PEDIATRICS Vol. 42 No. 2 August 1968, pp. 383-384
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The Drifters: Children of Disorganized Lower-Class Families, edited by Eleanor Pavenstedt. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967, 345 pp., $10.50

Robert Coles M.D.1

1 Cambridge, Massachusetts

This book and the study it describes has to be considered a landmark. Extremely poor families in a Boston slum were approached by a group of child psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, and educators who wanted to understand, but also to help, to cure, to change things, to do what they could to bring order and coherence to lives riddled with confusion and suspicion. For years the middle-class observers persisted–learning, reaching out, seeing the lives of incredibly hard-pressed parents and children unfold day by day.