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Why does the prison system, with its stated objectives of reform and rehabilitation, turns three out of four first-offenders into recidivists to harass the community again and again? Alastair W. MacLeod, drawing on relevant psychiatric literature to interpret the findings of a small-scale study of criminality made with the cooperation of inmates in a Canadian penitentiary, advances the hypothesis that damaging degrees of deprivation brought about by various kinds of social isolation during critical life periods can seriously handicap the individual in learning and using the social skills essential to living a noncriminal life.

Jurists, penologists, theologians, savants, and journalists have authored an impressive library of books and articles on crime, punishment, and correction. Only more recently have psychiatrists begun to add their observations, speculative thought, and recommendations to the literature. This study has been written in a spirit of confidence shared by many psychiatrists that the complex causes of criminality can be better understood than they are now, and that this understanding can be used both to lessen the incidence of crime and to increase the effectiveness of rehabilitation practices.

Recidivism: A Deficiency Disease is derived from a series of lectures given by MacLeod in 1958 under the terms of the Isaac Ray Lectureship Award. These lectures were based on observations made during a study conducted in a Canadian Federal penitentiary early in 1955 under official auspices of the McGill University Department of Psychiatry and the Montreal Mental Hygiene Institute, and with the collaboration and support of the John Howard Society of Quebec.

The Future of Democratic Capitalism poses this question: what are the chances of survival for America's present economic and political way of life?

Opposing totalitarian communism proclaimed by the USSR stands the democratic capitalism of the United States, which is being attacked from within as well as from without and is undergoing such serious, rapid changes that its fundamental nature has been altered within a single generation. Between these two extremes stand the democratic and socialist nations of western Europe.

The maintenance of the status quo is a challenge to all concerned, a challenge as difficult and dangerous as it is vital in character. And the best approach to the uncertain future of democratic capitalism would seem to be through a better understanding of the chief institutions of our present economic order. In this volume five distinguished authorities examine some of our most pressing related problems.

Contributors: Thurman W. Arnold, Morris L. Ernst, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Lloyd K. Garrison, Sir Alfred Zimmern.

This anonymous Middle English poem of the late fourteenth century, a central work in the Arthurian group, is an important example of the tradition known as the "alliterative revival" and is one of a group of poems having Sir Gawain as hero. Its metrical form is the most intricate in Middle English Romance, including rhyme, alliteration, and stanza-linking. The stanza consists of nine long alliterative lines rhyming ababababc and a "wheel" of four shorter lines rhyming dddc.

In this first critical edition based on all four extant manuscripts, Robert J. Gates has contributed careful commentary with extensive critical apparatus. He attempts to reconstruct original readings that have been lost in one or more of the manuscripts. His glossary, however, uses words from the variant readings as well as those accepted in the edited text.

Using the editorial methods developed by George Kane in his edition of Piers Plowman, Gates gives abundant new evidence of the usefulness of these methods. He believes that the edition shows that written poems could be formulaic and that scribes often substituted readings consisting of formulaic whole or half lines.