BOOK REVIEWS / Sociocultural Anthropology 881 the formal economy, her sample data reveal that they rely pri- marily on non-wage resources, and that four-fifths of her sample households received public assistance. Choctaws at the Crossroads represents the fruition of a dec- ade of dedicated scholarship and usefully narrates the sweep of Choctaw history from a well-defined and still relevant theoreti- cal perspective. At the same time, like many dissertation-based books, this volume would have benefited from further writing and editing. The author does not attempt to articulate the interre- lationships between economics, politics, and culture or to adjust her paradigmatic framework through new insights and data. The reader must infer the author's view of titular constructs, as she offers no definitions of culture, class, gender, or ethnicity. In keeping with the models employed, the dynamic between the Choctaw and non-Indian society is mechanistic and "top down"; the "core" acts monolithically, and the Choctaw re- spond, but generally as abstract social types such as "progres- sives" and "traditionalists" (often coupled with "mixed-bloods" and "full-bloods"). While intercommunity social relations serve the mode of production, no internal mechanism is proposed to account for social differentiation or change among the Choctaw. Given therichnessof the recent anthropological literature on co- lonialism, power, identity, and agency (which has enhanced po- litical economic paradigms), it is jarring to read a monograph that employs concepts such as "acculturation" and "assimila- tion," which assume a content-based model of culture. At theend of the book, Faiman-Silva reveals that at the time of the book's publication, the Choctaw had become relatively prosperous as a result of gaming and were highly un ified under a progressive, yet full-blood, tribal chairman. While her model prompts her to conclude that the Choctaw have lost their tribal identity and are now merely "an ethnic minority proletariat class," this and other aspects of her argument are challenged by the recent turn of events. While she does not analyze the struc- ture of Choctaw gaming, the author expects it to further "com- promise . .. moral, ethical, and economic considerations in fa- vor of singularly economic strategies" and she asserts that, "tribal culture persists (only) as a superstructural bas relief over abase driven by world economic forces in a global marketplace" (p. 214). Cultural constructivists and some Choctaw will find this approach too simplistic. Joseph Jorgensen, who pioneered the use of dependency theory to explain the persistent underde- velopment of Native American communities, has recently writ- ten that tribally controlled gaming may promote bona fide de- velopment and serve tribal self-determination agendas. While the status and future direction of these people remain open to in- terpretation, Choctaws at the Crossroads provides a solid ac- count of how they reached this political economic intersection. The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History. Douglas A. Feldman and Julia Wang Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.266 pp. CHARLES H. KLEIN City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Health Since the reporting of the first cases of a then unknown illness in North America and Central Africa in the early 1980s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has spread throughout the world. As of December 1998, the United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that there are 33.4 million people living with AIDS; another 13. 9 million people have died of HlV-re- lated illness since the beginning of the epidemic. Paralleling this dramatic spread of the biological agent HIV have been a wide range of political and sociocultural responses, from grassroots mobilization among affected communities to discrimination against people with or perceived to be with HIV/AIDS to the de- velopment of a multi-billion dollar per year global HIV/AIDS treatment and research industry. Over the years, AIDS aware- ness and HIV risk reduction practices have tended to increase, while the hysteria that accompanied the early stages of the epi- demic has greatly diminished. Yet, according to UNAIDS, 11 new HIV transmissions occur each minute. And despite recent dramatic advances in treating HIV-related illness through com- bination anti-retroviral therapies, there is still no definitive cure for AIDS, and the newer treatments remain financially out of reach of the vast majority of HIV+ people in the world. Seen in this light, and as The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History per- suasively and movingly demonstrates, the AIDS crisis is by no means over; in fact, in the absence of a massive and ongoing global mobilization, it is likely to continue for decades to come. In this volume, Douglas A. Feldman, a medical and applied anthologist who specializes in international and domestic AIDS social research, and Julia Wang Miller, a sociologist who has worked extensively in public health on AIDS issues, have com- piled more than 200 primary and secondary sources that exam- ine the social, cultural, psychological, historical, political, eco- nomic, and biomedical aspects of AIDS in the United States and on a global level. The book, part of a Greenwood Press series of documentary histories on contemporary events and issues, is di- rected toward high school and college students and can either be read cover to cover as an introductory level general history of AIDS or be used as a reference book for information on particu- lar AIDS-related topics. The texts, which include excerpts from governmental publications, journalistic reporting, autobio- graphical writings of people with HIV/AIDS, and research arti- cles, range in length from a few sentences to several pages. The editors have organized these documents by topic into nine chap- ters: "The History of HIV/AIDS,'" "The Impact of an Epi- demic," "HIV/AIDS Within Communities and Populations," "AIDS in the Developing World," "The Human Side of AIDS," "The Politics of AIDS," "Education and Behavioral Change." "Legal and Ethical Issues," and 'The Future of AIDS." Each chapter and individual document are preceded by short com- mentaries by the editors.