Some people have all the luck in the biographer they end up with. I could not have imagined a less philosophically attractive figure than B. F. Skinner, someone who was bent on denying not only the existence of the unconscious, but also freedom and dignity. His Walden Two presents a picture of human existence without conflict, suffering, or humor. Skinner's work, nonetheless, has been enormously influential, especially in America.

Now comes along Daniel Bjork, who presents Skinner in a thoroughly sympathetic light. Skinner only recently died in 1990, but I never even thought of trying to meet him. Bjork describes Skinner's early years in an unforgettable and attractively tortured manner. Who might have thought that the inventor of the Skinner box also loved Wagner, or could be on writing terms with Robert