The Mad Cow Crisis: Health Care and the Public Good by Scott C. RatzanReview by: Eliot A. CohenForeign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1998), p. 126Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20048994 .

Accessed: 11/06/2014 03:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.78.12 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:56:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

After disquisitions on the menace

posed

by cyberterrorists, who can, in theory, par

alyze financial systems and cause ghastiy industrial accidents with a few keystrokes,

meditations on the effects of instantaneous

worldwide news, and snippets of techno

logically informed fiction (very much ? la Tom Clancy), the author comes to a grim conclusion: "America today looks uncom

fortably like Goliath, arrogant in its power, armed to the teeth, ignorant of its weak

ness." A sensationalist judgment, perhaps, but not necessarily wrong.

First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the

Naval Academy, by Sharon hanley

dis h er. Annapolis: Naval Institute

Press, 1998,362 pp. $29.95. The introduction of women into the

mainstream of the American military constitutes perhaps the greatest cultural

and organizational change of the last half

century?a more dramatic shift even than

racial integration in 1948 or the end of

the draft in 1973. Women had served dur

ing World War II in separate corps, such

as that still in place in the Israel Defense

Forces. Beginning in the mid-1970s, women have become, slowly but surely,

part of the regular military establishment.

The author graduated from the U.S.

Naval Academy in 1980, and this is an

account of her experiences there. She

remains fond and respectful ofthat trou

bled institution, although, reading some

of her experiences, one occasionally marvels at her loyalty. Unlike today's women midshipmen, her generation had

few role models and faced stony hostility from their male counterparts. The service

academies are quite different places than

they were two decades ago. Young men

and women being what they are, however,

one suspects that the mixing of genders in a military environment will never be a

simple matter.

The Mad Cow Crisis: Health Care and the Public Good. EDITED BY SCOTT C

ratzan. New York: New York

University Press, 1998, 247 pp. $55.00

(paper, $17.50). Bovine spongiform ecephalopathy sounds

considerably more precise than "mad cow

disease," the affliction that in 1996 led to

the extermination of vast herds of cattle, international acrimony in Europe, the

expenditure of some $10 billion, and no

verifiable direct human deaths. This

compact volume, assembled by the editor

of the Journal of Health Communication,

incorporates a number of scientific,

sociological, and political perspectives. As is always the case, reliance on a dozen

authors leaves some holes in the narrative

and analysis, and much of the writing has an

unnecessarily scholastic quality, but the variety of views adduced here

makes up for these deficiencies. A useful

corrective to those who think that, at the

end of the twentieth century, governments make public health decisions, and educated

populaces assess risks, on the basis of

cool scientific analysis.

Desperate Deception: British Covert

Operations in the United States, 1939-44. by Thomas E. mahl.

Washington:

Brassey's, 1998, 257 pp. $26.95. Those who fret about the role of ethnic

interest groups in American governance, and campaigns of influence by foreign governments in the formation of the United

States' external policy, would do well to

read this handy volume. White Anglo Saxon Protestants and their sympathizers

[l2?] FOREIGN AFFAIRS -Volume 77N0.4

This content downloaded from 62.122.78.12 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 03:56:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions