building which is the northwest archway?

The guide also suffers from poor design. Maps are haphazardly scattered throughout the book (instead of logically collected at the beginning or end). The list of phrases is painfully set flush, with the Czech first (instead of as two easily scannable columns), making it difficult to search by English expression.

The guide also assumes that art and architecture are your main focus, and even then, the walks often lead you to fairly mundane buildings. The lack of editorial opinion makes it difficult to determine which sights are worth seeing and which aren't. Note that entertainment (not even music, theater, or opera) is not covered at all.

This guide is for you only if other guides do not provide enough art and architecture background to you, and you are able to read a travel guide in its entirety before your visit, or you are willing to carry this book with you at all times and follow its walks to a T. Otherwise, you'll be much happier with the always reliable Lonely Planet or Rough Guides, or if you must, Fodor's or Frommer's.

Having just returned, I can confirm that almost all one needs to appreciate Prague is this Blue Guide. Everything is covered in an accessible but intelligent way: the practicalities of transportation (warning: the Metro fare system is confusing!), food, money, and language basics, along with the historical and architectural information you will need to enhance your trip. Make this your airplane or train reading--you won't be bored!--and, despite any fatigue or jet lag, you will arrive anxious to wander. Logical walking tours of areas of interest are clearly set out in the Guide, with clear walking instuctions and local maps. You will especially appreciate this detail while touring the Castle. Like all the Blue Guides, there is little you would want to know about anything you see which is not covered. Since you will be walking on cobblestones, and spending a lot less on food that you would ever expect in a tourist area, I urge you to spend the anticipated savings on a good pair of walking shoes. This book and those shoes will greatly enhance your trip.

This is my letter to the editor of the Blue Guide Series. I have just returned from a week in Provence:

I bought the Provence Blue Guide sight unseen via Amazon.com and with great excitement as I first began using Blue Guides 30 years ago knowing that virtually every rock I passed would be discussed; that helpful routes and mileage would be given; and excellent plans. I confidently ordered the guide anticipating the fun of using a blessedly comprehensive work.

What a disappointing shock to start trying to use the guide. Not only is it woefully meager but so poorly indexed. I am reminded of the wine commercial about not selling wine before its time. I wish that had been taken to heart with this guide. It is not ready for publication. For the first time I wished I had the Michelin Green Guide instead of a Blue Guide. I also must now be more cautious in unequivocally counseling my clients [I am a travel consultant] to buy Blue Guides.

There were so many places not discussed (e.g., the towns of Trigance, Organ, not to mention specific sites overlooked) and places discussed that were not indexed (e.g., St.-Remy-de- Provence and Les-Baux-de-Provence). Furthermore, the places that are indexed generally have few sites listed under them.

I hope this guide is just a quirk and I will find the other Blue Guides in their traditional depth of quality. Please take all the time you need to publish the second Provence edition in classic Blue Guide style.

The Blue Guides are a cultural treasure, and ought to be designated as one by Unesco. They allow a traveler to just pick up and go somewhere, and to experience the charms and treasures of a region that would otherwise be inaccessible without years of study and painstaking exploration. For a cultural traveler, they are as indispensable as luggage: it's almost impossible to travel comfortably without them. That being said, I have no idea who actually uses them. Personally, I know of myself and my wife, an art history teacher of mine in college twenty-five years ago who recommended them to me, and a friend of ours who occasionally conducts guided tours herself. Additionally, I once saw someone carrying one in Monte Olivietto, a sumptuous Renaissance abbey in the hills of Tuscany. Practically no one I know of has ever even heard of them. They keep getting published, and the line gets extended, but I don't know for whom. Which brings me to the point of this review and a couple of others I've written for Amazon: I want more people to become aware of this fantastic resource. The Blue Guides are such wonderful and unique travel books that if more people know of them they'll buy them and recommend them to others, and I will never be in danger of having to travel without them.

The strength of the Blue Guide is generally cultural: for the most part, artworks and architecture are the primary focus, along with succinct but fairly comprehensive historical notes on the localities and sites they cover. Although there is less implicit emphasis in the text on scenery and sightseeing, they are arranged in tours, which are pretty carefully set up to run a traveler through the most interesting, characteristic and appealing terrain in the region. If you use a Blue Guide, you'll be able to do some very serious and very rewarding sight-seeing. The Blue Guide to Provence and The Cote d'Azur is actually a little bit of an exception to the formula, in part because of the nature of Provence, which in general is not really an artistic treasure house, at least by French standards. Provence is full of ancient cities and hill towns, and rugged and striking mountainous scenery, bathed in the Provençal sunlight so beloved by artists like Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso. (For the most part, their depictions of the region are housed elsewhere.) There is actually more left standing from the Roman period than in most of Italy. Atypically, this Blue Guide is a little weak in the details of the churches and buildings in some of the small villages, although it is very thorough in its treatment of history and culture. On the other hand, it does get you out into those quiet, small towns and villages way away in the countryside, including ancient hamlets with fifteen souls up in the scenic and forested mountain hills, and runs you along rural routes with views that make you want to stop every few minutes just to look. Careful treatments of the details of the Roman cities like Arles, Nîmes and Orange are there, (although I found a certain surprising weakness in the coverage of Romanesque sculptural programs), as are less well known little nooks and crannies such as the old synagogues of Cavaillon. There are maps of some of the larger towns, all of which are described in detail, and a floor plan and diagram of the portal sculpture of the cathedral of St-Trophîme in Arles. Like the rest of the Blue Guides, this one is exhaustive: friends of ours who live in Avignon and love to explore weren't familiar with some of the places we most enjoyed visiting. We actually found ourselves in a couple of really lovely towns like one where there were no other tourists, just local people hanging out by the fountain in front of the old church at the end of the day, watching the baby learn how to walk, while young lovers strolled along the winding cobbled streets up to look at the view from the ruined castle, just like their parents and grandparents had before them. (The routes are very well chosen for variety and enormous scenic appeal: The Blue Guide to Provence and The Cote d'Azur will take you through every part of the region, and every interesting city, town and hamlet, with notes.) Beautiful drives, beautiful destinations, lots of background and detail: it that's what you're looking for and you want to visit Provence and the Riviera, this book is for you.

A note of advice from my own experience: use this guide to sit down and do some planning before you leave. Mark out your routes beforehand on a map (the Michelin Road Atlas is excellent and keyed to the Red Guides, which are superb), because although the directions are good, it's very hard to drive and follow them at the same time: although well marked, the roads are narrow and winding in the countryside, the towns and cities weren't built for cars and the streets are very narrow and confusing, and French drivers are fast and aggressive. Being lost can be very stressful and time-consuming, if not dangerous, and if you need directions and don't speak French, you might be out of luck. If you put in some time in advance, you'll get a lot more out of your precious vacation time (and money).

In the introduction to this scholarly and impassive, but very interesting, study of China's relations with Vietnam during the height of the Cold War, Author Qiang Zhai, professor of history at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama, explains his rationale for writing this book: "The rise and fall of the Sino-Vietnamese alliance is one of the most crucial developments in the history of the Cold War in Asia in general and Chinese foreign relations in particular." According to Zhai, he drew on "fresh Chinese documents to present a full-length treatment of the evolution of the Sino-DRV relationship between the two Indochina wars, focusing on its strategic, political, and military aspects." During the course of his research, Zhai found "a complex blend of motives behind Beijing's Indochina policy," and one of his main premises is that the "Beijing-Hanoi relationship was composed of both agreements and contradictions, cooperation and confrontation."

China and Vietnam had a complicated relationship long before the Indochina wars of the mid-20th century. According to Zhai, the Vietnamese "had a tradition of looking to China for models and inspirations," but there also were "historical animosities between the two countries as a result of China's interventions in Vietnam." Zhai writes that Mao Zedong was "eager to aid Ho Chi Minh in 1950" because Mao believed "Indochina constituted one of the three fronts (the others being Korea and Taiwan) that Mao perceived as vulnerable to an invasion by imperialist countries headed by the United States." When the Viet Minh army headed toward the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they were accompanied by a Chinese "general military adviser," and China furnished the PAVN with antiaircraft guns, as well as engineering experts and large quantities of ammunition. The Viet Minh won the battle but were bitterly disappointed by the peace which followed. According to Zhai, China's approach to the Geneva conference was motivated by fear of the United States' designs in Indochina: "To prevent American intervention, [Zhou Enlai] was ready to compromise of the Laotian and Cambodian issue," and he formally proposed "withdrawal of the Viet Minh troops from Laos and Cambodia." Zhai writes: "For the Vietnamese Communists, the Geneva Conference served as a lesson about the nature and limits of Communist internationalism," and both Beijing and Moscow pressured the Viet Minh "to abandon its efforts to unify the whole of Vietnam."

Zhai makes the controversial assertion that, in 1961, President Kennedy "set out to increase U.S. commitment to the Saigon regime." In response, according to Zhai, Mao Zedong "expressed a general support for the armed struggle of the South Vietnamese people," but China's leaders "were uneasy about their Vietnamese comrades' tendency to conduct large-unit operations in the south." Zhai writes: "The period between 1961 and 1964 was a crucial one in the evolution of Sino-DRV relations....Its urgent need to resist American pressure increased its reliance on China's material assistance." According to Zhai: "The newly available Chinese documents clearly indicate that Beijing provided extensive support (short of volunteer pilots) to Hanoi during the Vietnam War and in doing so risked war with the United States." In Zhai's view, although Chinese leaders were "determined to avoid war with the United States," Beijing warned that "if the United States bombs China[,] that would mean war and there would be no limits to the war." According to Zhai: "Between 1965 and 1968, Beijing strongly opposed peace talks between Hanoi and Washington and rejected a number of international initiatives designed to promote a peaceful solution to the Vietnam conflict." "Above all, Mao and his associates wanted the North Vietnamese to wage a protracted war to tie down the United States in Vietnam." When the Paris negotiations began in May 1968, Beijing was "unenthusiastic." In less than three years, the international situation changed. Zhai's lengthy discussion of the complicated internal and international events leading up to the crisis in Cambodia in 1970 is a case study in Machiavellian politics and diplomacy. By 1971, according to Zhai, Chinese leaders were "keen to see an early conclusion of the Vietnam War in order to preserve American power and contain Soviet influence." After President Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972, according to Zhai, the North Vietnamese "drew a bitter lesson from Nixon's handshake with Mao that China's foreign policy was concerned less with Communist unity than with the pursuit of China's national interest." In Zhai';s view: "Nixon's decision to normalize relations with Beijing nullified the hitherto basic rationale of the Vietnam War, namely to contain and isolate Communist China." According to Zhai: "Mao and Zhou Enlai viewed with satisfaction the conclusion of the Paris Peace Agreement." In September 1975, just a few months after Saigon fell and Vietnam was unified, Zhai writes that Mao told a Vietnamese visitor, in effect, "Hanoi should stop looking to China for assistance." "The long historical conflict between China and Vietnam...had returned to life."

In conclusion, Zhai asserts that "[t]here were two strands in China's policy toward Vietnam during the two Indochina wars: cooperation and containment;" "From the 1950s to 1968, the cooperation side of China's policy was predominant; and "From the late 1960s, particularly between 1972 and 1975, the containment side of China's policy became more prominent." In my opinion, the most important aspects of this book is its demonstration that international Communism was not monolithic in the 1960s and 1970s. Zhai makes clear that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China encouraged and aided Vietnam's struggle for independence from France and its war for national unification against the United States, but the Communist powers were motivated more by national interests than by revolutionary solidarity. The history of Chinese-Vietnamese relations between 1950 and 1975 must be viewed within the broader contexts of growing Sino-Soviet competition for primacy in the international Communist movement and of China's eventual, if only limited, rapprochement with the United States. Zhai's book is, therefore, an important contribution to the literature about the most controversial foreign war in American history.

Mr. Zhai's contribution to Cold War history is a worthy addition to any CW buff's collection, since China's role in the conflict has always been a mix of "Yellow Peril" paranoia, rumor and biased commentary. It is a sound summary of the initially cozy, then increasingly frosty relations between the two communist Asian nations. However, being familiar with many of the observations made in this book from other sources, I was hoping for a more cogent analysis of the synergy between the radicalization of Mao's vision of perpetual revolution and the Indochinese wars. For example, did the Cultural Revolution hinder or help the Vietnamese, and what were their perceptions? Did China encourage Pol Pot's intransigence vis-a-vis Hanoi because of ideological affinity or just plain spite? How did the Ussuri River clashes affect the Soviet supply link to Hanoi? This is a good volume for factual summary of the events, but a more profound reading of the new archival sources needs to follow.

Sheridan published his book in 1975, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of turmoil, mass killing, disintegration, unjustice, economic failure and human tragedy in general as disastrous as no other in the Chinese history, maybe with the sole exception of the Great Leap Forward (1957-60), another Mao Zedong's orchestrated descent into hell, this time featuring mass starvation (30 million deaths?) and stupidity as signs of the era. Apart from this, the whole Mao tenure was marked by the Gulag. Sheridan was, one have to suppose, a scholar on the subject of China in general, even if his book is devoted to the so-called Republican Era (1912-1949). How could he ignore so blatantly the consequences of the movements, decisions and political clashes he was reviewing? Because he was obsessed with words. Sheridan loves one word above any other: integration. His book is all about integration, his central theme: integration is supposedly that thing that turns feudal or semi-feudal or backward countries into modern players in the world stage, like Mao's China, as he naively suggests in his introduction. The book itself is named China in disintegration, and his message goes like this: the Kuomintang didn't integrate, so it lost. The Communists did integrate, so they won. Quite simple. There's other words Sheridan loves too, like modernization: like so many other 60s and 70s scholars, he hails Mao as the founder of the "modern" China, whatever it means, like that's good (or bad), like it wasn't Chiang Kai-shek who won the beloved seat and veto in the Security Council for the Republic of China. Maybe, he had to say all this empty words to make a point in the furiously anti-communist environment of Vietnam War U.S. I don't care. That's over now, the people who were supposed to listen to him are doing something else now, and his empty words remain empty. In A People's Tragedy, the Brit Orlando Figes portrays the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a bloody business from both sides points of view. In his study of the other Great Agrarian Uprising, he shows clearly how the communist won not because they were nice guys who wanted to help the peasants and won their simple hearts, as Sheridan tries to demonstrate in the Chinese case, but because their policies looked better in the long run for the majority of a largely apolitical mass of people who wanted Land. Only Land (even if they were finally cheated, and ended up with No Land At All). Mao Zedong knew perfectly the basics of the Kidnapping of the Agrarian Revolution, that old communist strategy, as expressed in the notes written by the CIA case officers in Arbenz Guatemala (1954) or later by J.P.Vann in South Vietnam. Sheridan ignores it all. His revolution is a Bad Guy-Good Guy struggle, a young, brilliant, idealist Communist with History blowing his sails, versus that old creep who would kill his mother for money, the Kuomintang Confucionist Chinese. That's the weakest point of the book and one real important, because the Communist-Nationalist struggle is the key of the Republican Era, the one thing that basically weakened the Kuomintang's capacity to "integrate" China and finally gave birth to another China, 39 years of bloody soul-searching that ended up with a sell-out in exchange for Coca-cola. Sheridan, apparently unable to read either Chinese or French (the language in which so many excellent books about China are written), as I suppose after checking his sources, didn't have access to many authors that traveled behind the communist lines during the 30s and the 40s and wrote what they saw before 1975. In fact, when he's got to speak about Mao's revolutionary base in Yenan, he doesn't provide a single footnote identifying the sources of his lack of any knowledge whatsoever about the place, though he later states how helpful was for him Red Star over China, that piece of propaganda rubbish courtesy of Mao's friend and frequent guest Edgar Snow. The rest of the book, when one doesn't have to cope with the idealization of Mao and the reds, is well written, even occasionally insightful about the many flaws of the Kuomintang regime and the Warlords wars. Too bad all the names are in the Wade-Gilles transcription, which is currently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, and is (I believe) inferior to the pinyin transcription used in communist China, and confusing, especially since there is no Chinese characters or pinyin translations anywhere in the book. There you have one of the very few communist successes in history, and Sheridan doesn't take advantage of it.

This is the second in a series of books on modern China published by The Free Press, a division of McaMillan Publishing Co. Although published in the mid 1970's the series still has value for college undergraduate and graduate level instruction.

The writing style of the entire series easy to read and yet conveys much correct scholarly history. Professor Sheridan is the author of a number of books on China and he seems to favor writing on the warlord era of China--1912 thru 1949--having written this book and a biography of the famous "Christian Warlord," Feng Yu-hsiang.

This particular book, "China in Disintegration" deals with the period of time from the 1911 Sun Yat-sen democratic bourgeois revolution up to the time of the 1949 Revolution in China. During this time much of the centralized character of Chinese society and governance was broken apart. Various regional warlords controlled local areas of China and ran them independently from the wishes of the central government under Kuomintang Party of Sun Yat-sen and later of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus the title of this short 294-page book.

Close observers of the Iran have long puzzled over the paradox of the anti-Western Khomeini founding a republic based on a constitution that represents the nation via the decisions of a parliament which is chosen through popular elections-for these are all Western concepts. In a exquisitely detailed and revealing study of Iranian politics, Schirazi (a researcher at the University of Berlin) makes this paradox the center of his research and provides an important new understanding of the ideas that have dominated Iran for nearly two decades.

In particular, Schirazi notes two giant contradictions at the heart of the Islamic Republic: a government that supposedly rests on the pure principles of Shi'i Islam in fact draws heavily from Western secular sources entirely alien to the Shari'a (Islamic sacred law); simultaneously, its authority also rests on the authority that derives only from God but also from the will of the Iranian people. The author shows the historical roots of these contradictions (in 1906 the mullahs looked to a constitution to make the government more Islamic), then devotes the bulk of this fascinating book to the practical working out of the dilemmas they create and showing how these have molded contemporary Iranian life. In a word, secular defeated Islamic, God defeated the people.

Middle East Quarterly, Sept 1997

I admit it: I ordered this book on the basis of its title. I was researching the Republic of Iran for a comparative government class, and the university library is woefully short on books about non-Western civilizations.

Schirazi is the sort of professorial writer who needs an editor as good as his ideas. He is comprehensive, but not exhaustive, in explaining the contradictory origins of the written constitution that resulted in its inherently flawed nature (the very idea of a Republic is Western in origin, which is hard to reconcile with the "Islamic" nature of the Republic.) He writes like an academic, and would benefit greatly from having an outsider to reorganize his work and challenge him to pare down his ideas to make them more manageable. I don't think that the translation is his problem.

Schirazi certainly does bring up several points that were nowhere else in my reading (and I read A LOT of books for an undergraduate paper); a great example is "maslahat," the legal practice of meeting necessity instead of traditional or "feqh" law. Khomeini's attempts to press the clerics into using maslahat, in order to build a judiciary that could be both Islamic AND run a modern state, is emblematic of the picture of Khomeini that emerges from other authors. Abrahamian's "Khomeinism," for example, establishes rather well that he was not a fundamentalist at all, but a pragmatist; Schirazi ties this surprising truth to the actual CONSTITUTIONAL practices of the state.

Schirazi does not closely examine the parastate in this work, which I would argue is its main fault. One cannot understand the institutions of the clerical state without understanding that the real power has always lain in the bonyads, control of the paramilitaries, and the informal structures of the Majlis. I hope that the renewed sense of openness in Iran will spur closer examination of the parastate by political scientists, sociologists, and others.

Otherwise, Schirazi and his translator have done something sorely needed in America: they have brought a poorly-understood, under-studied government of great geopolitical importance to better light.

This is an excellent map for travel between major cities, but if you want detail of particular cities: Santo Domingo outside of the touristy Zona Coloniál or say, Higüey or San Pedro de Macorís, forget it. It is a detailed account of the Dominican highway system, but not the map for in-town travel. To its credit, it does have limited street maps of the tourist central cities of Santo Domingo & Puerto Plata, but not of the business / industrial centers of Santiago de los 30 Caballeros, Higüey, La Romana, San Pedro de Macorís, etc.

Providing a durable and informative travel resource to travelers traveling to/throughout the Dominican Republic is a great map to have when planning a trip to this nation. Foldable and laminated, the map covers the nation's highway system with great detail, and provides the reader with insert maps of the tourist centers of both Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata.

Regarding what other reviews for this map might say, I feel that the publishers did the right thing in covering the country's two major tourist centers, because hardly anyone travels to towns such as Higuey, San Pedro de Marcorix, or Santiago de los Caballeros. These cities are mainly second-tier, residential cities and do not have large scale tourist resorts/hotels such as Punta Cana, Sosua, and Puerto Plata.

Overall, a great, durable map to have for any future journeys to this interesting country.

"Return to Independence" is perhaps one of the most unique books on the topic of Estonia. It is one part historical account, one part autobiography, and one part personal polemic. Taagepera mixes concise, academic prose with a dose of literary caprice when relating personal anecdotes and ingenious metaphors, resulting in a book about much more than the Estonian national identity, or the Estonian struggle for freedom from the USSR. Rather, this book is about of the indomitability of the human spirit, and the fuel to that spirit that we know as freedom.

Very good book, interesting history review of the past, but a little bit PROPAGANDA sounding end, anyway, the excellent source for those who is interested in Estonian history.

A great read that poses the difficult question: what ought to come first--one's children, or one's cause? Especially challenging when the cause is the end of apartheid. Gillian Slovo is bitter that she didn't have her parents because they were busy trying to free South Africa. Understandable from an individual point of view, but the contribution of the Slovos to the anti-apartheid movement was invaluable. I don't know the correct answer to the question, but I do know that this is a good and engaging tale.

This book is very well and sensitively written. It gives a very vivid picture of Ruth First and Joe Slovo, two very strong willed people who were dedicated to the anti apartheid struggle in the dark years of apartheid in the last 40 years before the first democratic elections in 1994.

Here we get a true picture of how ths couple had sacrificed their family life for what they had believed in and how this had effected their relationship with their eldest daughter (the author). One cannot help but empathize with the author who makes no bones about the neglect that her parents had towards her relationship with them and how she truly wanted to know more about her parents who were rather secretive towards her.

The book makes very exciting reading. My main criticism is that there is a tendency to jump backwards and forwards in the past. There seems to be a problem of continuity of style as passed anecdotes are retold at different stages in this biography.There is also a tendency to repetition. This tends to marr a rather good book which is recommended to all those who are interested in the history of the freedom struggle in South Africa.