662 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 101, No. 3 • SEPTEMBER 1999 Context" (by both authors) offers a typology of the role(s) served by English (pp. 77-78); the discussion is interesting, but is the typology useful? Similarly, the observation that religion, economy, politics, and language interrelate (pp. 81-82) offers little that is new. However, the article "Language Planning and Gender Planning" (AAM) does raise some new perspectives, in particular the relationship between language usage and the pro- motion of gender-balanced participation in politics. Mazrui's sweep is broadly programmatic, advocating "cultural adjust- ment" (p. 92). The following chapter on language and democ- racy, by Alamin M. Mazrui (AMM), again raises the question of whether language policy can guide the path toward democracy. Paradoxically, the most successful examples of language plans in Africa come from one-party, quasi-autocratic states. The arti- cle shows mature thinking about the role of language in cultural and political process, in particular with regard to the ways in which ethnicity, class, and pluralism interact on the national stage. An important chapter, previously unpublished, treats "Lan- guage Policy and the Rule of Law in 'Anglophone' Africa." It focuses on relationships between the movement to democracy and the force of "rule of law," between the law of command, the law of rights (p. 112), therightso/languages (defined with refer- ence to the collective), and therightsto languages (defined with reference to the individual). Here, and elsewhere in the volume, there are some comments about language-culture-thought rela- tions, but the authors' treatments are likely to leave readers of this journal unsatisfied. Part 3 consists of four chapters on East Africa, with particular attention to Swahili. Much of the material here is available else- where, e.g., the development and spread of Swahili as a lingua franca, but the treatment of the indigenization of English, culmi- nating in the rise of Afro-Saxons (i.e., Africans who have Eng- lish as a mother tongue) is engaging (pp. 135-138). The assump- tion that languages have discrete boundaries mars the discussion of urban vernaculars and "merging" languages, but this assump- tion confounds much sociolinguistic research in Africa. It should be regretted that many of the statistics cited on language use are sorely outdated (25+ years). The chapter comparing the histories and roles of English in Kenya and Uganda raises a number of previously untreated points, e.g., the role of tourism in contributing to the "Ameri- canization" of Kenyan English. The concluding chapter looks to the linguistic consequences of the Cold War's end, the triumph of market ideologies, and the end of institutionalized racism in Africa. The authors' discussion ties the success of capitalism to situations wherein the language of the marketplace is the lan- guage of the classroom, but it is unclear whether the authors in- tend this relationship to be understood causally (p. 198). They note the negative effects of structural adjustment programs (S APs) on higher education (and therefore English). At the same time, resources available for indigenous language are also re- duced, countering (or at least equalizing) this negative effect; in- deed, in Tanzania, the role of English has expanded as a result of SAPs. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the relative dependence of indigenous languages in east and southeast Asia, compared to Africa, and the possible economic consequences of such dependence. Sociolinguists will appreciate the Mazruis's attention to lin- guistic concerns, their view that language is a central force in shaping Africa's past and future, and the treatment of the rela- tionships between languages and globalization. Even when the authors are revisiting familiar ground, they manage to engage and provoke the reader. The publication of these articles in a sin- gle volume is a useful contribution to the literatures on political linguistics and African studies. Physical Anthropology Reconstructing Human Origins: A Modern Synthesis. Glenn C. Conroy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.557 pp. HERBERT H. COVERT University of Colorado-Boulder In this timely book, Conroy provides a well-written, clear, and concise review of our present knowledge on human evolu- tion. For the first time in well over a decade, Conroy has pro- vided biological anthropology with a great textbook for human evolution courses. Moreover, this is a scholarly work full of in- sightful consideration of the historical climate of numerous im- portant discoveries and debates that make the study of human evolution exciting. The organization of this book is not unusual given the subject matter, with the text being divided into ten chapters. The initial two chapters entitled "Time, Climate, and Human Evolution" and "Finding, Dating, and Naming Fossil Hominids" introduce the reader to a range of pertinent paleoan- thropological topics. The remaining eight chapters lead the reader through areview of the past 20 million years of hominoid. evolution. The most distinctive aspect of the general organiza- tion is the inclusion of two chapters, rather than a single one, on recent human evolution—chapter 9 evaluates "What the Mole- cules Say about 'Modern' Human Origins" and chapter 10 evaluates "What the Fossils Say about 'Modern' Human Ori- gins." While the organization of this textis not distinctive, Con- roy's coverage of the material often is! The review of absolute dating techniques is nearly twenty pages long (pp. 51-68), yet this is not a heavy or an overly detailed treatment. Rather, it pro- vides the clearest and most thorough discussion of this essential piece of our understanding of natural history that I have seen in such a text. On pages 134 through 149 Conroy provides an inter- esting and detailed description of the complex taphonomic his- tories of the South African sites that have produced australo- pithecine materials. This is a much more insightful approach than the standard and rather brief discussions on this topic that simply note that the taphonomy of these sites is complex. Con- roy's review of the morphological variability expressed by the earliest members of Homo is also noteworthy. He provides an insightful and balanced discussion of how this variability is