BOOK REVIEWS 333 Tomáš Kučera, Olga Kučerová, Oksana Opara and Eberhard Schaich (eds.), New Demographic Faces of Europe: The Changing Population Dynamics in Countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Berlin: Springer, 2000, x + 420 pp. The British historian Eric Hobsbawn wrote in 1994 “there can be no serious doubt that in the late 1980s and early 1990s an era in world history ended and a new one began.” The dissolution of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991 marked the end of the fall of the East European socialism that had begun just over two years earlier. This historic era – there can be no serious doubt about that either – ushered a momentous multifaceted transformation of the entire central and eastern European. An important aspect of this has been intense demographic change, some of which has been faster and more profound than any seen during peacetime in twentieth-century Europe. In public, scholarly and policy circles, these changes have attracted far less attention than the transition to parliamentary democracy and market economy, the key driving forces of the post-communist transformation. The book edited by Kučera and colleagues is a step towards filling the gap in our knowledge of the population developments in these post-communist countries during the 1990s. This collection of country essays has been written by members of the Central and East European Demographic Network, an international group of demographers, statisticians and other professionals whose ultimate aim is the creation of “national sets of regional population forecasts” for the countries covered by the Network. The book is an outgrowth of the first phase of the work of the group, the purpose of which was the development of baseline knowledge at the national level, a stepping-stone towards sub-national demographic studies and forecasts. The essays are on the group of countries that overlap but do not include all of those that are part of the Network. Among them are a large number of the socalled transition countries of Europe, namely all central European countries, the Baltic states, the European Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Balkan countries, albeit only two – Bulgaria and Romania. Three west European countries are also covered; Austria, Denmark and Germany, with the essay on the latter distinguishing between the western and eastern parts. Given the preponderance of the transition countries, the claim made in the preface that the volume presents a demographic chronicle of new developments “on both sides of the former Iron Curtain” is unfounded. The value of the volume lies in its emphasis on central and eastern Europe, the area on which this review focuses. The authors describe a wide variety of new demographic developments, the onset of which in the majority of transition countries broadly coincided with the break with the communist past, and occasionally attempt interpretations of the new trends. Some authors compare these developments with those that occurred during the post-war communist era, making the reader appreciative of the changes in the 1990s. In part, the composite picture the authors paint is one of almost universal, sudden, rapid and often huge declines in fertility, starting around the turn of the 334 BOOK REVIEWS 1990s, and of a bewildering variety of mortality changes, ranging from a resumption of rapid decline in the Czech Republic, to large fluctuations in the Russian Federation. In many instances one consequence of these trends was the emergence of population decline, which in some countries was temporarily postponed largely as a result of ethnic cross-border migration triggered by the removal of barriers to population movements and the dissolution of the former federal states. Another consequence of the sharp drop in the number of births was a new dent in the highly irregular age structures of many of these populations. The new forms of partnership and reproductive behaviour that took root in large parts of the West since the 1960s spread to many areas of the region during the 1990s, particularly through central Europe and the Baltics. Some essays describe these changes in a comprehensive way, drawing, among other things, on the Fertility and Family Survey data. In other essays, including some on countries for which Fertility and Family Survey data exist, these changes are dealt with in a perfunctory manner. This is an obvious weakness of the volume. A number of essays seek to shed light on forces behind the transformations in partnership and reproductive behaviour. Some authors, writing about countries where cohabitation and extramarital childbearing (two defining traits of the so-called “Second Demographic Transition”) have begun to manifest themselves, attribute the transformations to both ideational changes, associated with new freedoms, values and western influences, and economic and social hardship brought about by the transition to market economy. The essay on Lithuania offers a particularly thoughtful discussion of underlying causes. In countries such as the Ukraine, where behavioural changes have by and large only resulted in large declines in fertility and marriage, the greatly reduced living standards caused by the deep economic crisis are perceived as the prime cause. The essays address a myriad other developments, including changes in population composition by age, sex, residential location, marital status, educational attainment, ethnicity, citizenship and religious affiliation. Shifts in the reliance on induced abortion and modern and traditional contraceptives are also considered. The list does not stop here: several essays discuss changes in labour force participation, employment and unemployment, and in a few instances housing, venturing as a result into issues beyond the borders of formal demographic analysis. In sum, the subject-matter territory that the volume covers is vast, making it frequently difficult for the reader to see “the forest for the trees.” However, not all of the authors embraced an all-inclusive approach, which was presumably suggested by the editors. As a result they wrote well-focused pieces that strike a better balance between description and interpretation. The authors of the essay on the Russian Federation broke from the mould, focusing exclusively on recent mortality changes and possible underlying causes. The reader will be, therefore, disappointed to find that the largest country of this region was not accorded a balanced treatment. For scholars interested in the demographic changes in this part of Europe during the early post-communist era this book is a “must-read.” In spite of its weaknesses, BOOK REVIEWS 335 which could be readily attributed to the fact that demographic research in a number of these countries is still coming of age, the reader will find the book a rich depository of facts, descriptions and occasional insight. The fact that it was written by the researchers from these countries, who obviously have intimate knowledge of their societies, makes the book all that more valuable. M IROSLAV M ACURA Population Activities Unit United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Graziella Caselli, Jacques Vallin and Guillaume Wunsch (eds.), Démographie: Analyse et Synthèse, Volume I: La Dynamique des Populations. Paris: Institut National d’Études Démographiques, 2001, xxviii + 550 pp. There has been an increase in the number of books dealing with demographic methods lately, after many years of relative stationarity. This could be an indication of either an upswing or a downswing in the field. It could mean that the field of formal demography is thriving, and that new books simply reflect the need for the field to be constantly updated with new material. On the contrary, this could mean that the field of formal demography is approaching an end point, and that various members of the demographic community feel that it is now an appropriate time to compile cumulative knowledge in more or less definite syntheses. This book, which is the first volume of an eight-volume treatise on demography and deals specifically with the methodological aspects of the field, proves to us that the field of formal demography is indeed alive. This book contains many useful chapters discussing recent work and giving future directions for research in the field of demographic methods. Particularly innovative are chapters dealing with demographic translation, age-period-cohort models, and the last section of the book which deals with independence, heterogeneity and multilevel methods. These chapters demonstrate the rising importance of statistical methods for understanding demographic processes, and the fact that demography is no longer about describing populations only, but also about understanding the demographic behaviour of individuals, according to their own characteristics and the characteristics of their environment. As for the more classical parts of the book, dealing with traditional measurement of mortality, fertility and migration, and their interaction in producing populations with particular growth and structure, the breadth and depth of the material presented is impressive. Measures and models are described with valuable information about their intellectual origins, and with numerous examples and illustrations. Part IV dealing with population reproduction and population models