This book is a welcome addition to the literature on suicide. Although the book was written by a sociologist who is critical of psychoanalysis (and sociology too, for that matter), its approach is closer to that of the psychologist and psychoanalyst than the author realizes.

The book is essentially an account of a research study in which a case history, interviews with the adolescent and a parent, usually the mother, and the suicide note, if there was one, were obtained from a total of ninety-eight adolescent suicide attempters and thirty-one nonpsychiatric controls. A Meyerian “life history chart” was then constructed for each subject. The book also contains one case history, a transcript of a verbatim psychiatric interview (these were particularly edifying, and there should have been more of such material), and a listing of books containing case histories of suicides.