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This book is of a decidedly different type from those usually offered in the discussion of nervousness. The author has elsewhere laid down what he believes to be the general principles governing nervous disorders and does not attempt to discuss them in this book. Rather he portrays in a really masterly way a few type cases. The book is by no means, however, simply a series of case histories. It is far from that. The author has taken his case histories from his own experience, he has clothed them in literary and dramatic form so that they are absorbingly interesting reading and he has presented the unfolding of their lives, whether for good or ill, with a broad appreciation of all the elements which have contributed to the final result. In other words, the book is an excellent series of case histories presented in admirable literary form and with an excellent interpretative insight, without, howevei, presenting any specific psychoanalytic deductions. Dr. Carroll evidently has grasped much of the meaning of the new psychology as expressed by psychoanalysis, but has either not accepted or not quite fathomed its principles, especially as they refer to the unconscious.
One excellent quality of the book is that it not only gives case histories which show the patient being carried on by a fatalistic destiny from bad to worse, ultimately winding up with some disaster and a complete wreckage of his life, but gives several histories in which it is shown how the individual who was headed for disaster has finally been able to get hold of himself and reconstitute and rehabilitate his life. All of the records set forth are so simply and so convincingly told and the lessons are in every instance so wholesome that the book is one of the very few that it might be of advantage to recommend rather broadly to patients for reading, particular chapters perhaps being indicated as representing parallel types of difficulties for which the patient is consulting the psysician. Dr. Carroll is t