This title was first published in 1987: This is the autobiography of Fay Afaf Kanafani, an Arab Muslim woman born in Beirut in 1918. Through telling the story of her difficult life as a woman in such a society and her struggles to free herself from her father, brother and father-in-law, it offers a feminist view of a people and culture.

This book is about long-term changes to class and inequality in Poland. Drawing upon major social surveys, the team of authors from the Polish Academy of Sciences offer the rare comprehensive study of important changes to the social structure from the communist era to the present. The core argument is that, even during extreme societal transformations, key features of social life have long-lasting, stratifying effects. The authors analyse the core issues of inequality research that best explain “who gets what and why:” social mobility, status attainment and their mechanisms, with a focus on education, occupation, and income. The transition from communist political economy to liberal democracy and market capitalism offers a unique opportunity for scholars to understand how people move from one stratifi cation regime to the next. There are valuable lessons to be learned from linking past to present. Classic issues of class, stratification, mobility, and attainment have endured decades of radical social change. These concepts remain valid even when society tries to eradicate them.

In contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the debate on class politics takes on a different form to that in the West - its concern is whether class divisions increased as the post-communist societies made the transition to the market system. Using Polish survey data on respondents voting behaviour in elections of 1991, 1994, 1997, and 2001, I present evidence on the significance of social class for voting behaviour. Results of log-linear analysis show that class membership does indeed exert a significant impact on voting behaviour. Although it changed across the time, it appeared no less in 2001 than in 1991. Also the patterns of this association (which class votes which party?) remained unchanged. On the whole our evidence suggests that in Poland a new dimension of social stratification - that which is referred in sociological literature as 'class politics' - has emerged. At the same time, claims for the class basis of voting in Poland should not be exaggerated, as the class-vote link in Poland is much lower than in most of the Western societies. To estimate the relative strength of this association I compared it across 17 countries using data from the European Social Survey 2002.

The American press and American television news have been filled with stories from Gdansk, Warsaw, Krakow, Lódz, and other Polish cities and towns. The names of a number of Polish leaders have become almost as familiar to Americans as the names of their own leaders, and the word " Solidarity" has acquired an important new meaning for Americans as well as Poles. The editor's identify that this interest of the American public has not been matched by corresponding interest from American sociologists, stating that Polish society is seldom mentioned either in major scholarly journals or in the textbooks written for students. This collection of studies seeks to address some of this issue, looking at works and the systems in Poland since 1956.