For nearly forty years, with great regularity, the late Vera Aleksandrova contributed articles on current Soviet literature to the Socialist Courier–the émigré organ of the Menshevik party. Now her husband, S. M. Schwarz, has selected from the large number of those contributions about 120 pieces and has published them in the original Russian under the sponsorship of the Russian Institute of Columbia University.

The result is a long, very significant, and in some ways unique book. One has every reason to be grateful to the editor and the sponsoring institution, and the only reproach that could be raised against them concerns their failure to include in the selection articles written between 1945 and the middle sixties. But this failure could still be remedied by issuing a second volume.

The field of modern civil-military relations is not a totally fresh one, still unexplored. Kurt Lang's 1969 bibliography on military sociology lists over one thousand items—books, articles, and unpublished material—and this catalogue includes only the material available in English. His section on civil-military relations lists some 250 items,1an impressive accumulation in a supposedly new field.

Increasingly, the present society is coming to be viewed not as a condition but as an alternative, as one possible arrangement of a much larger set. The social sciences help provide an understanding of the factors and mechanisms that allow us to review such a society, propose alternative plans, and transform it in line with these new designs.

Nordlinger and Zeitlin have each used survey research techniques to make insightful and important contributions to the analysis of political transformation and regime stability. Yet Nord-linger's book on British working-class Tory voters and Zeitlin's study of the revolutionary Cuban working class differ as widely in approach as do the two political systems they study. Zeitlin makes a central assumption “that the social pressures arising out of the work situation are fundamental to the workers' political outlook” (p. 221), and he concentrates on concepts such as alienation and exploitation, which Nordlinger never explicitly considers. But he pays less attention to the distinctive elements of Cuba's political tradition that contributed to the one successful socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Nordlinger explicitly seeks to connect the exceptional stability of British democracy with such apparently undemocratic, but characteristically English, attitudes as social deference and acquiescence toward authority. Despite the weight of some of his own data, he only briefly considers an interpretation of working-class Labour supporters as acting rationally on the basis of their class interests.

These three volumes form a curious mind-full. Two concentrate on whence we come. The third concentrates on whither we are going. Mr. Ardrey and Professor Lorenz dwell on the implications for our present and our future of the earlier other animal forms that we continue. Mr. Kahn and Mr. Wiener are concerned almost exclusively with the kind of animals we are going to be. Even the first two volumes make less of the constancy of man as an animal than we might expect.