CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN YOUTH

These twenty-five essays by leaders in education, government, religion, science and literature drop the problems and responsibilities of tomorrow squarely into the cringing laps of today's American youth. These must be after-dinner speeches. With a stomach full of banquet food, no necessity to clear the table and an understanding that everybody is committed to glassy-eyed concentration, the after dinner speaker is permitted unction, pomposity and, a speaker's right to view-with-alarm. But, this same permissiveness should not be thought to extend between one reader and the book he is reading. Abraham Ribicoff gives a promise to have faith in America's young people; Lawrence C. Powell's whimsey about the reading of books and Adlai Stevenson presenting the world of tomorrow without crepe streamers are small relief to the thunderous warnings of war (cold and hot), personal freedom at gun point, creeping mediocrity and the eternals of continuing education offered by such as Goldwater, MacArthur, Whipple and Ashmore. It is hard to imagine anyone reading this for pleasure, new insight or information-- except a debater stuck with the pro argument on ""Resolved: Education and Personal Responsibility are the Chief Ends of Man"".