ley Hall, and others that a man's sex is the core of his personality, most of the problems discussed center around a man's sexual adjustment, although that aspect of his life is not unduly exaggerated. Attention is given to depression, fatigue, alcoholism, anxiety, boredom, aging, nutrition, exercise, leisure time activities, retirement, general health habits, and other suitable topics.

In the sex field the two major problems seem to be the decline of the sexual powers and impotence. With notable common sense the authors point out clearly the mythology and superstition that surround both of these topics. There is no magic of specific remedies for these difficulties, but it is heartening to learn that much of the trouble arises from erroneous thinking and wrong attitudes of mind which can be corrected by wise counselling and following wholesome lines of activity. Undoubtedly the extensive advertising and wide use of pills and nostrums is one of the exploiting evils of our times. I am surprised that the authors do not mention the one simple and effective cure for alcoholism which many of us have practiced for years: avoidance of the use of alcohol entirely with no feeling whatsoever that we are being deprived of any real pleasure or losing any social status that we care about. Much is said about a "male crisis or climacteric" with attendant emotional disturbances, but the truth seems to be that it is merely a figment of the imagination with no basis in reality.

It is important to note that in the case of anxiety, depression, tension, etc., a certain amount of such experience is entirely normal. A person who has no feeling in the presence of a real tragedy or calamity is just as abnormal as the one who "goes to pieces" over trifles. In Dickens' Tale of Two Cities the women of Paris who during the Revolution, knit in perfect

equanimity while the streets ran with blood but who wept nightly in the theatre over the broken romances of the characters in the play were no better balanced than the official executioners. Life can never be a smooth, placid stream to a person who has real blood in his veins. It would be a terrible bore if such were the case.

The authors expressly avoid the problems of homosexuality, but indirectly deal with some of them since in fact many of them are the same as those of heterosexuality. But they do point out that latent homosexuality is an important cause of impotence. The lesson here would seem to be that each person should come to know himself and accept whatever category he finds inevitable and adjust his life to it. The authors recommend the services of an authentic practitioner where a person cannot resolve his own difficulties, which may be genuinely somatic or may be emotional only, both of which situations they consider equally important and subject to therapeutic measures. This book is a serious, competent work and should be helpful and reassuring to anyone who sees with something of fear and apprehension his youth passing into mature life.

T. M. M.

THE DAY WE WERE MOSTLY BUTTERFLIES by Louise W. King, Doubleday & Co., 1964, $3.95.

This little outrageous jewel has the looneyishness of AUNTIE MAME and is far better written. It is about a Greenwich Village decorator faggot, a nitwittish femme dyke called Miss Moppet, a terror of a bulldyke who is very large in Market Research, and a turtle called Miss Emma Hamlet Woodhouse. Honest. And I would be a fool to try to tell what the stories are about.

This author is no fly-by-night. To

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