Alcohol Problems: Review, Research, and Recommendations. by David RobinsonReview by: Samuel E. WallaceSocial Forces, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Sep., 1981), p. 263Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2577962 .

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Book Reviews / 263

size, and population of institutions, of official explanations of "increasing" mental illness, and of psychiatric maneuvers to gain control of asylums-all comprise an important story of state intervention in the lives of the helpless. Whether the reader accepts Scull's account of the causes of that intervention, he will be confronted with major sociological issues of social change and social control. Museums of Madness should have wide appeal to sociologists, but it is particularly well suited for graduate seminars in medical sociology and deviance.

Alcohol Problems: Review, Research, and Recommendations. Edited by David Robinson. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. 246 pp. $24.75.

Reviewer: SAMUEL E. WALLACE, University of Tennessee

Because alcohol problems are so diverse and numerous, many professionals outside medicine "are called on to deal quite regularly with people for whom alcohol has caused some kind of problem." To help these non-medical professionals-social workers, probation officers, health educators, the police, employers, policymakers and others-David Robinson has prepared this volume. "This is a book about alcohol, its use, associated problems, and certain recommen- dations....

In lucid prose Robinson introduces the seven major sections of Alcohol Problems-Drinking and Social Life, Alcohol Problems and Alcoholism, Teenage Drinking, Women and Alcohol, Alcohol and Work, Drinking and Driving, and Prevention and Public Health. With merciless editing, Robinson reduces the 28 articles he includes to five to eleven pages each, and can therefore add several pages of introduction to each section, six cartoons, and an introduction to the entire volume, yet keep the length to 246 pages.

The result is a broad and surprisingly thorough examination of alcohol problems from their onset to their prevention. Among the many themes explored, albeit briefly, are: variations in drinking, the functions and dysfunctions of treating alcoholism as a disease, alcohol abuse and the use of other drugs among teenagers, sexism in the identification and treatment of women alcoholics, drinking at work by occupation and by industrial alcoholism programs, and the consequences of alcohol control policies.

Given the audience for whom this book is intended, Robinson succeeds rather well in providing "a little more about the background to the alcohol problems they [practitioners] are called on to handle." One wonders, however, if that same audience will pay the high price asked for these 254 pages.

Cocaine Users: A Representative Case Approach. By James V Spotts and Franklin C. Shontz. New York: Free Press, 1980. 517 pp.

Reviewer: JAMES T. CAREY, University of Illinois, Chicago Circle

The increasing popularity of cocaine among middle-class groups has led to a series of research investigations of cocaine's physical, psychological, and social effects.

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