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The late Dr. Birch was a psychologist who became a pediatrician and a notable contributor to the field of pediatric neurology. Many psychoanalysts will know of him from his collaboration with Chess and Thomas in their longitudinal studies of temperament and behavior in children. There is a strong emphasis on constitutional and other organic factors in development in his work and the present book, written with Joan Gussow, is no exception. The authors state early in the book: 'Not failing to acknowledge the reality of "cultural disadvantage" we would assert that it is but a fragment of the threat which a poor environment offers to the intellectual development of a child; and that the poor, from conception until death, are also at differential risk with respect to a whole spectrum of physical hazards any one of which may be productive of intellectual deficit and educational failure' (p. 6).
Most of the book is a masterful compilation of an enormous amount of research data on the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal factors related to a higher rate of developmental deficit among the children of the poor, especially the nonwhite poor. The studies are well digested and carefully organized to provide a powerful and closely reasoned brief for the authors' thesis. They begin by reviewing the relationship of social class and ethnic variables to infant mortality, arguing convincingly that the increased infant death rate