Essays in Group Theory contains five papers on topics of current interest which were presented in a seminar at MSRI, Berkeley in June, 1985. Special mention should be given to Gromovs paper, one of the most significant in the field in the last decade. It develops the theory of hyperbolic groups to include a version of small cancellation theory sufficiently powerful to recover deep results of Ol'shanskii and Rips. Each of the remaining papers, by Baumslag and Shalen, Gersten, Shalen, and Stallings contains gems. For example, the reader will delight in Stallings' explicit construction of...