Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South. By Charles F. Robinson II. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 196. Acknowledgments, introduction, tables, conclusion, epilogue, bibliography, notes, index. $29.95.) The last few years have seen the publication of several notable books on the complex topic of American interracial relationships both sexual and marital-Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History (2002), Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003). To this growing and important literature, Charles Robinson's Dangerous Liaisons makes a valuable contribution by analyzing over one hundred southern court cases (including ones from Arkansas) that span from 1662, when Virginia first passed its first anti-miscegenation law, to 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared such statutes unconstitutional. Robinson tirelessly draws on these cases to demonstrate that enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws varied not only from state to state and era to era but also within the states and within periods. Anti-miscegenation laws, both state and federal, provide vital insight into the construction of not only whiteness and blackness but also gender, class, and sexuality. Even more importantly, they shed light on the ways in which each of these social categories informed and transformed the others. Robinson asserts that anti-miscegenation laws existed to secure white men's place at the top of both a racial and sexual hierarchy. The laws typically targeted formal liaisons involving free black men and white women (pp. 1-2). The strength of Robinson's book is that he reveals the complexity in the application of anti-miscegenation laws. Robinson contends that antimiscegenation laws have always embodied both white racism and patriarchy, and that white southerners were more likely to go after interracial intimacy and marriage than sex, since intimacy and marriage implied the potential for the couple to consider each other as social equals. Interracial couples tried to evade punishment either by downplaying their relationship as being of a purely sexual nature, so as not to touch upon the issue of potential social equality, or by arguing that, in fact, they were of the same race even if this fact was not visually apparent. Robinson also argues that although African Americans opposed anti-miscegenation laws as racist they did not on the whole advocate interracial marriage but in many ways opposed it as thwarting racial pride. Unfortunately, there are only a few places in Dangerous Liaisons where Robinson mentions, let alone analyzes in detail, issues of social class. …