A Concise History of Greece (review)

Reviews 273 die audiors, since the aims of Loizos's, Herzfeld's and Just's essays are clearly defined but do not include theorizing about gender or identity. The editors, in dieir decision to include a broader selection of andiropological approaches, have strayed from their stated intention of bringing togedier essays on identity and gender. A simple solution would have been to alter die introduction and the tide to include kinship (as Loizos and Papataxiarchis did in Contested Identities) in order to reflect die book's contents more accurately. Wisely, die majority of the case studies in the book avoid the mistake of trying to discuss gender too broadly. Rather, they focus on how aspects of gender gain prominence in specific localities in Greece. It is precisely because of such detailed analyses of bounded social settings that andiropological studies have succeeded in making sense of such significant abstractions as gender and identity. Roland S. Moore Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, California Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. Pp xii + 257. $12.95 paper, $44.95 cloth. This volume belongs to a new Cambridge series of illustrated "concise histories" intended for students, travelers, and the business community. It is attractively produced and generously illustrated with 52 captioned black-andwhite plates and 10 maps. After a brief but stimulating introduction and account of earlier periods, the text takes up the narrative from 1770 to early 1991. Supplementing the index are useful appendices comprising 26 thumbnail biographies, family trees of the royal houses and major political parties, a list of presidents, six demographic tables, a summary of election results since 1952, six pages of annotated key dates, and a guide to further reading. At first sight, die word "Concise" in the tide seems unjustified: the new volume is nearly twenty pages longer than the author's A Short History of Modern Greece (1979, Greek translation 1984, update 1986). But in this new volume mere is a plate or map on nearly every second page. The captions, referring to specific details of the plates, also repeat information from the text and successfully integrate the visual dimension into the narrative. (Could this mode of presentation owe something to television news and advertising techniques?) The text proper has in fact been pared down to slightly more than half of die earlier version, although some of the excised material has been diverted to the captions and biographies, whose combined lengdi is about half of the text. The publishers claim that this book is "different in concept from anything yet written, ... a wholly new account of the subject." Dropping the word "modern" from the title can indeed be construed as a major ideological shift, shedding die cultural imperialist trappings of earlier centuries and allowing die 274 Reviews nation to stand in its own right. Compared to the Short History, the Concise History also gives greater weight to the modern era, reducing the pre-1833 period from 69 to 20 pages, compressing die next four chapters into titrée, and allocating extra space to die years after 1974. But there is much overlap with the Short History, and many differences involve only sentence repunctuation—I failed to find even one sentence identical, but the same words appear in similar paragraphs in similar order. Allowing for abridgment, the selection and portrayal of events is largely unchanged; in truth, the new volume can be seen as die third edition of the original. Nevertheless, in some ways this is a revision. For example, the death of Lambrakis is now attributed to "murderers" radier than "assassins"; Sartzetakis's "courageous opposition to the Colonels' dictatorship" yields to a comment on his age; there was a "Warsaw Pact" invasion rather than a "Soviet" invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the subsequent Greek Communist Party split is now due to preexisting conflict between "a Stalinist old guard and reformists"; during die Cyprus crisis of 1974, a perceived US "tilt" in favor of Turkey is replaced as a factor by the resignation of President Nixon; Britain, "whose colonial policies had created die Cyprus problem," is accused of washing her hands of the "imbroglio"; Metaxas's regime has become "part of the general trend...