Family Environment and Delinquency

(Koutledge and Kegan faul, JJs.) This is the third member of the Gluecks' monumental trilogy, the previous two being Unravelling Juvenile Delinquency, and Physique and Delinquency. It is helpful if the reader has had previous acquaintance with the Gluecks' earlier works. The present 328-page volume is more readable than the predecessors, for it is divided into three sections, the first 106 pages containing a description of relationships between socio-cultural factors, development of traits, and the outcome of delinquency, the second 60 pages containing a more detailed examination of relationships between parental attitudes, the development of personality traits and delinquency, and the remainder of the book containing seven appendices with the detailed statistical background for the inferences made. Since each of the first two sections contains a highly readable summary of the author's findings and conclusions it is possible to digest this important contribution to the subject easily and quicklyThe Gluecks have evidently profited from criticisms of their two previous books. In the author's words (page 3): "one of the most crucial weaknesses in pre-existing analyses of delinquency causation has been the failure to ascertain the specific psychologic and physiologic traits and the specific factors in the environment which occur