Befitting someone writing about anthropologists, Mandler has rescued a small tribe from obscurity and used it to speak to his own time, culture, and society. His subject is broader than its title suggests as, rather than just the World War II-era work of Margaret Mead, he has uncovered the activities and influence of the small society that grouped around her in that turbulent era. Mandler's book can be more rightly described as the tale of stymied ambitions of the heirs of Franz Boaz to utilize their universalist and relativist views about human societies to further a new vision of the world in a time of crisis.

He not only recovers the remarkably influential wartime activity of Mead but contextualizes it within the scholarship of her close circle of collaborators Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Geoffrey Gorer (all of whom she had intimate, if not physical, relationships with) and within broader streams of intellectual engagement of the time.

In this Mandler counteracts some of the criticism that damaged the reputations of Mead and her peers during the Cold War. To critics, their eager cooperation with the state was seen as a sort of original sin that set anthropology down a road to eventual perdition places like Vietnam. Mandler does a service in showing that this cooperation was not craven and driven by the lure of power. Like many Western intellectuals, the unraveling of international order unsettled them and drew them from their work on the “natives” in places like Samoa back to their home countries. They were pulled into work first related to the building of ideological struggles between liberalism and “totalitarian” threats like fascism. In this battle, understanding how cultures work became a crucial tool to move societies. Mead and her peers indulged in what they called “culture cracking” to expose the way cultures functioned. Using what were then cutting-edge methods, they explored, among many other factors, child rearing (what critics would later deride as “diaperology”) and family relations to explain why cultures and the states attached to them acted as they did.

“Cracking” was not just done for arms of the state; it was also done for publics. And as much as enemies' cultures were cracked so were those of friends and of the United States. Indeed, it was Mead's work on American and British society that earned her the most attention. Books like And Keep Your Powder Dry made the two allies legible to each other and to themselves. By the middle of the war Mead had established herself as a leading cultural ambassador to Great Britain, regularly speaking directly to the British public in person by radio to make the Americans swarming all over their island more understandable.

But through his discussion of “culture cracking” Mandler touches on the irony of those who preferred to see cultures as equal necessarily having to dwell on differences, even invidious ones, as a means to understand the enemy and prosecute the war.

Attempts to maintain this sort of engagement with an eye toward fostering greater international cooperation in the years following the war foundered. In part this was their own frustration with Cold War imperatives, but for Mandler methodological and personal limits had place. As the Cold War settled in, the shortcomings of “culture cracking” became apparent. Could the interests of the Soviet regime be grasped by knowing Russian child-rearing practices? Knowledge of the other side's culture still had its place in a long-term ideological showdown but it lacked the resonance of wartime. Mandler also is unsparing in showing that Mead was sometimes more interested in relationships within her tribe than in scholarly rigor. A long-simmering relationship with Gorer led to patronage for sometimes glib and shoddy work (an analysis of the USSR by Gorer exposed that he did not know that Stalin was a Georgian, not a Russian).

In the end, Mead and her compatriots went back to the “natives,” seeing fieldwork as an escape from the frustrations of engagement at home. But controversy would follow them and color their legacy. Mandler has done an excellent job recovering the important work they did and showing that Mead et al. were not simply “nervous liberals” defending their ideals but part of a wider mobilization of intellectuals and scholars that sought to promote liberal and universalist values worldwide. At the same time it remains a warning about the limits of scholars and their agendas in the face of the imperatives of the state and changing world conditions.