Short stories are ideal for the daily train rides to and from work. I was expecting some solid fifties' science fiction from this compilation of 25 short stories first published between 1950 and 1968 in various magazines ranging from Playboy to the Ladies Home Journal. And while there are stories about the Handicapper General, who in 2081 and accordance to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Constitutional Amendments keeps everyone equal, a society with state-mandated ethical birth-control pills, Thomas Edison's dog, mental powers fifty-five times more powerful than a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb, cosmic radiation that creates life-threatening euphoria, living outside of your body, the devastating effects of cheap anti-ageing drugs, and about computers that cover about an acre on the fourth floor of the physics building and develop emotions, there are also more than one story about small towns on Cape Cod, the celebrities that drop by, and how to sell them storm windows and bathtub enclosures, about teen romance, schizoid jazz musicians, American puritanism, barbaric Communist guerilla fighters, noisy neighbours, interior decoration, orphans in post-war Germany, jobs at big companies, private preparatory schools in Massachusetts, the miracle of birth, the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club, and a review of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.