Students Under Stress. A Study in the Social Psychology of Adaptation: By David Mechanic. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. 231 pp.

Mechanic describes the behavior of a number of graduate students preparing for examinations for their doctorates. He attempts to show that the ways in which an individual sees, responds to, and copes with a situation are determined partly by what that person brings to the situation, and partly by the way his group defines and deals with it. To document theory, regardless of how well known and widely accepted it is, can enrich our understanding of the concepts it involves. This is not what is done here. Instead, Mechanic deals with his facts in a sterile and superficial manner, and the writing is often so shallow as to be unsound.

He seems curiously determined to place this book in apposition to Men Under Stress by Grinker and Spiegel,1 first with his title (though he spends several pages specifically defining stress not as the situation but as the 'discomforting responses' to it), then later, repeatedly, by drawing extensively on Grinker and Spiegel for illustration. But he never addresses himself to the glaring dissimilarities between airmen in combat and students in school. His failure to