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In the brief compass of a book which can be read easily in two hours these authors have sketched the salient and undisputed problems of adolescent life for the consumption and enlightenment of the child in mid-adolescence. The text is addressed directly to the reader, as if the author were holding a conversation with the boy or girl in question.
The book is divided into nine chapters. The first three deal in the main with the presentation of physiological facts in easily
assimilable form, and with a description of the physical and psychological aspects of personality. The fourth introduces the problem of venereal disease, describes its dangers, and relates it to various other fields in preventive medicine as a social as well as an individual problem.
There then follows an excellent chapter on adjustment to the family in which the authors appear as mildly apologetic champions of the parental outlook. It would be a comfort to any perplexed parent of children in mid-adolescence to read this chapter.
This is followed by chapters on adjustment to the sexual impulse and on the institution of marriage, in which these problems are simply and directly treated without any discoverable prejudice. In a chapter entitled Charting Your Course the authors make a strong plea for early orientation towards a plan for career building. The last chapter attempts to pull together the philosophy of living which has been hinted at earlier in the text. The main focus of this philosophy is the emphasis on the social and biological foundations of life as experienced today. The individual is urged to realize that in addition to a biological heredity over which he has no control he is necessarily subject to a society which has made laws and built traditions for his greater security and welfare; that in consequence it is his privilege and duty not only to adapt to these environmental influences but also to add whatever he can to the soundness of the social structure of which he is a part,