In Coming of Age in the Other America, Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin offer the reader an opportunity to observe, in great detail, the socioeconomic and institutional factors that influence the lives of disadvantaged individuals making the transition from childhood to early adulthood. The authors describe the aspirations, achievements, and struggles of a group of young individuals from the projects in Baltimore, collected from repeated interviews over more than a decade. The book is rich in its descriptions of the neighborhoods and family environments that surrounded these young individuals as they prepared for their adult lives, making it easy for the reader to understand their struggles and become empathetic toward them. While the transition from youth to early adulthood is not a new topic in the literature, little attention has been given to the youths from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. One contribution of the book is to ask whether patterns observed in middle-class individuals moving from youth to early adulthood also apply to the more disadvantaged. Not surprisingly, the answer is no. However, the authors go beyond in understanding the reasons.
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