Here are nearly a score of books which may be taken collectively as an expression of general sociology. That, of course, was not the goal of the authors; they were not engaged in any common effort even though they shared the same general aim: to write an introduction to sociology. To look at 19 different introductory texts on the same subject is to expect that a general view of that subject will emerge and take on a form with definable features. Persons schooled in that subject may then respond to such a picture with a variety of comments and questions. Nineteen sets of decisions about what aspects of sociology need to be included when presenting it to the uninitiated, and 19 sets of priorities in the arrangements of such features, do yield a set of commonalities which result in a portrayal of general sociology. Those portions of sociology omitted or de-emphasized in such an image can become a source of reflection about what is and what is not happening to the discipline-as introduced to students. This review will not explore such questions very deeply, but some of them will be raised. After all, a major purpose for reviewing textbooks is to give readers sufficient information to make their own first level evaluations about texts for use in teaching. This essay, then, has a double objective: to provide about these texts (all published in 1978-79) sufficient information suitably organized to help the instructor who is hunting a text, and also to stimulate colleagues interested in reflecting on the current condition of the discipline. These authors expect their texts to be used in learning situations, and they provide a number of helpful visual and instructional aids. Table 1 compares the texts by the most common of such devices. Some of the aids which appear to be lacking for a given text may, in fact, be available in the instructor's manual; if the authors indicated in their text that such a manual was available from the publisher, that is shown in the table. Instructors differ in their preferences for such aids, of course, but that factor is probably secondary to matters of substantive content in text selection, so Table 1 stands here for your information but without further comment. In the interests of saving space in the comments below, after the first reference to a text by the authors' last names, I will use their initials in later references; those are the symbols used in Tables 1 and 2. In Table 2 we see the general shape of sociology's subject matter as presented in these texts, their collective image as well as their individual outlines. The reader should be informed immediately that some texts which do not have a chapter or significant unit on a given topic may in fact treat that topic more continuously throughout the book. A prime example of this is the treatment of sex roles by Almquist, Chafetz, Chance, and Corder-Bolz (ACCC). It should also be noted in this connection that two of the texts are abridgements of larger books: Broom and Selznick (BrS), Perry and Perry-Brief [PP(b)]. The data as arranged in Table 2 present a distribution of topics among these texts that, when considered as a set, suggest a general shape to the discipline. We find that sociological theory and research, socialization, stratification, and social structure are universally included with significant priority (see below for the apparent exception). Culture, collective behavior, social change, crime/deviance, and minorities are topics nearly universal in their inclusion. The traditional social institutions are less common but notably present. A fourth to three-fifths of these texts give little or no emphasis to the topics of urban sociology,