Total Man—Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Personality

Evolutionary Theory of Personality by Stan Cioocn Allen Lane The Penguin Press, ?4.50 Such an arresting title would presuppose a massive volume and the prediction would be correct. The author takes 534 pages and on the very last, promises yet another volume to portray something, but what? A review is meant to convey an informed critique of the contents of a book, which in this particular instance, is far from easy. Many a reader will, in fact, abandon the project of thorough reading or skip more than one chapter. The author would be embarrassed to read that, in one way, he elicits the same boredom as the academic experimental psychology he chides throughout the text. If the impersonal, statistically-loaded text of a contemporary paper in most journals irritates by its virtual loss of contact with living reality, this book manages to produce the same result by its repetition, circumlocution, meandering and undisciplined text. This is a great pity because, somewhere, buried in this exercise of thinking aloud, the author is pointing the way to some important things which the reader must latently identify with in order to recognise. I am in sympathy with much of the author's thinking, which was a much