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Gay Cuban Nation. By Emilio Bejel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 257 pages. Cloth, $50; paper, $19. Literature is taken seriously by theocracies, including those in which peasant revolutions [...]

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376 pages. Cloth, $40.00. Often, book titles promise more [...]

Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan. By Wire Lunsing. London: Kegan Paul, 2001, 411 pages. Hardcover, $127.50. During his first visit to Japan in 1986, when he [...]

The article comments on D. J. Feeman's comments on Margaret Mead's conclusions to the cultural determinism of Samoa. Freeman claims that Samoa seems to be recognized in intellectual circles and in the social sciences as conclusive proof of the cultural determinism central to the Boasian paradigm base from the conclusion of Mead. The author stresses that Freeman did not state that Mead's criticism has been accepted by all Boasians and argues on the history of anthropology that Freeman wrote about Mead and Samoa.

This case study of an inter-university controversy over the publication of research from an interdisciplinary social science project on the forced migration and long- term internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during World War II shows some of the difficulties of maintaining ownership of research materials. In this particular instance the junior employee was able to override his seniors' demand for control of the dissemination of research results by playing on the concerns about even appearing to suppress work for political reasons. The paper discusses conflicting norms of science and rhetorics of justification ranging from proprietary self-interest through "good science" to "the national interest" and onto "the needs of a free society." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of two "research clusters" each in social and biological science were asked how they had first learned of work they had cited in recent publications. While scientists can learn of new work via weak ties, they hardly ever did, because, it is argued, (1) a scientist's goal is to find particularly good work rather than to maximize information about all possibly relevant work and (2) scientists who are strong ties do not necessarily know identical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author gives his comment on the review of David F. Greenberg's "The Construction of Homosexuality" by Philip Kayal. Although the author agrees with Philip Kayal in rejecting a deviance model of homosexuality and disagree with a number of interpretations in David Greenberg's "The Construction of Homosexuality," he believes that Kayal is represents the book to engage in straight-bashing. The author can find nothing in this very long book to show Greenberg assuming that "insatiable anally passive sexual appetites define and characterize" gay men. It also seems to the author that the end of Kayal's review equates male homosexuality and effeminacy more than does Greenberg's book. Although there is discussion of the construction of a separate ontological category of homosexuality by those engaged in homosexuality, he does not think that either the phenomenon or the historical description is sinister. It is all too common for social science reviewers to castigate authors for failing to explore the topics the reviewer finds more interesting and important than those in the book.