Capsule Reviews

The Iraqi state has existed for just one decade short of a century. The history of this diverse polity, which for centuries had been three separate provinces of the Ottoman Empire, is divided into the four decades of the British-sponsored Hashemite monarchy, which was abruptly ended by a military coup in 1958, and the half century from 1958 to the present. This latter period can be subdivided into the roughly one decade of rule by generals and the Baathist era that evolved into the Stalinist despotism of Saddam Hussein. Then, in 2003, came the drastically disruptive U.S.

These three readings offer an in-depth study of the 22 countries and 350 million people that make up the Arab world. All implicitly pose the interlinked questions of why the Arab world has not achieved as much progress as comparable areas of the world and what needs to be done if it is to "wake from its sleep." Rivlin's early chapters provide an economist's view of the region that brings in geography, demography, and "the constraints of history." Then come separate chapters treating individual cases.

Marton, an American author and award-winning journalist, recounts the harrowing experiences of her Hungarian parents under Nazi, and then communist, rule. Endre and Ilona Marton were well-known journalists in Budapest, he for the Associated Press and she for United Press. By the early 1950s, they were the last permanently accredited independent journalists behind the Iron Curtain. They were arrested in 1955 after an informant in the American legation exposed Endre for transmitting a copy of the Hungarian government's 1954 budget, officially a state secret.

Clunan does something unusual in this book: she both intervenes in an academic debate over international relations theory and produces fresh insight into the wellsprings of contemporary Russian foreign policy. In the constructivist-realist debate, she favors the constructivists, largely because she is more interested in how a national identity comes to be than how a state -- in this case, Russia -- acts once in place.