Book excerpt: The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America is concerned with the study of the abilities, achievements, and personality characteristics of oriental immigrants and their descendants in North America. The book attempts to set a correlation between the cultural background from which the immigrants came and their history in North America, and to discover the implications for psychological theory. The text contains discussions on the problems of heredity, environment, and acculturation; racial and ethnic differences; and a comparison of biological, environmental and cultural differences between orientals and occidentals. Sociologists, psychologists, ethnologists, historians, and people who wish to study oriental character traits will find the book very insightful.