Book Reviews Kasto, Jalil. The United Nations: A Global Organization - Its Evolution, Achievements, Failure and Reconstruction. London: Kall Kwik Kingston, 1995. Pp. 95. Index. This book is presented as being a celebration of the United Nations at its 50th year. Despite all its shortcomings, the United Nations has more to celebrate than Kasto. As a piece of scholarship, this book is poorly researched and badly edited. The reader is constantly confronted with convoluted sentences which make little or no sense. The confidence of the reader in the author's ability is further undermined by the fact that, once the text is deciphered, little substance is revealed. The observations are trite and the quotes pulled mere rhetoric and without context. In a book of this size any author would be confronted with the limitations of space, and would thus be forced to be concise and relevant. Such brevity breeds a certain amount of superficiality. But Kasto lacks the clarity to portray even a brushstroke of the image he is trying to paint. Everything he says has been said with more substance and eloquence elsewhere. Larissa Behrendt Harvard Law School
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