This is a well-written, thoughtful synthesis of what can be learned from recent experiences in which communities work together with the state and other organizations to manage forests. The book came into my hands just as I was to start teaching a graduate seminar on Community Forest Management. I regularly co-teach this course with a forestry colleague, Karen Kainer, for a diverse audience of students from both biological and social sciences. As we reviewed new materials that had emerged since we last taught the class a year ago, this authoritative volume was a very welcome addition to the bibliography. For those who do not teach courses on Community Forest Management, this may seem a rather narrow focus, but our course, like Menzies' book, uses the topic to address the complex interface between biodiversity conservation, economic development, and the livelihoods of rural communities. In his history of the emergence of “community forest management” Menzies incorporates attention to globalization and privatization; deforestation; social movement resistance; cross-scale alliances; negotiations with the state; gender and social equity; social capital; capacity building; governance and empowerment; differences in interests, approaches and expectations of community forest management; and the indeterminacy of the future of statesanctioned community forest management. As Menzies notes in his introduction, communities own 11% of the officially-recorded world's forests, 22% in developing countries. “Community-based Forest Management” (CBFM) has become important on the agenda of conservation and development. The book focuses on communities that are collaborating with state agencies as forest management systems, rather than on indigenous or local management systems devised and implemented by the communities themselves—although the Brazil case study community would fit the latter description, having little or no state support. Why this focus on state-sponsored management? The author's main interest is precisely on the newer policy regimes in “political forests” (taken from Peluso and Vendergeest 2001) where state control over forested land is giving way to the inclusion of “user communities” in efforts to link environmental protection, human rights, social justice, and local interest in improved livelihoods (p. 11). In these community forest management initiatives, community organizations must adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and must learn to negotiate with governments, civil society organizations and commercial interests. In this sense, Menzies defines community forest management institutions as a “forum for negotiation to identify overlapping interests (122).” The book pursues three lines of inquiry (14):