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Recently "community" has replaced "dynamic" as the word that most neatly characterizes psychiatry's advancing edges. In and around Boston, a number of investigators, most of them attached to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, have been closely identified with the design and implementation of new programs in community psychiatry. Dr. Milton Greenblatt, Superintendent of the Boston State Hospital, and nine collaborators from psychiatry, nursing, and social work, report in this new volume the characteristics of 128 applicants on the waiting list for admission to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. They describe how waiting for hospitalization affected these patients and their families, and they outline techniques to circumvent the hospitalization of "acute mentally ill patients." The general tone of the book is scholarly and a large amount of data is presented in tables, but statistical treatment is not attempted. The report will be of little interest to the layman inasmuch