The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind: E. Goldberg. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001

This fascinating book is, by the author's own admission, “somewhat of a hybrid” (p. 1). In one respect, it is an engaging and wide-ranging review of the nature of executive function, and the role of the frontal lobes as the substrate of this class of regulatory process. No reader is likely to come away from the book without adding to their knowledge of the role of the frontal lobes in grand topics a diverse as drive, maturity and free will. The reader will also learn much about the role of the frontal lobes in disorders as wide-ranging as schizophrenia, ADHD and criminal behaviour. However, the book is a hybrid because it also intensely autobiographical—for the topic of Goldberg's science is also the story of his remarkable journey from a training under Aleksandr Luria in the cold-war Soviet Union to his career as a scientist in the USA. These scientific and autobiographical themes, which in principle might mix very poorly, in fact seem to knit together seamlessly. More importantly, because human beings read so much more avidly when they have a character with whom to identify, this mix-and-match approach seems to make the book more, rather than less, readable. For example Goldberg points out that “the career of every clinician is punctuated by a few formative cases” (p. 119). He then goes on to describe one such key case in his early career, the floridly frontal “Vladimir”, who it seems was allocated to Goldberg primarily because he was one of the few male trainees on Luria's predominantly female staff, and hence more likely to cope with Vladimir's “clinical antics” (p. 119). Is there a clinician alive who can read such an account without casting his/her mind back to who their formative patients were, and whether (as in Goldberg's case) much of their later career seems to have been determined by the happenstance of clinical allocation? I was especially moved by the second chapter of the book, where Goldberg describes his family background, his relationship with the