James Gilbert. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 269 pp. $39.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-29324-6.

✍ Scribed by Ian Nicholson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 128 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20230

✦ Synopsis

From the outset, Intelligence: A Brief History presents its readers with a problem: what is this book really about? Judging from the title, the unwary reader would presume that Cianciolo and Sternberg have set out to provide a quick overview of the historical development of the concept of intelligence, the practices that have been invented to measure it, and the uses to which it has been put. Indeed, this is precisely what they claim to have accomplished at the beginning of their conclusion (p. 135). However, as a contribution to history, the book is an abject failure. Events and developments that occurred before the 1960s or even 1970s are scarcely mentioned, and when they are, the exact details are often inaccurate. The authors provide no attention to historical context, to the specific intellectual traditions associated with the various articulations of the notion of intelligence they describe, or to the effects of the sociological/cultural locations of these developments in shaping the concepts and practices adopted. Indeed, a quick check of the bibliography reveals that of the approximately 291 works cited, only about 35 (12 percent) were published before 1960. Moreover, although there is an extensive literature on the history of intelligence and its tests, as the readers of this journal well know, only five (1.7 percent) of the works listed were historical treatments of the issues addressed by the book. Indeed, such central figures in the historiography as Hamilton