Social Education is stimulating in that it gives the reader an opportunity to share with some fine minds a range of perceptions on a needed system of values and a needed complex of institutions for our emergent society. The book is ambitious in purpose; in carrying out that purpose it is suggestive, not comprehensive in scope. Readers may point out that Social Education does not commit its authors to a closely-knit philosophy or curriculum based on shared thought.

To the formidable task of introducing the reader to the American people and their dilemmas in a single volume, Mr. Odum brings a range of techniques. He catches some of the infinite variety of American life through sweeping descriptive catalogues, as Thomas Wolfe did in fiction and Charles A. Beard does in history. He parades the paradoxes and conflicts of our times; he marshals encyclopedic arrays of cumulative facts; he heaps question on question. Throughout his running story, he uses pages of charts and photographs, which broaden, further the scope of the inquiry.

THIRTY-SIX men and women, authorities and near-authorities in their fields, inquire into civilization in the United States in America Now, sixteen years after a similar symposium. Their book belongs with Middletown in Transition on your shelves as a record of developments in American life during "the era of beautiful nonsense" before 1929 and "the years of the locust" that followed.

NOW THAT the day of the sad young men who composed maudlin laments of their self-imposed exile from horrid, standardized America is fortunately done, we may read, without being damned as Babbitts, books by men who like America and lay so loudly.

OVER the years Upton Sinclair has been un-wearyingly flinging his weight against the bars of the capitalist cage. Recently he has hit them again, this time with Co-op, the fifty-first of his published books and plays.

AS THE seven lean years of the locust have plodded by with paralyzing slowness, America has tried to forget her pariahs, the folks on relief. Yesterday, when raking leaves and presenting grocery orders seemed close to Everyman; and he whistled through his graveyard, it was difficult to forget. Today, with poverty approaching normalcy and the market bullish, it is easier.

WHEN James T. Farrell wrote the trilogy, Studs Lonigan, he created a masterpiece of sociological fiction; his latest effort, A World I Never Made, a year in the life of Danny O'Neill and his relatives, is merely a competent novel. Farrell has to carry success, an old man of the sea, early in his promising career.

THROUGH his fifteen thousand mile "unsentimental journey," James Rorty has made his contribution to our understanding of the sprawling giant, America. He is one of the many recent writers who have come back from transcontinental travel with tales of what Americans are thinking, feeling, doing.