The Competent Infant: Research and Commentary, edited by L. Joseph Stone, Henrietta T. Smith and Lois Barclay Murphy. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973, 1,193 pp., $30.00
R. D. Becker A.M., Ph.D.1
1 Old Forest Hills, New York
In recent years there has been a bewildering and indeed a staggering proliferation of newly published books, scholarly monographs, research anthologies, and compendia as well as an exponential increase in newly organized professional journals within the areas of developmental and psychological medicine, child neurology, experimental psychopathology and the neurobiology of growth and development as well as new volumes in the area of advances in syndrome identification. These have dealt broadly with subjects ranging from prenatal influences of maternal and fetal undernutrition on the integrity of subsequent brain function to studies dealing with patterns of neurocognitive, affective and communicative development in infancy, to neurological and behavioral sequelae of prenatal and paranatal complications, low birth weight, small-for-dates and preterm babies, fetal heroin or methadone addiction and withdrawal, problems of dysmaturity and the multiple outcomes related to the isolated and restrictive early cognitive and physical environments of the "critically ill" newborn and infant in "intensive special care" in isolettes.
