Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views Edited by Rhoda Metraux (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Experimental Leukemia and Mammary Cancer: Induction, Prevention, Cure. By Charles Brenton Huggins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. 221.120.00. Nobelist Charles Brenton Huggins is an unusual scientist who has never abandoned his work at the laboratory bench. It is natural, therefore, that he would produce an unusual book. The distinguishing quality of this slim volume is its blend of history and current background, laboratory direction and observation, and Huggins's conclusions, opinions, and philosophy of research. Huggins and his associates show how the induction, prevention, and treatment of two complicated forms of cancer in rodents can be studied in logical ways with significant results. Beginners as well as seasoned workers in oncology will find much of value in this personal account of research. It will endure as a valuable progress report and as a fine example of oncology. The volume is illustrated, referenced, and indexed in a thorough and pleasing manner. James A. Miller University of Wisconsin Centerfor Health Sciences Madison, Wisconsin Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views. Edited by Rhoda Metraux. New York: Walker & Co., 1979. Pp. 286. $9.95. The late Margaret Mead studied anthropology under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Obeying the quaint Columbia University custom that no one gets die doctorate unless the dissertation is published, she published her thesis in Germany . Probably this is the least read of her works. As Toynbee became the world's greatest historian after his picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Margaret Mead in her day became, through the extraordinary impact of her best-selling books, the preeminent American anthropologist . You can still buy Coming ofAge in Samoa (1928) in both cloth and paperback. You can also purchase some 35 other hard-cover titles and 16 paperback tides by Mead or by Mead and coauthors. A third-generation scholar in a family of scholars, Mead always knew who she was and what she wanted to do. Numerous field trips, plus dozens of scholarly reports, plus lectures and a professional position with the American Museum of Natural History gave her an assured scientific reputation. In addition to the Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. 670 I BookReviews scholarly works, she held it was a scientist's proper role to interpret her findings in popular writings in simple nonacademic English. Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views was gleaned from popularized questionand -answer columns that Mead contributed with the aid of an anthropological collaborator, Rhoda Metraux, toRedbook magazine. Two other volumes,A Way of Seeing and Aspects ofthe Present, also present excerpts from Redbook columns that appeared between 1962 and 1979. Mead's original subject was six tribes in Polynesia and Melanesia, whom she revisited periodically. Later, she also wrote about U.S., European, and Soviet national traits. She helped write a presidential report on the status of women, a biography of her mentor Ruth Benedict, and memoirs of her own early years. Mead spoke six native languages and might well have written grammars of these languages. If so, nobody outside of her profession would probably ever have heard of her. She chose to write about male and female sex roles, a topic that has always intrigued people the world over. Also, books about the customs ofother people, in which the author suggests that perhaps we might learn better ways of handling such universal problems as sex, child rearing, and the generation gap, are a means of commenting on our own society. In comparing attitudes on these topics among diverse South Sea peoples, she demonstrated that sex roles are not immutably fixed at birth. She pointed out that some societies placed greater emphasis on "masculine" and "feminine" traits than others, and indeed males in some societies might perform so-called feminine tasks in child raising and the home. In her later years, Mead pointed out that U.S. sex roles are changing also, and in some ways are becoming more like those of some South Sea islanders. Probably Mead herself helped bring about today's U.S. revolution in sex roles, because of the female readers her best-selling books reached, but she was no extreme feminist. She...