Becoming delinquent

Historians and social scientists from Europe and the US examine how young people have gone bad for three centuries in western Europe, considering such questions as what forms juvenile delinquency took, what responses it provoked and the degree to which it was constituted by those responses, and how all that varied between and within states and across different periods of time. They find persistent panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness, and future social stability. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR