seat belt, getting maimed or killed going down a long slide with too many
classmates in a commercial swimming pool, HIV and AIDS, drug and/or
alcohol addiction, or being murdered or raped by parents and friends, kids
have become the prototypical victim.

Nanette Davis proposes that we reconceive our thinking about and meth-
ods of collecting delinquency statistics and drug-using rates in the manner
of the disciplines of public health or ecology and environmental studies.
The statistics can portray clearly the victims and only dimly or misleadingly
the suspected perpetrators of willful action. Someone happened to exist at
the wrong time and the wrong place and then someone no longer existed.
This is the postmodern perception from the university to the barrio and
from literature to the ghetto. Life is harsh. Danger is imminent. Force,
competition, greed, and pollution are unrelenting. Chaos becomes a theo-
retical perspective, though clearly one that leads nowhere.

In truth, there is a structure around the accident of being murdered,
dying in a car crash, or contracting AIDS or HIV. The structure is detailed
carefully and patiently by Nanette Davis, for she is aware that she is sug-
gesting a new language of social analysis of crime, delinquency, deviant
behavior, social problems. The analysis of high environmental risk and low
social justice are relatively recent ways of reformulating older ways of ap-
proaching and organizing the study of social life.

Developed in a variety of disciplines and standpoints, the critical envi-
ronmental risk and critical social justice models provide the conceptual
framework. Nanette Davis does an admirable job of the difficult task of
bringing together fresh ideas from diverse sources in the multicultural uni-
versity. These ideas grew from the abandonment and reconstruction of
older modes of discourse, and apply new concepts and techniques of meas-
uring and assessing the systematic dimensions of technological environment
and political and economic power. At the beginning and throughout the
book, Davis explains the relevance of these new standpoints and applies
the concepts associated with the environmental risk and social justice mod-
els to the description of the postmodern predicament of childhood and
youth.

Her descriptions of youth and children are derived from a variety of
sources, including United Nations statistics and reports, surveys of youth,
ethnographic studies, journalistic and literary descriptions. These descrip-
tions are well organized into analytic and imaginative chapters moving
from the general predicament of endangered youth (which refers to all
youth) through chapters on homelessness among the young, the pseudo-
community of gangs, the worlds of drugs and alcohol addiction, the inner-
city war zones of barrio and ghetto, and a final substantive chapter on the
current predicament of black America. Each chapter deals with an aspect
of the general crisis of the social problem as it impinges upon the mass of
endangered youth. Her history or genealogy of youth is written with a firm

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