["Why Can't They Be Like Us? America's White Ethnic Groups"] is a short, intelligent work that its author, Andrew M. Greeley …, announces is both a preface to and a plea for further studies he thinks should be done about the individual natures and peculiar qualities of those American groups that still identify themselves with a European ethnicity. Some of the chapters report on surveys, some argue, some are anecdotal or impressionistic, but the theme is all one—a plea for the rights of ethnicity. The book is informative, pleasant to read, sometimes diverting, and sometimes surprising. It is also frequently perplexing, since findings about ethnic groups can be mysterious, at least to outsiders: Why do Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans get along badly? Greeley's enthusiastic espousal of ethinc nationalisms in the United States is even more puzzling, inasmuch as he admits that the European contributions to these hyphenated American cultures...