Reviews the books, The Mind Stealers: Psychosurgery and Mind Control by Samuel Chavkin (1978) and Mind Control by Peter Schrag (1978). A forceful journalistic expose, Chavkin's Mind Stealers concentrates its attack on the biologistic ideology and concomitant practices of medical-model "therapy," drugs, electroshock, and especially psychosurgery. For Chavkin, psychosurgery is not only morally, ethically, and legally objectionable as a mode of social control; it is also scientifically absurd, since it ignores the sources of deviance. Schrag's Mind Control is suffused with a generally negative ethico-moral evaluation of contemporary American techniques for controlling behavior. Schrag's eminently readable volume more than succeeds in its attempt to analyze these methods of social control in their sociohistorical context. Mind Control traces the development of the methods and their invasion of extra institutional "private" life. Polemic aside, both are interesting, powerful books that will amply reward careful reading. Chavkin and Schrag raise fundamental issues that deserve professional refection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)