Field-work was conducted for several summer periods and one complete year (1954–5) among the northern Ojibwa at Pekangekum. Pekangekum is situated in northwestern Ontario (52 degrees north latitude and 94 degrees west longitude), close to the Manitoba border and to the northern Ojibwa–Cree boundary. The major occupations of the people are fur trapping and subsistence hunting and fishing. The band is composed of treaty status Indians, numbering 382 persons in 1955, who communally own a small reservation of approximately 2,000 acres at the summer fishing centre.

In 1947 the provincial government registered all the territory as traplines, and the trappers therefore became licensed in the area in which they already trapped. The band's territory, which is low-lying and poorly drained forest and muskeg, comprises 4,800 square miles, that is, about 12.5 square miles per person. During the trapping season, approximately six months of the year, the population breaks up into eighteen residential groupings, averaging twenty-two persons each, and these units proceed to the centres of the trapping territories allotted to them by tradition. Usually such domestic groupings are ten or fifteen miles apart and are spread throughout the total territory of the band, but in summer they live nearly contiguously at two major summer fishing camps.

The population is made up of five extended families with patronymic totems. Formerly political authority was vested in the senior man of a domestic group on the basis of his dream-sanctioned success and power. Sometimes an individual magico-medical specialist held sway over wider territory, but his position rested on prestige rather than power, and each domestic group was usually autonomous.

A preliminary report is by definition an unsatisfying document, though it may be an exciting one. The Gordon Commission's Preliminary Report qualifies for the former description, without quite coming up to the latter; for while the prospects of economic growth which it holds out are gratifying in the extreme, its discussion of policy problems is narrowly empirical and pragmatic, uninspired by any consistent philosophy of resource-orientated growth or even of economic policy, and interesting mainly as a reflection of trends in Canadian political opinion and the balance of pressure groups at the end of the second Liberal era.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is documented in two books published in the spring and summer of last year. The first is a comprehensive collection of speeches, documents, radio reports, and newspaper articles arranged chronologically to trace the uprising from its first stirrings in the Petofi Circle and the Literary Gazette to its prolonged and anguished death under the Kadar repression. Its method is impressionistic, designed to convey the hope, determination, uncertainty, and desperation of the participants in two weeks of national revolution, and to “observe a revolution and a war with a thousand eyes” (p. 7). It succeeds in transmitting the mood of the revolution by careful editing of the selections, many of them eloquent and impassioned; and it develops a much more complete picture of the revolt than most North Americans could imagine from newspaper and radio reports during the uprising. It leaves many questions unanswered, and some unasked; the editor, Melvin J. Lasky, presents die collection with its ambiguities unresolved. He does not attempt to draw his own conclusions from the incomplete evidence that he has collected. The book does, as the editor hopes, tell the story of the tragedy with directness and sympathy. It implies more than it says.

Perhaps never in the history of economic thought, and certainly not since the crash of 1929, has economic analysis lagged so far behind the demands of policy as it does at present. The elevation of economic development to the top ranks of policy issues, in under-developed and advanced countries alike, has caught professional economists more than ever unprepared to deal with the most pressing economic problem of the moment. One result of this unusually large inflationary gap between the demand for solid policy recommendations and the supply of them has been an unprecedented concentration of economists’ effort on the study of economic growth. The technical assistance programmes under the United Nations, the International Cooperation Administration, the Colombo Plan, other bilateral programmes, and the Ford Foundation have given economists opportunities for “laboratory work” on a scale never before open to them. In the universities, too, more and more economists have redirected their interests in research towards economic development.

This study sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research lives up to the Bureau's object which is “to ascertain and to present to the public important economic facts and their interpretation in a scientific and impartial manner.” Important economic facts are presented to throw light on four topics: concentration in Canadian manufacturing industries in 1948; differences in concentration between plants and firms in Canadian manufacturing industries at the same date; differences between firm concentration in a number of Canadian manufacturing industries in 1948 and firm concentration in the corresponding United States industries in 1947; and the trend in the concentration of plants in Canadian manufacturing industries in the period from 1922 to 1948.