The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 has been widely hailed as one of the most important pieces of legislation in recent U.S. history. Among its many provisions, the act transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children from a budgetary entitlement to a block grant, imposed lifetime limits on benefits, and gave state governments more flexibility in designing welfare programs. Some scholars, notably Kent Weaver, have analyzed the process of enacting PRWOA at the national level. Other scholars have cited the act as further evidence that women, racial minorities, and the poor are treated particularly badly by public policy. In recent years, probably the single largest category of studies has attempted to measure the impact of PRWOA on welfare caseloads and poverty rates.

Much has been written about racial residential segregation in American society and its effect on race relations and the quality of life for African Americans (e.g., see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid 1993). While residential segregation remains a prominent and disturbing feature of urban America, there are signs of increasing residential integration. In light of this growing trend, Race and Place addresses the key question: How does residential context affect the attitudes and perceptions of both blacks and whites about race? The answer, according to Susan Welch, Lee Sigelman, Timothy Bledsoe, and Michael Combs, depends to a large extent on racial patterns of neighborhoods. The study of race and residence has not, to date, accounted for the myriad ways that neighborhood context affects racial attitudes. This well-written book is an impressive work that will help fill the void. Its detailed analysis is sure to be of enormous interest to every serious student of racial and urban politics.

This is an unabashedly theoretical book motivated by a recent empirical puzzle. To wit, why did certain post-Soviet states strongly reorient their trade and monetary relations away from Russia after 1991, while others either clearly chose not to do so or engaged in heated yet ultimately indecisive political debates about the “proper” direction for their foreign economic policies? Rawi Abdelal provides a provocative answer to this question: “What societies want depends upon who they think they are” (p. 1). His book effectively challenges dominant realist and liberal theories of international political economy, and promotes a new “Nationalist” theoretical perspective to better explain the foreign economic policies of postimperial states.

Students of Brazil, of various disciplinary and theoretical persuasions, have long sought to explain the seeming inability of the country's political leadership to transcend patronage politics and develop coherent policies suitable for transforming the country's enormous potential into sustained economic growth and greater social equity. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil by Barry Ames, is the most recent major work in this tradition. Grounded in rational choice principles, the book's core argument is that political institutions—namely, open-list proportional representation in districts of high magnitude, coupled with federalism and the executive's long-standing reliance on patronage and pork—are at the heart of Brazil's governability problems. The proliferation of veto players, the continued weakness of political parties, legislative obstructionism, and corruption are among the most pernicious effects of the system.

Academic writing about the democratic transition in Russia remains heavily politicized, as was writing about the Soviet Union. Authors line themselves up as critics and defenders of the reform project of the incumbent leader—Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and now Vladimir Putin.

This is a book with two separate purposes: to demonstrate the scope and diversity of institutional analysis, and to account for the rise of, and limitations to the rise of, neoliberalism as a politico-economic phenomenon. The authors therefore have both a methodological and a substantive aim. There is no reason that a book should not have two purposes in this way, and, especially given the firm editorial hand of John Campbell and Ove Pedersen, this particular exercise succeeds. But the whole remains less than the sum of its parts. Inevitably one or the other component becomes the dominant one, and in this case, it is the display of both the diversity of and capacity for convergence within institutional analysis. The work is unable to serve as a thoroughgoing analysis and critique of neoliberalism, because this becomes an object of study from the varying perspectives of the 13 contributors, rather than being built into a coherent, developing thesis. This would probably have required a single author or small group of authors, rather than the editors-pluscontributors format. Institutional analysis is, however, confronted cumulatively, because the internal organization of the book is based around different approaches to such analysis, rather than around different aspects of neoliberalism. The primary value of the whole therefore lies in its account of the state of this particular art; readers mainly concerned with the substantive study of neoliberalism will look more to individual chapters than the overall work.

The politics of gender relations, as a critical element in the construction of and resistance to power in the Age of Empire, has been the focus of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Middle East, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Colonial officials such as Lord Cromer (in Egypt) and Lord Curzon (in India) often relied on discussions of the subjugated status of “native” women to articulate the moral imperative of the colonizer's “civilizing mission.” Meanwhile, the intersection of gender and power was a key element in the formation of anticolonial nationalist movements and in the process of state building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mounira M. Charrad's book makes a significant contribution to this growing body of literature.