Alcohol Problems: A Report to the Nation

Manual on Alcoholism, by the American Medical Association (prepared by 13 contributors, Committee on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and Council on Mental Health, Robert J. Shearer, ed.), 95 pp, paper, 50c, Chicago: American Medical Association, 1967. If you want a job well done, somebody has said, turn it over to a busy man; the other kind has no time. Another general rule: if you want a job poorly done, turn it over to a committee; performance, the rule goes, will be inversely proportionate to committee size. But, as exceptions to this rule, we have two new books,Alcohol Problems, and the American Medical Association's newManual on Alcoholism. Both are the products of group effort, and both are commendable by any standard. The committee responsible forAlcohol Problems, the Cooperative Commission on the Study of Alcoholism, was composed of 17 prominent physicians and scholars and sponsored by the National Institute