This is the second edition of this book, and it is most interesting to look back at the reviews which heralded the first edition. At that time, it was regarded as a major landmark in the history of our thinking about such issues as how mentally handicapped people should be regarded on a personal, interpersonal and societal level. Reviewing the book now, it is rather more like a timebox, containing the relics and thoughts of a bygone age, the results of which we now see around us in the services which have since evolved, or rather, devolved.

That being said, I found myself splitting the book into the good, the bad and the interesting.

Much of ‘the good’ is now mainline thinking in mental-handicap practice. However, the reader new to this area may find the explanations of such important phenomena as labelling, rejection, and society's need to regard mentally-handicapped people as different, useful. Also, the insistence that mentally-handicapped