For Stutterers
By Smiley Blanton, M.D. and Margaret Blanton. D. Appleton-Century Co. 7/6. From the point of view of the stutterer, this book must of necessity prove a disappointment. The title For Stutterers suggests that practical help would be found in its pages, whereas twothirds of the book consists of theories?all more or less vague. There is very little that has not been said and written before, and the psychology is of the most elementary.
The question of how far a stammer is due to home conditions is dealt with in chapter 15, and some sound advice is given to parents on this subject, but one cannot help feeling that chapter 18 might with advantage have been written on the same clear lines, instead of suddenly becoming a treatise on phonetics (pages 174 and 175).
The abrupt change from one subject to another is extremely confusing to the lay mind, no chapter being devoted entirely to psychology for example. Practically every few pages the subject changes from speech training to psychology, then to a smattering of phonetics mixed up with medical terms.
The suggestion that a stutterer should change his environment isi good in itself, but rarely applicable to the average man or woman who in all probability has his or her living to earn, and would find it utterly impossible to leave a particular town or business; the idea is right but impracticable.
On page 83, the question of imitation is discussed, the writers saying: ” We have never seen what we believed to be an authentic case of this.” One wonders how much experience of stammerers the writers have had, particularly of children in schools, as it is a well known fact that children will imitate a stammerer and thus acquire a stammer themselves. The chapter on Emotional Patterns, deals with such subjects as Dreaming, Forgetting and Rationalising, and it is extremely difficult to find any connection between these subjects and the subject about which the book is written, i.e., Stuttering.
We venture to suggest that had the writers devoted themselves to one subject, instead of attempting to write about several, the book might have been worth reading. K.E.J.
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