Swimming Upstream is a remarkable life story. Born in 1922 into a Viennese Jewish family, T. Scarlett Epstein was catapulted into immediate adulthood by the Austrian Anschluss. She had to learn to think on her feet in order to save herself and her family from the nightmares of the Holocaust. Her dangerous escape route took her from Yugoslavia to Albania; finally, after a terrifying flight via Germany, she arrived in England. Her ambitions to become a surgeon were dashed as she found herself sitting at a sewing machine in one of the many sweatshops in London. She attended night school and was...

Swimming Upstream is a remarkable life story. Born in 1922 into a Viennese Jewish family, T. Scarlett Epstein was catapulted into immediate adulthood by the Austrian Anschluss. She had to learn to think on her feet in order to save herself and her family from the nightmares of the Holocaust. Her dangerous escape route took her from Yugoslavia to Albania; finally, after a terrifying flight via Germany, she arrived in England. Her ambitions to become a surgeon were dashed as she found herself sitting at a sewing machine in one of the many sweatshops in London. She attended night school and was...

The merit of the Tolai case study lies in the fact that "the schema of economic growth of small underdeveloped societies," which it represented, "when abstracted from its specific background," appeared to be "logically likely to fit other similar societies in Melanesia and elsewhere." Epstein is especially sensitive to the role of cultural traditions, giving her work importance in the field of economic anthropology. She has taken a substantivist as against a purely formalist view of the processes of economic development.