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James Garbarino's Lost Boys comes at a time when there is considerable concern about youth violence. As I was reading this helpful and informative book, I found myself thinking, “what if” it had been written before the Columbine tragedy in the spring of 1999 and speculating how some of its anecdotes, histories of various perpetrators, and suggestions for Lost Boys could have helped us avert that awful situation. Sadly, however, since I finished the book, about two weeks ago, there have been two more school shootings: one at Martin Luther King High School in Manhattan, where a teenager somehow entered the school with a gun and shot two students; one at a law school in Virginia, where a student who had been asked to leave the school killed three people, including the dean.
Lost Boys gripped my attention from start to finish, and I found it particularly interesting as the author wove his way from Chicago to Ithaca, bringing in both the reactions of his own children to youth violence as well his feelings about their reactions and the somewhat rebellious aspects of his own youth. Garbarino, a psychologist and presently Co-Director of the Family Life Development Center and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, has worked with many troubled youngsters in prisons and other settings over the last quarter of a century. Among his numerous projects and studies about violent youth, he interviewed adolescent boys individually, over a period of weeks, who had committed lethal violence and were in jail serving out sentences or awaiting trial. He gives poignant examples of parts of their interviews and indicates that the boys themselves said that this was the first time they had ever told their entire stories—that no one had ever listened long enough before. These interviews, as well as Garbarino's other research with troubled boys, form the basis for this book.
The author sets the stage in 1994, Chicago where the Chicago Tribune had published in-depth profiles of ever