Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids
The author, a freelance journalist working on a story about four teenagers in northern New Jersey who, in 1987, killed themselves in a suicide pact, gained entry into the world of the so-called "burnouts" of Bergenfield. Gaines, a former social worker and a devotee of rock music, began hanging out with local kids whose lives were much like those of the teenage suicides. Her reflections on the primacy of death in the culture of these nomads in a middle-class society are expressed in an earthy, colloquial style that marks the author's empathy with alienated youth. This is a hard-hitting, disturbing report urging adults to "renew our social contract with young people."Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.