The current trend toward suicide bombings began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The practice soon spread to civil conflicts in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and Chechnya. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1990s and during the Al Aqsa intifada further highlighted the threat. Al Qaeda's adoption of the tactic brought a transnational dimension. Interest in the phenomenon then surged after the shock of the 2001 attacks, which involved an unprecedented number of both perpetrators and casualties. Since then, suicide bombings have expanded in number and geographical range, reaching extraordinary levels in the Iraq War and spreading around the world to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Britain.

This review covers thirteen of the books published on the subject since 2002. Three analyze the Palestinian case and four others focus on Islamist violence. The other six, including two edited collections, intend to be comprehensive. This review also refers to a few selected publications that discuss the arguments presented in the works reviewed. It aims to give readers a glimpse of the content of the different volumes as well as offer a critique.

The essay reviews these works:

• Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
• Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
• Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Mohammed M. Hafez, Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2006).
• Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
• Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs, translated from the French by David Macey (London: Pluto Press, 2005).
• Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
• Ami Pedahzur, ed., Root Causes of Suicide Terrorism: The Globalization of Martyrdom (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
• Christoph Reuter, My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• Shaul Shay, The Shahids: Islam and Suicide Attacks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004).
• Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus Pa.: Rodale [distributed by St. Martin's Press] 2003).

The continued spread of democracy into the 21st century has seen two-thirds of the almost 200 independent countries of the world adopting this model. In these newer democracies, one of the biggest challenges has been to establish the proper balance between the civilian and military sectors. A fundamental question of power must be addressed—who guards the guardians and how?

In this volume of essays, contributors associated with the Center for Civil-Military Relations in Monterey, California, offer firsthand observations about civil-military relations in a broad range of regions including Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Despite diversity among the consolidating democracies of the world, their civil-military problems and solutions are similar—soldiers and statesmen must achieve a deeper understanding of one another, and be motivated to interact in a mutually beneficial way. The unifying theme of this collection is the creation and development of the institutions whereby democratically elected civilians achieve and exercise power over those who hold a monopoly on the use of force within a society, while ensuring that the state has sufficient and qualified armed forces to defend itself against internal and external aggressors. Although these essays address a wide variety of institutions and situations, they each stress a necessity for balance between democratic civilian control and military effectiveness.

Since 2000, the Modesto City school district in Modesto, Calif., has been engaged in one of the nation's most direct experiments in using the public school curriculum to promote respect for religious freedoms and diversity. While other school districts include discussions of world religions in subject matters such as history or English or provide independent elective courses on world religions, Modesto requires that all 9th grade students take an extended, independent course on world religions. Unlike many other school districts' treatments of world religions, the teaching of respect for religious freedom is an explicit and central purpose of Modesto's world religions course. Modesto's course is part of a "safe schools" policy intended to create a comfortable school environment for all students, and the first two weeks of the course deal with the United States' tradition of religious liberty.

While studying the educational effects of Modesto's course on students' views addresses the question of whether world religions courses should be implemented in public schools, an examination of Modesto's religious landscape yields valuable insight into the question of whether world religions courses can be implemented and in which communities. Modesto is home to a large evangelical Christian population, an active group of politically and culturally liberal residents, and adherents of a wide range of religions including Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and animists. The Modesto community's reaction to the required world religions course not only provides evidence about the possibility of successfully implementing required world religions courses in communities around the nation, but allows us to assess whether our nation's ability to deal with the issue of teaching about religion in schools is as bleak as the Kansas, Dover and Odessa disputes seem to suggest.

In his umpteenth book Why? (2006) Charles Tilly has shifted his focus from large-scale historical processes to both present history and personal history, including the illness and mortality of others and himself.

In his discussions of large-scale processes, Tilly has always provided vivid and telling detail, whether of "malefactors who set off ...fireworks" in Dijon in 1642 (Tilly, 1986, p. 2), or of Louis XIV and his finance minister Colbert maneuvering to avoid state bankruptcy, and "to keep smuggling, banditry, bribery, and plunder from getting completely out of hand" (Tilly, 1997b, p. 37). Tilly presents here not an illustrated set of large-scale processes but a very personal cabinet of wonders, stuffed not with crocodile skulls, musical instruments, and deteriorating dice, but with others' writing that has caught his eye, his own acute observations, and appearances by family members, friends, and colleagues.

In a sense, this is not an abrupt departure: we've met various of Tilly's extended family and friends before, in dedications, forewords, acknowledgments, and text, though here Tilly goes further. Why? is not only set in the present, but is about the present: it opens and closes with how various people have tried to make sense of the shattering attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. And though Tilly's wide-ranging discussion of his own family and of illness may appear to be about past and future, this too is fundamentally, and movingly, about the present.

Although the concept of cultural capital has been widely adopted in sociological studies of culture, education, and stratification, few studies have addressed the processes through which specific instantiations of cultural capital become important in particular institutional locations. This article, based on an analysis of primary documents relating to changes in admissions policies at Harvard College between 1945 and 1965, addresses the question of how nonacademic factors came to have such a significant role in undergraduate admissions at elite American universities. It argues that in relatively autonomous fields such as higher education in the midtwentieth century United States, cultural capital is shaped not only by the relations of cultural qualities and economic classes but also through specific intra- and extra-institutional struggles within the field in question.

How has the threat of catastrophic terrorism reshaped the strategic environment? This chapter argues that in fact the threat is not dramatically new; what is new is the salience of this threat to the public in some states, particularly the United States. However, the secretive nature of counter-terrorism actions necessarily means that the public is ill-informed about the potential efficacy of government's activities and so cannot assess if their rhetoric matches their actions. Thus public statements can easily be tailored to what decision-makers think the public wants to hear, rather than to what decision-makers genuinely believe. We consequently rely on an examination of how the United States budgets and exercises for the war on terrorism to illuminate what American decision-makers believe to be the links between domestic counter-terror operations and strategy. Along the way we look at the tools states have to prepare for counter-terrorism, and the challenges of doing so.We find strong evidence that the United States remains strategically focused on relationships between states, and argue this is probably an appropriate focus.

The second edition of this successful textbook has been completely revised and updated in light of 9/11. In the aftermath of the attacks, there has been an increased need to address issues of war and peace, particularly terrorism, irregular warfare, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and the revolution in military affairs.

The new edition contains a mature set of reflections on the role of military power in the contemporary world. It analyzes recent conflicts from Afghanistan to the Iraq War and looks at the ongoing debates about the lessons that can be learned from these wars. Particular attention is given to the debates about whether there has been a revolution in military affairs given the phenomenal pace of innovation in electronics and computer systems.

On Oct. 31 to Nov. 4, 2006, a delegation led by Prof. John W. Lewis, Stanford University, accompanied by Siegfried S. Hecker and Robert L. Carlin of Stanford University, and Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard of the Korean Economic Institute visited Pyongyang, Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). This report summarizes the findings regarding the DPRK nuclear program based on our discussions with officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korean People's Army, the Supreme People's Assembly, and the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. Three members of our delegation made similar visits to the DPRK in January 2004 and August 2005. Before and after the current trip to the DPRK, Lewis and Hecker also had extensive discussions about the DPRK nuclear program with Chinese officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the military, the Central Party School, the China Reform Forum, the China National Nuclear Corporation, and the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics.