* The main trouble with this book1 is well described by the blurb on the back, which says "Nader's Raiders Strike Again!" Indeed they do, and in some ways very effectively. But, in spite of their generous comments about economists, their obviously careful reading of recognized books on the economics of transportation, and the ample space they give to the views of the economics profession, their level of economic analysis is at times what one would expect of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Part of the trouble is the adoption of an approach more appropriate to an adversary proceeding than to the investigation of a regulatory body. Part of the trouble is expressed by the old Forrest maxim: Get there first with the most. (As a first draft, the book is excellent.) And perhaps a small part of the trouble is that even Ralph Nader is not exempt from that curse of organized humankinddiseconomies of scale. He remains the most distinguished ombudsman this country has ever produced. As the sponsor of this and other research projects, he has become one of the country's outstanding educators. But Ralph Nader, Incorporated, is by no means as consistent or as cogent as Ralph Nader, Sole Proprietor. There is a certain aura of the committee about part of the text, and of the sub-sub-committee about some of the inconsistencies. But let us start with some of the book's virtues. The first is that it is obviously based in large part on a method which is either beneath the dignity or beyond the capacity of most economists-direct interviewing and reliance in other ways on primary research. Here the Nader influence is at its very best, in establishing for yet another time the right of members of the public to have access to types of government information which were succesfully hidden away in the pre-Nader era, and the Study Group has browsed and burrowed most intelligently. Some of the reports of interviews are almost uncannily revealing, although details are chastely buried in the text so as not to reveal the identity of individual informants. Occasionally statistics are wildly inaccurate (e.g., as with the statement that the I.C.C. is "a group responsible for the regulation of almost one-fifth of the nation's GNP," which is an order of magnitude too big [p. 19], or with