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This is a most delightful and fascinating book, an account by the writer of her experiences in living for a number of months with a group of Samoan girls, recording their social customs, habits of thought and speech, and the anthropological data of the tribes as a background. Like Malinowski's work, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, reviewed in this journal in the present volume, page 365, it seems on the face of it that some of the savage people solve many of their problems with infinitely better results than we do. The outstanding conclusion of Miss Mead's book that goes to the heart of this apparent discrepancy between the savage and the civilized solution of emotional problems is that the Samoan girl does not pass through any emotional storm or serious period of readjustment at the time of puberty but marges from girlhood into womanhood without any apparent difficulties and with only the obvious physical changes that accompany the alteration in the physiology of her several organs. All of which goes to indicate the truth of what Professor Boaz says in the Forward, namely, “The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization.” Both this book and Malinowski's book above referred to strike the reviewer as of very great importance, to the psychoanalytically minded in particular and to those who are interested in the progress of civilization in general. If what they appear to show on the surface is really true then we have made serious blunders and we ought to get to work promptly and right them. The reviewerT however, has the suspicion that while the savages have solved their problems apparently with very much more sense than we have and in a way to produce very much less conflict, that they are to all intents and purposes without neuroses and psychoses, still the fact remains that they are savages