Men in Crisis: A Study of a Mine Disaster.

Abstract

an effective, dispassionate source of reliable information about drug taking, its ramifications and related phenomena. This annotated guide contains virtually every publication concerning marihuana published in the English language in the last 150 years. Its format allows, through cross-indexing of both author and subject, the reader to readily obtain relevant articles to any particular area of interest concerning marihuana. Further, the summaries of each article are extremely accurate and will allow the reader to assess its relevance to his area of interest. This publication should be extremely beneficial to anyone interested in the subject of marihuana and represents a major step for STASH in accomplishing its objective of providing unbiased factual information about drugs. CHARLES R. SCHUSTER, PhD Men in Crisis: A Study of a Mine Disaster. By Rex A. Lucas. Price, $10. Pp 335. Basic Books Inc Publishers, 404 Park Ave S, New York 10016,1969. A multidisciplinary team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists studied the survivors of a major Canadian mine disaster. The same instruments were then applied to a control group of miners who had not been trapped. The first study emanating from this experience was Individual and Group Behavior in a Coal Mine Disaster by H.D. Beach and R.A. Lucas. The results of psychiatric and psychological tests were described, together with some observations of interest to sociologists. Now R.A. Lucas has written a second volume, Men in Crisis, in which he presents a detailed sociologic analysis of the data. Sociologic concepts such as normative priority, pluralistic knowledge, and anticipatory socialization will present difficulty for the psychiatrist, but he will be repaid by reading these volumes. The relationship between social imperatives and behavior is nicely illustrated by the observation of a shift in group leadership as the task of the group changed from seeking to escape to waiting for rescue. The relationship between personality characteristics and behavior under stress and the analysis of family responses as well as other relation¬ ships of interest make these studies signif¬ icant additions to the stress literature. EDWARD C. SENAY, MD