RYUTARO OHTSUKA is President of the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan. STANLEY J. ULIJASZEK is Professor of Human Ecology in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. His research is focused on the biocultural ecology of human populations past and present, and nutritional anthropology.

• Acknowledgements; 1. Health change in the Asia-Pacific region: disparate end-points? Stanley J. Ulijaszek and Ryutaro Ohtsuka; 2. Interactions of nutrition, genetics and infectious disease in the Pacific; implications for prehistoric migrations Stephen Oppenheimer; 3. Biocultural adaptation and population connectedness in the Asia-Pacific region Ryutaro Ohtsuka; 4. Changing nutritional health in South East Asia Geoffrey C. Marks; 5. Obesity and nutritional health in Hong Kong Chinese people Gary T. C. Ko; 6. Modernization, nutritional adaptability and health in Papua New Guinean highlanders and Solomon Islanders Taro Yamauchi; 7. Tongan obesity: human ecological implications of its causes and consequences Tsukasa Inaoka, Yasuhiro Matsumura and Kazuhiro Suda; 8. Nutrition and health in modernizing Samoans: temporal trends and adaptive perspectives Ember D. Keighley, Stephen T. McGarvey, Christine Quested, Charles McCuddin, Satupaitea Viali and Uto'ofili A. Maga; 9. Health patterns of Pacific Islanders and Asians in the United States W. Parker Frisbie, Robert A. Hummer, T. Elizabeth Durden and Youngtae Cho; 10. Impacts of modernization and transnationalism on nutritional health of Cook Islanders Stanley J. Ulijaszek; 11. Mortality decline in the Pacific: economic development and other explanations Alistair Woodward and Tony Blakely; 12. Health changes in Papua New Guinea: from adaptation to double jeopardy? Robert Attenborough.

Review of the hardback: 'I enthusiastically recommend this book. It will appear especially to students and scholars of anthropology, public health, globalization and Pacific peoples.' Anthropological Science