The War Blind in American Social Structure: By Alan G. Gowman, Ph.D. New York: The American Foundation for the Blind, 1957. 237 pp.

Thomas D. Cutsforth's laudatory foreword to this book is richly deserved. It can be enthusiastically recommended to any professional worker with the blind or other physically handicapped and to the

intelligent relatives and companions of blind people. Gowman was blinded in combat in World War II, subsequently received a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard, and based this work on his doctoral research. However this is no arid dissertation. While Gowman clearly presents his theoretical and methodological orientation, the book integrates a wealth of sociological, psychological, and psychoanalytic data into an imaginative human document. He is quite free of the compulsive need to translate psychoanalytic concepts into nonpsychoanalytic terms.

Essentially Gowman delineates: 1, the nature of stereotypical thinking, ambivalence, and other pervasive hazards placed by society in the way of the blind who seek vocational and social integration; 2, the nature of the interactions between the blind and the seeing in key life situations (Of outstanding interest is the ingenious experimental study of what happens when a haberdashery clerk is confronted by a blind man, accompanied by a seeing woman, who wants to buy a shirt, the observer acting as a browser in the store.); 3, the definitive character types among the blind resulting from individual predisposition, reaction to blindness, and interaction with the seeing. Gowman knows that a major problem is the initial sharing by the blind with the seeing of stereotypical thinking and ambivalent feeling about blindness. The presentation is relatively sketchy with regard to the inner psychic life of the blind individual, but this is admittedly not the author's primary focus.

Concerned with the problems of integration of the blind, Gowman demonstrates that they are more or less shared by other handicapped people and members of racial and religious minorities. It is strongly suggested by the author's investigation of the attitudes of s