Sheila 30-B-2 FPE

m

wwww

BOOK REVIEWS

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SEX DIFFERENCES, edited by Eleanor Maccoby, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 351 pp, 1966, $8.50.

wwwwwwwwwwwwww

Abraham Lincoln once copped-out in a way I'm tempted to plagarize: "If this is the sort of book you enjoy, then you will enjoy this one very much." It is highly technical, and like so many books consisting of a job-lot of articles on a common theme, quite disjointed. It does give some unusual help in an "afterword" by S.M. Dornbusch, who tries in twelve pages to sum up the ideas of the editor and other five authors. (This is usually left to the reader, as the authors always scrupulously avoid discussing each others' papers). While his main conclusion is the "much remains to be done" platitude, he does manage to put each author into some perspective with respect to the others and to workers not otherwise represented.

Virginia, whose copy I borrowed to write the review, did not think very much of this book. One obvious reason is that the word "gender" is totally absent, and all authors use "sex" indiscriminately to cover behavioral and physical differences. It would have helped their clarity a lot to have utilized the dual terminology, though it is usually possible to decipher which they mean. (Fortunately, sex in the sense of inter- course is hardly mentioned, so few "trilemmas" develop!)

81