Ashgate Publishing Co.

China's agricultural development; challenges and prospects.

Whether China will be able to continue its rapid industrial development depends largely on whether the 800 million of its people in agriculture and rural economies can keep pace. Low productivity and slow growth of rural income indicate the system has significant challenges and risks. The 16 papers here compare China to other high-performing Asian economies, offer strategic and political ideas on boosting rural development, analyze current reforms, link agriculture to the industrial state, assess the impact of the World Trade Organization, and take lessons from Taiwan. Other papers cover new measures to improve productivity, country-level production efficiencies, the impact of land fragmentation on rice production, future prospects for grain and means of handling peak demand for it, income risk and acreage in terms of soybeans and corn, commercial crops and grain crops, farmers' insurance, and price behavior in China's wheat futures market. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Delivering excellent service quality in aviation; a practical guide for internal and external service providers.

A systems engineer and capacity integrator for Airbus, Kossmann offers a step-by-step approach to managing the quality of service for anyone delivering professional services to external or internal customers in the context of airlines, airports, or aircraft manufacturing operations. The three realms are related, he says, because the ultimate customers for all of them are air traffic passengers, though this may not be readily obvious except to airlines. He looks at theoretical considerations, the service quality cycle, and a case study in aircraft manufacturing that should but probably will not interest people at Boeing. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Developing strategies for the modern international airport; East Asia and beyond.

Williams (aviation management, Massey U., New Zealand) explores how broad geopolitical and economic changes are reshaping the role of the international airport in East and Southeast Asian countries. He examines how structural changes in international business have impacted the airport industry and considers impacts of deregulation on international airport development. He also examines how geopolitical factors and urbanization have affected regional airports and explores the political and market issues of which airport managers should be cognizant. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Drugs, clubs, and young people; sociological and public health perspectives.

Sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, and various medical specialists consider such aspects of the phenomenon as a contextual understanding of club drug use in New York City, conceptions of risk in the lives of youth using ecstasy, ecstasy use among young low income women, the emergence of clubs and drugs in Hong Kong, and three different night-time economies. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

First do no harm; law, ethics, and healthcare.

This volume pays homage to Ken Mason's contributions to medical law, reflected in such influential works as Legal and Ethical Aspects of Healthcare (2003). McLean (law and ethics in medicine, Glasgow U.), the coauthor of that book, introduces 37 essays treating the medico-legal issues involved in such contentious matters as informed consent, privacy rights, medical errors, gender reassignment surgery, and euthanasia. While many of the discussions are from a UK perspective, the influence of common law in North America and Australia is also examined. Interesting differences are noted between US and UK patients' motivations to participate in clinical trials. Lacks an index. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Governing global desertification; linking environmental degradation, poverty and participation.

International goals of poverty alleviation and environmental sustainability are tightly linked in the issue of desertification, because of its degradation of small farmers resource base and consequent damage to agricultural yields, a fact recognized by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, which is "about reversing land degradation trends, improving living conditions and alleviating poverty in rural drylands," in the words of the editors (of the Canadian law firm Heenan Blaikie and the non-profit research center Unisféra, also based in Canada). Eleven chapters explore issues of sustainable development governance in the rural drylands and how they relate to the UNCCD. Topics include the Convention's problematic definition of desertification, economic and political marginalization processes influencing poverty and desertification, the nexus between desertification and migration, the negotiation dynamics that led to the UNCCD, and the UNCCD provisions related to governance and financing. The volume concludes with discussion of recent experience in West and Southern Africa. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Gunpowder, explosives and the state; a technological history.

Just as in the previous Gunpowder: The History of an International Technology, this work presents papers from symposia held under the auspices of the International Committee for the History of Technology examining the history of the technology of explosives manufacture, but this time broadening the topic to consider the relationship between gunpowder as a commodity and: the policies and authorities of the state, international trade, colonialism, and imperialism. Editor Buchanan (social and policy studies, U. of Bath, UK) has organized the 20 papers into sections on modern perceptions and ancient knowledge, the production of saltpeter and gunpowder in Europe, the overseas transfer of technology from Europe, military technicalities, and modern developments. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

History, historicity and science.

In addition to the problematic mind-body split, Descartes' legacy includes the Cartesian paradox. The realist position holds that there is an objective world and ways of scientifically knowing it that are independent of history. Hegel famously sought to resolve the relationship between knowledge and history in a contructivist approach, as did Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970). Philosophers Rockmore (Duquesne U.) and Margolis (Temple U.) introduce eight contributed essays on the Cartesian paradox as it relates to the validity of science. They treat Kuhn's thinking on historically-rooted paradigm shifts, among other classic and contemporary perspectives. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Human perception.

Bertamini (U. of Liverpool) and Kubovy (U. of Virginia) present a text combining a selection of classic essays on human perception with several more recent review essays on key topics, all of which were previoulsy published in a variety of scholarly journals between 1969 and 2004. Twenty-one chapters are organized into six sections: attention, brain systems, object interpolation and completion, object recognition and classification, different types of objects, and information processing and models. Indexed by name only. For experienced researchers as well as those who are new to the field. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Organ and tissue transplantation.

As part of a 15-volume virtual library on bioethics, this reader collects classics and other interdisciplinary writings (1976-2004) on issues in this burgeoning field. Price (De Monfort U., UK) introduces 29 contributed chapters commencing with US and European medical and legal views on the meaning of death (different degrees of brain deadness vs. the non-beating heart). Other themes include the body as property, commerce in organ procurement, cadaveric organ and tissue donation, living donor transplantation, specific classes of donors (e.g., pediatric), and equitable organ allocation. Contributions also tackle such debated issues as fetal tissue transplants, harvesting of organs from patients in permanent vegetative states, and xenotransplantation of organs from other species. The volume contains a name index but no subject index. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Technology and legal systems.

Cox (Auckland U. of Technology, New Zealand) explores examples of how technology has influenced constitutional and broader legal systems during the 20th century, in order to identify some possible guidelines, principles, or indicators for the nature of such influence in the future. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)