Teens Speak Out

Rinzler, a 16-year-old student at New York City's Horace Mann School, devised a questionnaire about teenagers' attitudes that was completed by 200 secondary school students across the country; she interviewed another 50 students in person. Their responses make up the core of this book, written in an easy, colloquial style intended to ""point out feelings and concerns that might otherwise go unnoticed, uncover as widely shared beliefs what many teenagers thought were only their own, and at the same time to show that every teenager is an individual.'' Rinzler's collective portrait shows teenagers in the '80s to be open-minded about careers for women, perhaps overly concerned about making money, more sexually free than their parents but less so than the generation immediately preceding them, conservative politicallyand disturbingly unknowledgeable about current events. (In one group interview, several prep school students state that until recently they didn't know Ethiopia was in Africa; another says Indira Gandhi ruled Nicaraguawhich no one disputes.) A straightforward, informative work.January