The Denver Developmental Screening Test was given to 373 disadvantaged black children attending preschool nursery classes in a large urban area. Findings are presented and discussed. Primary emphasis is on the need for early recognition of developmental failures and the establishment of remedial classes within existing preschool programs. Cultural stereotyping is viewed as one obstruction to early identification of learning deficits.

Most students of premodern Italy acquire a working knowledge of the four main languages used in contemporary scholarship: Italian, French, German, and English. It is an open secret that mastery of any but the first is optional. Only a few doyens are conversant with the scholarship of the field as a whole, and it seems safe to say, at least in private, that most of our bibliographies neglect one or more of these lingue franche. Michele Sampaolo's translation of Mitterauer and Morrissey's Pisa: Seemacht und Kulturmetropole (2007) into Italian should therefore ensure wider exposure for this valuable study of early and high medieval Pisa. Largely synthetic in nature, Pisa nel Medioevo addresses topics in the city's political, economic, and religious history, weaving a loose narrative that runs from antiquity up through the thirteenth century. Mitterauer and Morrissey's text functions well as a primer for Italianists more familiar with Genoa and Venice, the Tuscan port's competitors and eventual conquerors. Indeed, both authors specialize in Venetian history and explain their interest in Pisa as ancillary to work on the serene port. But their collaborative volume does far more than treat Pisa as Venice's rival. In particular, it does an excellent job situating the actions of its subject on a stage crowded with small players. On a local level, for example, the authors connect the rise of Pisa with the decline of the ports at Populonia and Luni, each of which collapsed in a manner foreshadowing Pisa's futurevictims of industrial decline, malaria, and silting. Lacking a central thesis, Mitterauer and Morrissey's text functions more as a collection of thematically linked essays than a monograph. It is divided into three chapters, but these, like the book itself, lack proper introductions and conclusions. The chapter titles function instead as headings for their respective collections of subchapters, each of these an essay with self-contained momentum. Chapter 1, "L'ascesa di Pisa," concerns the city's development from antiquity to the mid-eleventh century. The