Customer Rating: 
Summary: A dry summary of a fascinating region
Comment: I bought this book while researching Czech and Slovak politics, and got quite a bit less than I was expecting from it. Perhaps the title misled me: I was expecting an overview of politics in the region, but what I got instead was a handbook that, to a large extent, summarised the constitutions of the four countries.What I found disappointing was the author's sometimes uncritical quotations from constitutions and party programmes. Rather than repeating what is supposed to be, he could have done a better job of informing the reader about what is by bringing in observations and opinions from other political scientists.
In certain areas, Fitzmaurice's urge to summarise leaves the book thin on the ground. For example, the author uses a single paragraph to describe "constitution building" in Slovakia.
The book also shows signs of a poor editing job. The author is quite patchy in his use of diacritics in Central European names; he uses them in some names, while ommitting them in others. He also manages to misspell the names of two leading Slovak politicians. Further, the book is not free of factual errors: Fitzmaurice writes about Poland's Marshal Pilsudski fighting "against the Soviet Union in 1920", when more careful research would have shown him that the USSR was, in fact, not founded until 1922, after Communist Russia's war with Poland was over. Such errors and ommissions reflect badly on the author's knowledge of the region.
Finally, given the title of the book, I expected more attention to be placed on regional issues and on relations between the four countries. While the author does maintain a comparative framework throughout the book, he devotes a handful of pages explicitly to relations between the four countries.
Thus, in short, while the book does provide useful background information on the four countries' politics, the reader would be well advised to look elsewhere for more in-depth information and analysis.
