Road To Whatever

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 culture―and not just on kids.
Vivid, compelling, and deeply empathetic, The Road to Whatever is a stark indictment of a society that has lost the will―or the capacity―to care.

• Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New Perspectives in Crime, Deviance, and Law)
• Juvenile Delinquency: The Core
• Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth
• Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
• Juvenile Delinquency: Causes and Control
• Gender, Heterosexuality, and Youth Violence: The Struggle For Recognition
• $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
• The Cycle of Juvenile Justice
• Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society
• Goths, Gamers, and Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures