Osa's study is part of a larger literature that looks at the decomposition of communism and postcommunist politics through the prism of the literature on social movements. The book stands out, along with Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik's Rebellious Civil Society and John Glenn's Framing Democracy, as among the best in this school of research. Osa concentrates on the creation of networks of resistance in communist Poland from early 1950s to the period of Solidarity's formation and suppression in 1980–1982.

The book seeks to answer two larger questions: First, how is it possible for a widespread protest movement like Solidarity to emerge in an authoritarian context? Second, why do some protests give rise to enduring social movements while others rapidly demobilize? To answer these questions Osa examines protest dynamics through the prism of several different strands in contemporary social movement theory, including political opportunity structures, network analysis, cultural framing, and protest cycles. She molds and adapts these concepts into a larger model to understand the give and take between state and society in a contested authoritarian polity. The model integrates several critical concerns: how protest actors are constrained by the existing structure of political opportunities, how triggering events interpreted through cultural frames can catalyze existing social networks to mobilize for protest, and, in turn, how such protests can alter political opportunity structures.

The book also presents a thorough discussion of protest action, repression, and the rise and fall of opposition groups in Poland from 1950 through 1982. To do this, Osa has done an impressive amount of work to develop data sets on social protest, oppositional organizations, and political repression in communist Poland.

Osa's depictions of events are original, and break with some of the more prominent analyses of the politics of the communist period in Poland. Two aspects of her interpretation strike me as particularly notable. First, she argues for greater continuity between the early period of resistance to communism and the more sustained opposition of the 1970s and 1980s. Osa also argues for the centrality of Catholicism to Polish resistance. She is to be lauded for making a serious sociological argument rather than letting a positive or negative attitude toward hagiographical accounts of the role of the Church drive her analysis. Her discussion of the Great Novena of 1966 (the 1000-year anniversary of the adoption of Catholicism) adds much to our understanding.

Another important purpose of the book is to engage the rich literature on the rise of civil society in Eastern Europe, particularly the legion of studies that have looked at its origins in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here, Osa breaks from the dominant theme in the literature, arguing that civil society was present in Poland from the 1950s. Here I disagree with her, but I suspect that our differences may have more to do with different concepts of civil society rather than understandings of the politics of the 1950s and 1960s.

A second problem that I have with the book is the limited ability of the data-event component of Osa's model to do full justice to the period of the late 1970s. Her data, drawn largely from the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III, 1948–82, simply does not seem to have picked up the consistent repression to which the opposition of this era was subjected. The only place to really get this data is from the Polish underground press of the period. Another problem with protest event-data analysis is that it can miss important developments, particularly organizational ones. The period from 1976 through 1980 was one of intense organizational and underground publishing activity, which by its nature eschews a public profile most of the time. This is not a problem specific to Osa, but of data-event analysis generally. It does not do a great deal of damage to her account because she compensates for its limitations with both her network analysis of the Polish opposition and her interpretative account of the period. Her use of multiple methods provides a useful corrective.

Even where I did have differences with the author, I found the process of working through her arguments to be highly rewarding. In many cases it forced me to reexamine my views. The book is theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich, and highly original in its interpretations, and provides another demonstration of how the integration of social movement and civil society approaches to the problems of resistance to authoritarianism and the transition to democracy can be fruitful.