Su"ender and catch: give so you can receive, where the giving is your whole self, in a total experience. This is scarcely new on the American scene, and it is ancient knowledge, East and West. The fears of total surrender, the fears of self-revelation and of total abandon, although genuine, are likewise not new. Yet Kurt H. Wolff does attempt something new here, an epistemologi cal essay with the help of this old idea: his subtitle is 'experience and inquiry today'. He tries to formulate an integrated view which incorporates in the theory of total experience not only the accepted component- esthetics, religion, the recent American experience - but also a metaphysics, a phenomenology, a theory of perception, a social philosophy and a methodology of the social sciences, even a philosophy of history and psychopathology. Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together. It all looks topsy-turvy at first. We have here scraps of a diary, fragments of correspondence, a stray adolescent love letter, notes on notes on field work, and notes and comments on tutorial seminars plus long excerpts from students' essays, a stray paper in a learned journal summarizing the core of the book, comments piled on comments and a web of self-references, literary criticisms, and pieces of poetry, plus a rich scholarly apparatus.

Kurt Wolff seeks to answer a large ques­tion: what are the justifications and tasks of sociology at a time when hu­mankind and its planet are in jeop­ardy? Since his youth in Germany, where he was a student ofthelate, great Karl Mannheim, the author has ori­ented much of his work to the sociology of sociology. Survival and Sociology takes into ac­count that this age, for the first time in history, extends to society what was only in the province of nature and god—the ability to destroy as well as create life. That being the case, the concern of so­ciology must shift from everyday issues to ideas and policies aimed at averting human extinction. The act of "surrendering" to our novel condition may give us a clue. In any case, it re-establishes our continuity with such founding figures as Max We­ber. Max Scheler. Alfred Schutz, Emile Durkheim. Georg Simmel, and Mann­heim himself. As a result. Wolffs work can be seen as both innovative and continuing a grand tradition of analysis. The an­swers given are very much in terms of specific American conditions, but also provide the sort of theoretical scaffold­ing that underwrites current East-West negotiations on practical issues relat­ing to arms negotiations and peace set­tlements. It is thus a work that should have wide appeal to students of the his­tory of ideas, sociologists of knowledge, and people interested in the philosoph­ical foundations of war and peace.