Professor Liska is that rarity-a writer on international politics with a genuinely profound knowledge of history. Sensitive to both the tragic and the farcical dimensions of human affairs, of over 15 books on international relations, and his most recent book, Return to the Heartland and Rebirth of the Old Order: Reconceptualizing the Environment of Strategies for East-Central Europe and Beyond (Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, 1994) is distributed by the University Press of America.