MUST WE CONFORM

These six essays by the author of The Fifty Minute Pour which had a most interested and interesting press last year were originally delivered in Los Angeles as the Hacker Foundation Lectures for 1954 and have been much in demand ever since. All of them deal with the individual in relation to the changing political and social culture of the times and the last three, among them the title essay, repeat the manifesto of an earlier book- Prescription for Rebellion- appeal for a positive form of protest and argue against conformity which leads to the domestication and domination of man in mass groups. The Mutiny of the Young shows that today, in a world which has gone amuck, this once accepted and tolerated period of protest has become a ""downright active and hostile mutiny"" leading to predatory patterns of conduct (delinquency, etc.); there is a discussion of homosexuality which does not equate deviation with femininity, or any physical singularity, but again as a form of rebellion; in Political Creed and Character, Communism is seen as a release for the neurotic, fascism for the psychopathic.... A psycho-social analysis, Lindner is a forceful- but not didactic, commentator and will attract attention and in some areas argument.