WATCHING THE WIND: Conflict Resolution During South Africa's Transition to Democracy.

WATCHING THE WIND: Conflict Resolution During South Africa's Transition to Democracy by Susan Collin Marks United States Institute of Peace Press, $14.95

IN WATCHING THE WIND, SUSAN Collin Marks describes the push for peace in local South African communities struggling to deal with life after apartheid. From her own experiences working to implement the 1991 National Peace Accord, which laid the groundwork for South Africa's 1994 elections, Collin Marks culls a collection of the stories that have gone unnoticed by an international community that has focused on the political movements in the upper levels of South African society. With sensitivity and care, Collin Marks describes the life and work of peace workers who put themselves at daily risk in order to facilitate South Africa's transition to democracy: activists sitting across the negotiating table from their torturers; brave citizens putting themselves between enraged crowds and frightened, combative police; community groups working desperately for change. Through these stories Watching the Wind seeks to capture and explain how South African society managed to move from apartheid to democracy without suffering the fragmentation undergone by other countries in transition.

The problem is that Watching the Wind lacks a broader perspective into which its pieces can fit. The book strings together situations and people that only achieve unity if the reader is familiar with the political history of South Africa. The chapters take on the character of memory snapshots, lacking the driving continuity that would make them come to life for someone other than a peace worker or a South African.

One has the feeling that the various sections were developed as discrete entities, perhaps even as tools for conflict resolution workshops, instead of as chapters in the ongoing story of a society working for change. This makes the book hard to follow at times, causes Collin Marks to repeat herself, and in the end is likely to limit the book's audience.

That's a shame because, for all its shortcomings, Watching the Wind presents some wonderful portraits of what many South Africans were thinking, feeling, and suffering on the long road to democracy. It is an album that should be studied by societies and citizens who wish to understand how factions scarred by decades of violence and hatred were able to come together to forge a meaningful peace.