Ruth Shonle Cavan is a veteran sociologist and textbook writer whose first book (her dissertation on suicide) appeared in 1928. The “junior” partner in the present joint venture is her husband, a retired professor of education. Not seriously intended as a major research effort, their book is directed to “college students and interested laymen.” Intelligently conceived and competently written, it will doubtlessly be widely adopted as an auxiliary text to provide a needed cross-cultural perspective in the ever-popular criminology courses to which students flock in large numbers.
Six “societies” receive chapter-length treatment: the Eskimo, Mexico, India, the Soviet Union, Sicily (for the Mafia), and England; briefer attention is devoted to eight others. Sources are necessarily secondary and standard. “Interested laymen” knowledgeable in any one of the regions covered will find little new in content for their area, and most of them will probably want to quarrel a bit with the Cavans’ presentation. Mexico is described as “an agricultural land . . . dotted with small folk villages” (p. 44). The “transplanted” peasants of Mexico City’s slums are therefore presented as disorganized former “folk,” despite the fact that the authors’ chief source (Oscar Lewis) has repeatedly and vigorously attacked this interpretation. It is easy to see, nonetheless, why they persist in their more old-fashioned view; otherwise Mexico (in company with India) would fit less conveniently between the Eskimo and the Soviet Union. Such are the hazards of pedagogy, which daily tempts all of us into questionable generalization.
