Jones to Drill-Pig when he is caught. Before the end of the book one tends to believe that such a state of affairs could develop. Drill-Pig, while he decries a "conformist society," unwittingly pushes, in his every action, for it. He finds a kinship with enemy agents cold, disciplined a kinship he cannot get from his own "weak sister" embassy officials. He nails such softies to the carpet and considers: "We always have the last word because of the magic label 'Security.' We have the whip hand. There is no other hand worth having."

That the author of Smith & Jones is successful is probably due to the terrible reality of what he is trying to tell us. The book acts as a key to what has become a tangle of politics, pressures and passions.

D. S.

DICTIONARY OF EROTIC LITERATURE, by Harry E. Wedeck, New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1962, pp. 556, $10.00.

One does not ordinarily expect to read a dictionary consecutively, but this volume would seem to be intended to be read in that manner. It is certainly not a reference book for students as the usual scholarly apparatus of philological notes, origins, analogies, etc., customary in works basic to research, are quite missing except for dates of authors. Of course the title indicates that the content is literature, not word meanings or concepts drawn from psychology, psychiatry, biology, or other fields. Thus it is limited to books. authors, and occasional words or phrases with a definitely literary character. Such writers as Hirschfeld, Stekel, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and others notable in the sex field are conspicuous by their absence, although many of their works might certainly be classified as literature, Ioläus and Love's Coming

one

of Age, for example. Perhaps there is more reason for omitting such terms as homophile, homosexual, sadism, masochism, berdache, etc., although even here literary origins have played a large part in erotic ideology. Many of the references are so brief and unconnnected with any specific publisher, periodical, time, or place that they give the reader or research worker very little enlightenment. It would seem that the author has confused the function of a dictionary with that of an anthology. Many of the references to the more notable works of erotic literature are accompanied by selections from the work itself which give a real impression of the book as a whole. Extended excerpts are presented from the writings of Balzac, Chaucer, the Decameron of Boccaccio. Aristophanes, the Satyricon of Petronius, The Song of Songs from the Bible, Zola, Voltaire, and others. As stated above, the volume offers little to the serious student of eroticism and practically nothing to the homophile or student of deviationism, but for one who has heard of Chaucer, Boccaccio, etc., and would like to have a glimpse into their writings without an extended reading of their longer and sometimes tedious, complete works, it would prove interesting and useful. Perhaps the author would have done better to have separated the functions of dictionary and anthology and limited. himself to the latter with no attempt to cover the entire literary field, more as was done by the author of Unhurried Erotica.

T. M. M.

DESPOTISM, A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF TYRANNY, by Dagobert D. Runes, New York, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1963, pp. 269, $12.50.

Anyone who reads history at all knows that every epoch and particularly every crisis or change has been marked by wars, massacres. and up-