Books are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism. By Siobhan Doucette. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. xix, 331 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $29.95, paper.

legal doctrines and his take on the relationship between customary law and civil law are explored. The section concludes with an exploration of Albania’s constitutional developments. The strengths of this edited volume lie in the detailed exploration of the legal contexts that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkan region. The volume adds to the literature on international legal studies and developments, and sheds light on a region that has received less scholarly attention in that realm than it deserves. The discussion of colonial powers’ influences on the legal frameworks of the select set of countries and the legacies that lingered even after their official demise created an underlying thread that binds the majority of these academic texts, albeit from different perspectives and under different political circumstances. While this edited volume has a solid structure, the coherence and connectedness of the different texts could have been strengthened with a more focused set of topics and time periods that span different geographic contexts. A closer look at the texts and (albeit not undermining the value of this study in any way) the usage of different terms such as Bosnian Muslims (151), Bosniaks (47), and Bosniak Muslims (179) might present slight confusions for readers not familiar with the Balkan region, and greater consistency in the usage of terms would have eliminated any doubts as to their reference. The volume also misses an opportunity to expose the reader more fully to the legal reforms and developments, or stagnations thereof, during the second half of the twentieth century, both encompassing the period of communist rule and the legal transformation after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. On a related note, the volume also does not have a concluding chapter, which could have provided the reader not only with a synthesis of the major lessons learned from the extensive research presented here, but also of how these lessons had shaped the course of legal studies in these countries for years to come. Lastly, the reading experience is certainly embellished with the inclusion of texts in both English and German, but this same language variance, appreciated here, might present challenges for finding a sizeable number of readers who possess knowledge of both languages equally and who equally wish to immerse themselves in texts presented in both languages. Despite these shortcomings, the edited volume is a valuable addition to the literature and might be of interest to scholars who are bilingual and interested in the nineteenthand twentieth-century legal history of the Balkan region.