CULTURE AGAINST MAN

Today most socio-anthropological studies are microscopically-exact surveys of statistical minutiae; the subject scarcely seems ""human"" at all. Here Washington University's Jules Henry bursts through the waxworks with a big, bustling, blood-pumping investigation and interpretation- what he calls ""a passionate ethnography""- of America's changing cultural conditions as they affect the national character, parent-child relationships, teenage problems, the educational impasse, the political and economic systems, and the overall emotional ethos involved. Professor Henry's case-work includes orays into the homes of particular families, of a high school and its students, of uburbia and its prejudices, of the job-mart and its ""pecuniary philosophy"". Of course, being ""passionate"" he tends towards exaggeration; further, like most social scientists, e has that pretentious penchant for formulating new terms out of very old concepts. But fundamentally the documentation tingles and taunts with so many home-truths, e.g., the industrial pattern of ""planned obsolescence"" is producing in more ways than one a uman obsolescence, a ""culture against man""; and the research projects, especially the tunning stuff on conforming and non-conforming adolescents, are so forthright, so rightening, that the book is bound to have a seismic impact on students and laymen like. A must.