After reading this book's Foreword by Otto Kernberg, I expected a treatise which would tell me a great deal about anorexia nervosa and give me the benefit of the experience of a psychiatrist who has been involved with the subject for over twenty-five years. In the author's Preface, I read that "this book is written in the hope of bringing together a vast amount of literature for clinicians interested in treating the anorexic" (p. xv). However, in a book of three hundred seventy-nine pages of text only twenty-two are devoted to treatment. This is one of several disappointments in an otherwise useful book.

The bulk of the book is divided into two parts. Chapter Two is a two-hundred-page novella about a mid-adolescent anorexic girl who eventually succumbs to the ravages of self-starvation. Sours cites Freud's clinical case histories, which are celebrated for their language and their sensitivity. By using the third person point of