The author is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas. The volume is designed as a textbook for students and therefore follows the conventional plan of textbooks with brief bibliographies at the end of each chapter. No attempt is made to be all inclusive. “The general plan is based upon the assumption that social problems can be most easily understood by considering them in the social and historical setting in which they occur.” The magnitude of the problem is stressed. The contents of the volume range far and wide; industrial society, crime, disease, neuroses and psychoses, rural and urban, etc. Like most textbooks this one also contains vagaries and idyllic illusions that the student some day must see through for himself. Thus on p. 446, “From the fact that small, homogenous groups are able to maintain a high degree of immunity to internal conflict without anything recognizable as formal organization or control, we may infer that early societies had little crime.” One wonders if the author ever heard of patricide.