This excellent monograph describes in considerable detail a series of clinical and laboratory studies on a cohort of 78 autistic and 78 normal children. As such it clearly constitutes a unique contribution to our knowledge of this tragic and distressing condition, and Dr. Coleman is to be congratulated on the industry, dedication and understanding she has brought to her task as principal investigator and editor.Both in the selection of material and in her introductory comments Dr. Coleman adopts a broad and eclectic approach. Thus the book starts from the premise that autism is not a disease entity but, in the words of the editor, "a constellation of symptoms, i.e., a syndrome, one of the limited patterns the infant central nervous system has in reaction to injury or genetic misinformation." Despite this wide concept the 78 autistic children comprising the study were selected on the basis of well-defined diagnostic criteria: besides early age of onset and Kanner's "profound inability to relate to others," language problems, ritualistic behavior, stereotypy, and perceptual anomalies were required. With regard to etiology the bias is clearly towards organic factors, but in discussing the nature-nurture question the editor wisely takes a balanced view, recognizing that "even in patients with unequivocal organic etiologies of central nervous system disease, data is now available that demonstrates an environmental effect on the patients' biochemistry, particularly metabolic systems at risk in that particular patient."Beyond Dr. Coleman's introductory essay and a chapter devoted to descriptive (demographic, historical, etc.) data on the patient and control populations, the book is divided into two sections of six chapters each on laboratory and clinical studies. There are also four chapters in a section inappropriately entitled "The Classical Autistic Syndrome" (which deals in fact with subgroups of the population exhibiting distinct symptoms), six appendices giving profiles of all the patients together with details of diets, codes, and questionnaires, and a very valuable correlative chapter (by H. A. Walker). The amount of detail given in this volume of some 300 pages is 189 9 1977 Plenum Publishing Corp., 227 West 17th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011. To promote freer access to published material in the spirit of the 1976 Copyright Law, Plenum sells reprint articles from all its journals. This availability underlines the fact that no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
