Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young, eds., National Identity and Global Sport Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup.  Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.  ISBN-10: 0791466159.  List Price: $65.00 (Hardcover).  ISBN-10: 0791466167.  List Price: $21.95 (Paper)

National Identity and Global Sports Events looks at the significance of international sporting events and why they generate enormous audiences worldwide. Focusing on the Olympic Games and the men's football (soccer) World Cup, the contributors examine the political, cultural, economic, and ideological influences that frame these events. Selected case studies include the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin, the 1934 World Cup Finals in Italy, the unique case of the 1972 Munich Games, the transformative 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and the 2002 Asian World Cup Finals, among others. The case studies show how the Olympics and the World Cup Finals provide a basis for the articulation of entrenched and dominant political ideologies, encourage persisting senses of national identity, and act as barometers for the changing ideological climate of the modern and increasingly globalized contemporary world. Through rigorous scholarly analyses, the book's contributors help to illuminate the increasing significance of large-scale sporting events on the international stage.

Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts.  London: SAGE Publications, 2007.  ISBN: 9780761935476.  List Price: $32.95 (Paper)

This important book is a conversation across cultures on the theme of partition and its far-reaching sociological implications for communal patterns, generational dynamics, and individual lives. While the governing imagery of partition is drawn from the context of India and Pakistan, the analysis explores similar processes vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine and East and West Germany. Developing the concept of 'partition-societies', the volume succinctly explains the social, economic, and political implications of such divisions.

The lens of partition is used to focus on how societies that have experienced breaks and traumas are organized and constituted and the ways in which they deploy their understanding of the past to reconstruct themselves. The book inquires into ways in which local communities as well as wider national entities use their knowledge of the past. The international contributors to this volume show how this separation was of significance not only in the strict political sense but formed the basis for long-term processes of identity, of memory and inspiration, and the very basis on which different societies were organized.