The Lancet Commissions are widely known as aspirational pieces, providing the mechanisms for consortia and networks of researchers to organize, collate, interrogate and publish around a range of subjects. Although the Commissions are predominantly led by biomedical scientists and cognate public health professionals, many address social science questions and involve social science expertise. Medical anthropologist David Napier was lead author of the Lancet Commission on Culture and Health (2014), for example, and all commissions on global health (https://www.thelancet.com/global-health/commissions) address questions of social structure, everyday life, the social determinants of health, and global inequalities.

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This is a good addition to the substantial body of literature on the Japanese Americans. The monograph can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters (pp. 1-49) contain a summary of the social and cultural background of Japanese Americans, and of their evacuation from the West Coast and relocation during World War 11. This material is interpreted in terms of the impact of these events on family groups, and such a focus is appropriate because of the central importance of the family in the organization of life in Japanese-American communities. The second part of the monograph (pp. 51-213) presents ten cases of representative Japanese-American families. The composition and history of each family is traced from their prewar adjustment through the process of evacuation and relocation and into the postwar situation. Data on each family are presented separately from the interpretation in order to facilitate use of the cases for other purposes by other scholars.To read the opening chapters is to realize anew that the United States acted out of a sense of over-anxiety and hysteria in the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast early in 1942. At the same time, in order to temper the effects of such an evacuation, the decision was made to "evacuate entire family units" and "to move communities together so far as this was possible." However, as the authors point out: "The evacuation of the family as a unit did not ensure its maintenance as an institution. (Even less did the evacuation of fragments of neighborhoods ensure the transfer to the centers of cohesive communities.)" I n the relocation centers the traditional authority of the Issei parents was severely straiiied by such policy decisions as the exclusion of Issei from elective offices in the centers; payment of the same wages to the Issei and to their children; and the War Relocation Authority's intention "to create a community as nearly American in its outlook and organization as possible." The authors stress that under such circumstances, the maintenance of family solidarity and integration increasingly depended upon the family's ability to draw upon its affectional ties among members rather than on a reliance upon traditional structural bonds which were no longer supported by a community organization or by current realities.A family's ability to use affectional ties as a defense against deterioration depended in large part upon its type of integration and stability under prewar conditions. And, as the authors say, "The cases presented show how variation in the structure, cohesiveness, and affectional and cultural characteristics of the family affected its adjustments to the demands imposed by administrative policies." The cases fulfill this purpose, although the facts in each case are given so compactly that the cultural and emotional conflicts that must have lain behind them often do not come through very sharply. The map and chart which accompany each case help in following the movements of various members over time, and in tr...

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