Stefan Dorondel's “Disrupted Landscapes,” is incredibly timely. Set in the context of economic transformation in rural Argeș County, Romania, the book accounts for the breathtaking degradation and outright destruction of Romania's forests, speeded by corrupt practices of local, regional, and national officials, in collusion with wood merchants and others seeking quick profit. As Dorondel shows, blaming forest destruction just on capitalist greed in the new postsocialist economy is simplistic, ahistorical, and socially uninformed. In contrast, Dorondel's project probes local, national, and even international forces behind the systematic forest destruction, furthered by the manipulation of law and reinterpretation of landed resources in the years after socialism. Furthermore, as he shows in concluding sections to most chapters that Romanian conditions are echoed, if not exactly duplicated, throughout the post-socialist world. Alhough Dorondel ultimately leaves the implications of forest destruction and land use transformation for the reader's inference, it is a small step to see the processes he outlines as active in the environmental challenges faced by regions, nations, and even the planet, in this age of unceasing climate change.

The book is a case study of change in land-use patterns in Dragova and Dragomirești, two communes, or townships. To Dorondel’s credit, however, he contextualizes these practices by considering change in the cultural understanding and political economy of land as shaped by changing demographics, national legislation, political practice, and citizens' economic desires spawned in postsocialism. Above all, the fall of the socialist state reprivatized much of the forest, returning it to individual householders. At the same time, the state imposed a range of regulations to safeguard certain amounts and qualities of forest, to limit the cutting of forest, and to levy fines against malefactors. There is a Catch-22 quality to such legislation, however: it places many especially poor individuals at a disadvantage in terms of gaining access to the income that the rich beech and oak stands represent. People are forced to compromise with political leaders who hold the power of granting permits, in order to gain access to their own forest, and are forced by those same leaders to sell their wood at fire-sale prices. For example, Dragomirești's mayor almost acts as a mafia don, forcing fellow communards to sell wood, often quite conveniently to his wife's company, one of the larger lumber merchants in the region.

This is but one example of the range of local-level mechanisms, relationships, conflicts, and practices Dorondel sees by which the ample forests and pastures of Argeș county are steadily eroded and eliminated, and along with them anything that can be recognized as a functioning peasantry. The forests are replaced by increasingly denuded hillsides (and the few photographs presented in the book are remarkably sad and breathtaking for the destruction they picture). Meanwhile demography, the legal context, economic dislocation, and political competition essentially keep reforestation to a minimum, encourage the development of a tourist economy that furthers inequality, force young people from the region as labor migrants, and otherwise disassemble a region previously renowned for its agricultural and wood products and animal husbandry.

In Dorondel's defining the importance of local-level mechanisms in forest destruction, one critical insight is how a group of Romani, known as Rudari, serve as mediators between forest, political leaders, lumber companies, and others. Though marginalized because of their lowly status, Rudari are often allowed to cut forest with impunity, or at least are rarely punished for their marginal activities by political actors. Political leaders thus use them as clients to patrons to get away with things Romanian villagers, or even national officials, are prevented from accomplishing,

Although his tale is significant, Dorondel's narrative occasionally confuses. The detailed cost accounting he often uses can detract from the subject's larger significance, often leaving the reader unable “to see the forest for the trees.” Dorondel's work also suffers from reliance on short vignettes of people engaged in land-related activities whose actions are boiled down to an economic calculus. However, in other Romanian communities forest and land figure strongly in ritual relations, in marriage partner choice, in decisions over family size, and other aspects of life. Dorondel hints at these larger relationships, but rarely explores them. Nonetheless, for those concerned with the transformations of land relations since the fall of socialism and of the mechanisms behind them, this book is essential reading.