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The desire to sell most of the remaining federally owned lands in the American West has been strengthened by proposals such as those offered by Richard Stroup and John A. Baden (Natural Resources: Bureaucratic Myths and Environmental Management, CH, Dec'83), who advocate selling or privatizing most public lands. This idea was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the early Reagan years and is associated with the current Wise Use Movement. Lehmann (philosophy, Univ. of Connecticut) examines privatization proposals in terms of their logical completeness and relationship to the common good and invokes, as needed, the perspective of analytical economics. Feeling that arguments for privatization have been incompletely developed, Lehmann begins by trying to strengthen the rationale for privatization. Once this is accomplished to his satisfaction he meticulously dissects weaknesses in those arguments. Using an anti-utilitarian perspective, he scrutinizes such terms as "productive," and "property rights," and raises questions about the neutrality of markets as ethical arbiters of environmental and public values. Along the way he offers valuable challenges to the so-called evils of collective management. Although critical of privatization proposals, the author also takes environmental groups to task for advocating a variant of privatization that he calls marketization. This book is the most stimulating discussion of these issues since Stroup and Baden and will no doubt spark controversy from both fans and opponents of privatization. Undergraduate through faculty. P. J. Pizor; Northwest College