Review by Choice Review
In this third volume of the MIT Press "Eurasian Population and Family History" series, the editors bring together results from an ambitious international collaboration of historians, demographers, and other social scientists. The book's framework builds on detailed historical reconstructions from several rural communities in Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and China. Looking across these varied cultural settings, the contributors illustrate the richness of cultural variations in marriage patterns--not only variations between East and West as perceived by scholars going back to Malthus but also variations among different communities within these broad culture areas. Sometimes these variations can be traced to factors such as proximity to large and growing cities and to local economic development (or the lack of it), but in other cases, variations seem to represent long-standing cultural contrasts that predate the last century or so of rapid social and economic change. The contributors also often find commonalities in the human condition across their study areas that bridge even the East-West divide between Europe and Asia, giving rise to the book's title. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Elwood Carlson, Florida State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
