Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elliott Currie is the author of Confronting Crime, Reckoning, and Crime and Punishment in America. An internationally recognized authority on youth and crime, he is a professor of criminology, law, and society at the University of California, Irvine.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Road to Whatever

Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of AdolescenceBy Currie, Elliott

Owl Books

Copyright © 2005 Currie, Elliott
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0805080007
Over and over, the kids I spoke to told me how they had hidden their troubles from adult authorities for years. The only people they talked to "for real," if anyone, were their friends, who were usually kids in the same boat-the ones on the outside, the ones nobody else liked. And so they stewed, their sense of failure and grievance festering. Quite often they tried on new identities, predictably those that combined serious "badness" with great power. Better to be identified as a villain, a monster, or a vampire than just a dumb screw-up; better to be Satan, or Hitler, than a messed-over little nothing. Better, at the extreme, to go out in a blaze of glory than to face more of that excruciating sense of rejection and insignificance. When the explosion came, it was usually a surprise to the surrounding adults, but was almost always understandable from the kids' angle of vision. Driving their parents' car into a wall, shooting someone, defacing a church-these represented both an assertion of identity and the drawing of a line, a refusal to "take it" any more.


Continues...

Excerpted from The Road to Whatever by Currie, Elliott Copyright © 2005 by Currie, Elliott. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.