When an outstanding anthropologist, like Margaret Mead, turns her attention from the South Seas to the American scene, it arouses the intense interest of psychoanalysts. Such an interest is amply rewarded because Mead approaches the question of how American babies are made into Americans and how these Americans are going to win the war, with all the curiosity, open-mindedness, sympathetic understanding, and intuitive analytic interpretation with which she once studied the people of Bali.

Her psychodynamic description of 'the American character' is the most fascinating part of the book. In the chapter, We Are All Third Generation, she discusses the effects of historical and present-day social factors and events on American behavior, with special emphasis on the family within which the child is reared. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin do not represent the past to which one belongs by birth, but the past to which one tries to belong by effort. Washington represents the thing