Book Reviews Bouandel, Youcef. Human Rights and Comparative Politics. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1997. Pp. x, 246. £38.50 This book focuses on an odd assortment of issues. It is written by a political scientist but is, for the most part, notably free of the methodological concerns of that discipline. It begins by reviewing the content of human rights by reference mainly to the work of Jack Donnelly and Maurice Cranston. It then provides a comparison of Eastern and Western perspectives and moves on to review the literature on third generation rights. But the fall of the Berlin Wall remains almost a close-kept secret in all of this. Despite the occasional post-1989 reference, the analysis is firmly rooted in the Cold War years. The same is true of the subsequent chapters on Amnesty International and the Human Rights Committee. The latter's work is assessed almost exclusively on the basis of its performance up until 1988, although its approach has changed dramatically in the intervening years. The purpose of all this preliminary analysis is to address questions of considerable interest: such as whether the performance of different countries can be `measured' and then compared with one another. Alas, the material is again sadly out of date. A chapter on `democracy' refers to none of the outpouring of literature in recent years. Instead, it relies largely upon the work of Robert Dahl, whose writings are mistakenly attributed in the bibliography to Maurice Cranston. P.A.
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