Reviews the autobiography of Eva Hoffman, "Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language" (Dutton, 1989). Hoffman, whose family left Poland in the 1950s, offers a consciously bicultural view of the immigrant experience, in contrast to many autobiographies of those who forsake the old world for the new. (DM)

Despite its failings, Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" is valuable for emphasizing cognition as significantly affecting human performance and social achievement; acknowledging human differences; and offering a frightening depiction of contemporary American society. The authors err in reducing intelligence to a stable, immutable…

Reviews "Human Minds: An Exploration" by Margaret Donaldson, which inquires into the diverse uses of minds, their ontogenetic development, and their histories. The two predominant themes in the book are the ontogenetic and historical development of cognition, and development of social-emotional understandings and experiences as well as…

Reviews four books: (1) "On Intelligence. . .More or Less: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development" (Stephen J. Ceci); (2) "Knowing Children: Experiments in Conversation and Cognition" (Michael Siegal); (3) "Adolescents and Their Families: Paths of Ego Development" (S. T. Hauser and others); and (4) "Adolescence: An Anthropological…

Examines several current nonfiction books that can expand a child's knowledge of a wide variety of subjects, noting that the breadth of a child's knowledge base affects his or her reading development. Subjects discussed include dinosaurs, animal preservation, insects, ecology, history, and drugs and alcohol. (SM)

Reviews six books on developmental psychology: (1) "Children and Violence" (David Reiss and others); (2) "Television and the American Child" (George Comstock); (3) "Intellectual Development" (Robert Sternberg and Cynthia Berg); (4) "Context and Development" (Robert Cohen and Alexander Siegel); (5) "Adolescent Identity Formation" (Gerald Adams and…