The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence

An energetic, provocative, and much-needed investigation of the root causes of the epidemic of drug abuse, violence, and despair among middle-class American teenagers (Los Angeles Times)

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed sociologist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliott Currie draws on years of interviews to offer a profound investigation of what has gone wrong for so many mainstream American adolescents. Rejecting such predictable answers as TV violence, permissiveness, and inherent evil, Currie links this crisis to a pervasive culture of exclusion fostered by a society in which medications trump guidance and a punitive zero tolerance approach to adolescent misbehavior has become the norm. Broadening his inquiry, he dissects the changes in middle-class life that stratify the world into winners and losers, imposing an extraordinarily harsh cultureand not just on kids.
Vivid, compelling, and deeply empathetic, The Road to Whatever is a stark indictment of a society that has lost the willor the capacityto care.