This comparison of the relationship between organized fem- inism and partisan politics in Canada and the United States addresses two questions. First, Young asks how much orga- nized feminism has influenced partisan and electoral politics in each country. Second, she asks how political parties in each country have responded to organized feminism. She answers these questions by examining the relationship between each country's largest feminist organization and its party system and by showing how each relationship changed between 1970 and 1997. The result is an important and readable book that demonstrates the value of feminist political science as an approach, especially in comparative politics. The book is head and shoulders above many other texts about feminist political activism, mainly because of Young's ability to bridge between feminist ideas about politics and the comparative politics literature about political opportunities.

This new book by one of the most distinguished senior contributors to scholarship on the international political economy (IPE) of money is a fascinating and ambitious effort to remap our understandings of the geography of money. Cohen argues convincingly that the prevailing mental map based on one nation/one money is outmoded. Monies are primarily differentiated today not by territory but by their function in a hierarchical pyramid-like arrangement; the few currencies at the top are used widely internationally, whereas those at the bottom have been displaced even within their home borders and may now serve only trivial administrative functions. The great number of theoretical and empirical insights into an important process of global restructuring, and the engaging and straightforward style, should make this book of interest well beyond those who specialize in the sometimes dauntingly technical literature on global money and finance.

Literary forms of inquiry into politics range far beyond the journal article and the scholarly monograph. Myron Aronoff's monograph serves us well by respecting the novel of international intrigue as an insightful form for analyzing the politics of diplomacy, bureaucracy, covert action, and international regimes. Aronoff targets the latter-day dean of spy novelists, David Cornwell, who writes under the name of John le Carre´.

Studies of the relationship between the distribution of power and prospects for conflict or cooperation have a distinguished history in the field of international politics. Several competing theories have been offered to explain variation in foreign policy behavior as a function of power distributions. Moreover, a wealth of empirical evidence suggests the crucial role that power plays in international bargaining. The Origins of Major War is a deeply penetrat- ing, extraordinarily wide-ranging, and judicious treatment of the onset of major conflict, and it offers an explanation and some evidence for the relationship between power differentials and major power conflict. Copeland provides a dynamic theory of major power war, building upon classic realism. In my view, his diagnosis and combination of prescription are substantially correct.

In two provocative new books, Elizabeth DeSombre and Matthew Paterson attack two issues that call into question common assumptions about international environmental pol- itics (IEP). Paterson asks: Does our global environmental predicament reflect unfortunate, but essentially unrelated, secular trends or the influence of deeper, structural forces? DeSombre asks: Does resolution of environmental problems, whatever their sources, require broad support among many countries, or can solutions arise from unilateral action by a single powerful state? Paterson's answer involves a refreshing critique of the IEP literature that shows how traditional realist and liberal approaches systematically ignore the un- derlying causes of global environmental change. DeSombre provides a trenchant analysis of when, how, and why a country will attempt, and succeed at, internalization of its own domestic environmental regulations. Both books make significant contributions to the growing IEP literature, ex- tending it to important new areas of research.

For three decades political scientists have attempted to show that markets reflect the political institutions and politics within which they function. Also, many scholars have traced states' foreign economic policies to their domestic politics. Open-Economy Politics pushes both these projects forward with an extended case study of the world coffee market. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Robert Bates takes us chronologically through key shifts in policies of the chief coffee trading countries-Brazil, Colombia, and the United States-especially the formation, operation, and collapse of the International Coffee Organization from 1962 through 1982.

In introductory international relations courses, we were once accustomed to contrast three alternative approaches: realism, liberalism, and Marxism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclaimed triumph of liberal politicoeconomic ideas has led to a deemphasis on the third paradigm or, in some cases, its substitution by constructivism. But, contrary to Fukuyama, history has not quite ended. Neo-Marxist inter- pretations of international relations persist, and new and interesting ones continue to emerge. The latest entry, Boswell and Chase-Dunn's new book, is a case in point. As long-time and leading contributors to world systems theory, they employ their theoretical interpretation of modern his- tory (the last 500 years) to explain what went wrong with socialism and how the socialist strategy might still be salvaged in a future world-system (with a hyphen).

When the intellectual history of international relations in- quiry is written for our time, War and Peace in International Rivalry may very well be seen as a seminal book. Along with Frank Wayman, Diehl and Goertz have been at the forefront of a major conceptual breakthrough in the way peace and war are studied. This book is their major statement of the subject and presents their most important findings.

When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, as the Vietnam conflict was escalating, I took Stanley Hoffmann's mesmeriz- ing course, "Causes of War." I thought back to this class as I read Cynthia Enloe's book, which deserves all the superla- tives it has accrued. The experience of reading now and remembering back left me wondering: Without Enloe to consult (her first book on militarism and gender came out in the early 1980s), what were we missing in Hoffmann's class? The answer, I think, is this: We could understand well enough the contending theories about why nations go to war; but in the absence of Enloe, we were less able to ask how militaries could manage such massive mobilizations that required the often calamitous sacrifice of precious lives even for wars whose purposes seemed remote or unconvincing.

As toxic pollutants and hazardous production emerged across the twentieth century, first-world states came to play a guardian role, imposing constraints on capital to safeguard their workers, communities, and environments. As we enter the new century, vigorous protest and debate over the character and conditions of neoliberal globalization center on whether or how to reaffirm or extend such protections in an era of free trade, capital mobility, privatization, and deregu- lation. From Rio to Seattle, Kyoto to Prague, controversy arises over where the locus of authority for codes of corpo- rate conduct might rest. Can states be redeemed as guardians and still avert a destructive "race to the bottom"? Can existing supranational bodies or regimes be charged with design and enforcement of global standards, or are new international institutions imperative? Dare we trust multina- tional corporations (MNCs) to police themselves? What is the proper role of advocacy networks and civic organiza- tions?