The advance of medical science is neither uniform nor predictable. Rather, progress tends to occur in salients which may grow with great rapidity and then await catch-up growth of other fields. An example is human genetics, which has undergone an astonishing growth in the past two decades. It is easy enough for the busy practitioner or investigator to lose track of one of these rapidly developing disciplines. Carter's little volume is an ideal introduction to recent developments in human genetics. In no sense does it pretend to be a general text or a comprehensive survey. Nonetheless it contains an extraordinary amount of useful information. After an introductory chapter on the relevance of genetics to disease and on the general methods for obtaining information about human inheritance, the author provides a terse and lucid consideration of chromosomal mechanics and a brief survey of the diseases which are characterized by disturbances