BOOK REVIEWS
327
professional entomologists, school teachers, university undergraduates or any interested reader. Its reading style is easy, and the book can be enjoyed both by the professional, and by the amateur looking for an interesting volume to fill in the hours before bed time. One can on the one hand, find a highly specialised entomological term such as 'scarabaeiform' explained in the book, while, on the other, having the curious mating behaviour of mantids described to the unfamiliar reader in a simple and clear way.
Its extensive index can and will be readily used as an indispensable check list in the field.
One personal criticism of this book is the lack of a few colour plates, which if present, would make it even more attractive. Nevertheless, its other merits certainly outweigh this shortcoming, and I strongly recommend this book to all lovers of nature,
WILKIN W. K. CHEUNG
Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Secret Societies, A Study of Chinese Secret Societies in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1981).
To give a taste of the sort of frustration any reader of this book must be prepared for, let me begin by briefly summarizing the section on "internal control" (pp. 70-71) in chapter 5, "Adaptive changes in the organizational structure."
The author begins by outlining three types of coercion defined by the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni. He goes on to quote a report in 1867 in which a Penang secret society headman explained the types of punishment that were meted out to society members who were disobedient. The headman's types, however, have nothing whatsoever to do with Etzioni's types. He then goes on to mention interview data that suggest torture and killing being "still in use" as punishment. The reader obviously wonders what these data might consist of, whether "still in use" refers to the time the author was writing or to the time of the interviews, and what was actually said, but the author leaves all these points in the air by departing for yet another
BOOK REVIEWS
327
professional entomologists, school teachers, university under- graduates or any interested reader. Its reading style is easy, and the book can be enjoyed both by the professional, and by the amateur looking for an interesting volume to fill in the hours before bed time. One can on the one hand, find a highly specialised entomological term such as 'scarabaeiform' explained in the book, while, on the other, having the curious mating behaviour of mantids described to the unfamiliar reader in a simple and clear way.
Its extensive index can and will be readily used as an indispensable check list in the field.
One personal criticism of this book is the lack of a few colour plates, which if present, would make it even more attractive. Nevertheless, its other merits certainly outweigh this shortcoming, and I strongly recommend this book to all lovers of nature,
WILKIN W. K. CHEUNG
Mak Lau Fong, The Sociology of Secret Societies, A Study of Chinese Secret Societies in Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1981).
To give a taste of the sort of frustration any reader of this book must be prepared for, let me begin by briefly summarizing the section on "internal control" (pp. 70-71) in chapter 5, "Adaptive changes in the organizational atructure."
The author begins by outlining three types of coercion defined by the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni. He goes on to quole a report in 1867 in which a Penang secret society head- man explained the types of punishment that were meted out to society members who were disobedient. The headman's types. however, have nothing whatsoever to do with Etzioni's types. He then goes on to mention interview data that suggest torture and killing being "still in use" as punishment. The reader obviously wonders what these data might consist of, whether "still in use" refers to the time the author was writing or to the time of the interviews, and what was actually said, but the author leaves all these points in the air by departing for yet another
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