H-Soyuz December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two! Discussion published by Jennifer Carroll on Saturday, January 7, 2017 Dear Soyuz Members, Please find below the newest book review round up, which includes the final batch of reviews published in the month prior to December 1, 2016. Today’s round up includes 79 reviews from seven journal issues, as follows: Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 5: Review 1 Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 6: Reviews 2-12 Religion, State, and Society Vol 44, Issue 3: Reviews 13-14 Central Asian Survey Vol 35 Issue 4: Reviews 15-20 Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 2: Reviews 21-45 Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 3: Reviews 46-72 East European Jewish Affairs Vol 46 Issue 2: Reviews 73-79 I also have the pleasure of announcing a new book written by a Soyuz Member: David Montgomery’s Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. David’s book was published by University of Pittsburgh Press just last month. According to the press, “Montgomery presents a rich ethnographic study on the practice and meaning of Islamic life in Kyrgyzstan. Through his years of on-the-ground research, he assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments. This book offers the most thorough English-language study to date of Islam in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” More information can be found here: https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36680 Please join me in congratulating David on his new book! As always, if you have recently published a book, OR if there is a journal, which we have not included in this round up but which you think deserves our attention, please email me directly at [email protected]. Best, Jennifer Carroll Soyuz Book Review Editor Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Soyuz Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 5 1) The politics of gender culture under state socialism: an expropriated voice, Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová, eds. 2014, New York: Routledge. AND Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, by Malgorzata Fidelis. 2010: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. AND The left side of history: World War II and the unfulfilled promise of communism in Eastern Europe, by Kristen Ghodsee, 2015: Raleigh, Duke University Press. AND Love in the time of communism: intimacy and sexuality in the GDR, by Josie McLellan. 2011: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. AND Gen si reprezentare în România comunist ̧ ă, 1944–1989 [Gender and representation in communist Romania, 1944–1989], by Luciana Jinga. 2015: Iasi, Polirom (review article by Maria Bucur). “Taken together, the five studies also reveal important differences among these European societies, which continued and were amplified through the choices made by the state socialist regimes. These very differences enable us to better appreciate the extent to which any statements regarding gender equality reflected core principles or were just expedient propaganda. Overall, it appears that while in Bulgaria and the GDR such goals found their expression in long-term policies, they were used with greater flexibility and far less consistency in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland.” Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 6 2) Ethnic Politics in the Baltic States. V. V. Poleshchuk and V. V. Stepanov (eds). 2013, Moscow: Nauka (review by Olga Talal). “The politics of the Baltic States present puzzling questions about regime stability in political systems where majority-minority relationships are shaped by both democratic and ethnic principles. The volume entitled Ethnic Politics in the Baltic States, co-edited by Vadim V. Poleshchuk and Valery V. Stepanov, published by the Nauka Press in Moscow, presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of ethnic politics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since 1991, and their consequences for the status of ethnic minorities in these states.” Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Soyuz 3) Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy. By Agnis Nilufer Kefeli. 2014, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (review by James Meyer). “Agnes Kefeli has written a first-rate monograph examining an issue in Russian imperial history that has generally been described in terms of “apostasy.” The “lapsing” of Tatar Christians in the nineteenth century, and the need for tens of thousands of baptized Tatars – or Kräshens, as they are known – to live unofficially as Muslims, is actually a rather old story in the historiography of Russia…Kelefi has brought a fresh perspective to this topic by drawing from a more diverse mix of both Russian and Tatar-language materials.” 4) Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe, by Fred Abrahams. 2015, New York: NYU Press (review by. Lori E. Amy). “While several studies in recent years have begun to reexamine transition-era politics in Southeast Europe and the Western Balkans, Albania has received very little critical attention…Fred Abrahams’ Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe thus offers am much needed retrospective on an often overlooked country…The book is strongest in its thick description of the formation of political parties after the collapse of the Communist regime and the consolidation of political power, in tandem with emerging criminal networks, in the early 1990s.” 5) Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (eds). 2014, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Victor Apryshchenko). “In one of his interviews the Polish historian Jan Zharyn (Janem Żarynem), who was also elected a Polish senator, mentioned that “Our sacrificial nation is considered as the nation of criminals, and we have to organise the attack in the sphere of historical politics in order to repulse these spiteful accusations.” 1 The cases that are represented in the collective volume demonstrate different attitudes in the sphere of historical politics. Some of them were successful and resulted in “pacification of memory” while others are still require for more elaboration. All of these mean that Eastern European “captivities of memory” will produce new “labyrinths of memory” for researchers.” 6) No illusions: the voices of Russia’s future leaders, by Ellen Mickiewicz. 2014, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Ellen Carnaghan). “Ellen Mickiewicz’s book is a somewhat balky combination of two different projects. On the one hand, it is an analysis of focus groups with students in three top Russian universities. On the other, it is a discussion of protests in Russia, the bulk of which occurred after the focus groups were concluded. There is quite a bit of interesting material in each part, but it is not always obvious how they inform each other.” 7) The sacred routes of Uyghur history, by Rian Thum. 2014, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (review by Yu-Wen Chen). “In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of western media reports and academic writings on the tensions between the Chinese government and Uyghur nationalists. Both have different views on who should be the owner of the land known as Xinjiang in today’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rian Thum moves away from both competing poles of nationalist discourses Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Soyuz and seeks to unveil how inhabitants of this land of contention narrate its past and relate the past to its present.” 8) A world history of war crimes: from antiquity to the present, by Michael Bryant. 2016, London: Bloomsbury (review by David M. Crowe). “In a refreshing shift from studies that look at the history of war and, at least over the past few centuries, reactive international laws of war and the laws of armed conflict, Michael Bryant looks more much deeply into the past for hints about the nature of warfare globally, with the eye of an historian and a lawyer. What is refreshing about his approach is that he is not tied down by traditional singular approaches and interpretations of the historian, the legal specialist, or the political scientist, whose analyses are often clouded by the broader strictures of their disciplines. The result is a carefully researched study of warfare since antiquity that was affected, for various reasons, by certain restraints on human and military behavior.” 9) Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908, by Ipek K. Yosmaoglu. 2014, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (review by Bedross Der Matossian). “In this well-researched and sophisticated book, Ipek Yosmaoğlu deals with a major question that preoccupies historians of late Ottoman history: