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The author has written a comprehensive, easily readable and scholarly book on adolescence and culture. The topics this volume addresses are the interpene-tration of adolescence and culture, adolescence as a phase of individual development, culture as a matrix in which this development occurs and from which in part the individual's development is inseparable and the effect of adolescence on the culture itself. This is covered in a thorough and erudite manner. Even though the book is brief, the text is approximately 99 pages, it conveys a great deal of information.
In his first chapter, Esman discusses adolescence from an historical perspective. He feels that with the Industrial Revolution there was a need for a more extended formal education and this led to defining and institutionalizing a period between childhood and adulthood called adolescence.
This occurred in the US in the nineteenth century with regular school attendance. Then institutions geared toward this age group came into being.
Esman discusses rites of passage in primitive cultures and how clearly defined childhood is from adulthood. There is no need for adolescence. He says that the protracted, indeterminate, conflict-laden period is culturally determined and not intrinsic to human biological nature or needed for adaptation across the broad span of human social organization.
In the chapter on “Adolescence as a Developmental Phase” he discusses Offer's work, which proves that adolescence is not the period of “sturm and drang” for most teenagers. The adolescent must adapt to the biological changes of puberty, to have new patterns of social relations tinged with sexual feelings, and undergo changes in his relationships with parents so as to establish autonomy.
In the chapter on culture as a shaper of adolescence, Esman discusses sexual activities in various tribes that may seem bizarre to the western mind, but have sufficient internal cohesion and plausibility to provide a rationale for an approach to becoming