write and publish lies about them. Perhaps the type of homosexual who buys this sort of book IS sick, but God help him or her, he will only be more sick after reading such nonsense as Sex Offenders in Group Therapy. W. E. G. TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF HOMOSEXUALITY by Daniel Cappon, Prentice Hall, 1965, 302 pp., $6.95.

In his prefatory phrase, "There are no homosexuals-only people with homosexual problems," Dr. Cappon sets both the tone and the limitations of his work, for what is it that he is saying? Is it not that homosexuality is no "part" of the human condition but merely one of the inconveniences or annoyances which some persons encounter because of their unfortunate unfamiliarity with such "clarifications" as Dr. Cappon offers?

Having thus begun, Dr Cappon continues, "Homosexuality, in the author's view, is a painful and destructive disorder, but one which can be relieved and even cured." On page after page of this book, homosexuality is a disorder, an affliction, can be cured, is a symptom, a problem, abnormal, contaminating, deviant, pathological.

With the revealing disclosure of the doctor's predispositions and scientific shortcomings such phrases provide, the natural question would be, why bother further with the book? Why not shelve it alongside the books of Bergler, Albert Ellis, and the host of other pseudo-scientific works on homosexuality?

The answer is that Dr. Cappon is not quite so easy to dispose of. He is far shrewder than any of the above and more persuasive, by virtue of his strongly professed humanitarianism and sympathy, if for no other reason. In fact, despite the absence of extensive tables and graphs, he exhibits a much more penetrating and muscular intellect than that of Dr. Irving

Bieber or any of the contributors to his pretentious 1962 book, Homosexuality.

There is no doubt that Dr. Cappon, who was educated in London, and is a specialist in Internal Medicine and Psychiatry, has made many acute observations from the limited experiences he has had with homosexuals as patients. Yet his conditioning by long exposure to psychoanalytic theory has rendered him apt on one page to be reasonably objective and scientific and on the next a veritable gypsy fortune-teller. Is there something innate in psychiatrists that causes so many of them to behave in this fashion? The author's handling of the Kinsey findings exhibits this type of shortcoming, a seeming inability and reluctance to deal with the Kinsey material dispassionately: it does not fit my theories, ergo Kinsey is at fault.

A section of Chapter Four is entitled "The Hereditary Hoax." For several pages, the author vigorously sets up a straw man theory of homosexuality as hereditary, flashes a few fashionably modern phrases about genes and chromosomes, and passes neatly on to "The Constitutional Stewpot;" "The Myth of Chemistry;" "The Biological Theory;" polishing each of these off with a few wellchosen phrases. The trouble with this is that Dr. Cappon is really so innocent, so happily unaware of where and through what areas he treads.

Nowhere is this better shown than in his truly disappointing little chapter on homosexuality in history, potpourri if ever there was one, of historic tidbits intermingled with Sunday supplement journalism, quite devoid of any of the severities of historical discipline. He even repeats the ancient howler about the virile absence of homosexuality among nations on the upgrade; the moral decline that eventually brought in homosexuality which, in turn, led to the downfall of nations. That there simply is no