MINORITIES IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.

By Charles F. Marden '23. New York:American Book Company. 493 pp.

Charles F. Marden '23, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers, has produced in this book a readable, well organized and timely text in the important field of minority group problems in American society. For many years much of the best work in this field was limited to studies of specific minorities. In recent years the trend in sociological thinking and research has been in the direction of correlating and integrating our knowledge of many minority groups and the problems of majority-minority relations. "Our book," writes Professor Marden in his foreword, "... aims to carry on, and it is hoped, carry forward, this integrated standpoint."

Five chapters, three at the beginning and two at the end of Professor Marden's book, contain the substance of his work of coordination, correlation and synthesis. In these chapters he develops successively the importance of minorities in American society, the sociology of minorities, the concept of race as myth and as science, the interpretation of dominantminority relations, and social action and minorities problems.

Professor Marden devotes twelve chapters in the body of the book to detailed examination of specific minorities exemplifying four major types of dominant-minority relations in the United States, namely, "Native"-foreigner relations, white-colored relations, wardwardship relations, and religious difference and minority status. Within the first category the contrasts between the older and the newer immigrants are featured, as are the special problems raised by Mexican and other Spanish American groups in the United States. The greater part of the white-colored relations section is devoted to Negro-white relations, but one chapter takes up the problem of Oriental minorities. American Indians are dealt with in the ward-wardship section, and Catholic-Protestant and Jewish-Gentile relations are covered in the section devoted to religious difference and minority status.

This book breaks relatively little new ground. As a text that is not its primary function. It is a sound, workmanlike text, well written and well organized, and it will provide the beginning student in this field and the general reader with a competent, up-todate survey of minority problems in the United States.