YOUTH AND COMMUNISM

The level of understanding in this ""Historical Analysis of International Communist Youth Movements"" is indicated by the author's sole comment on Communism's appeal to young people as more successful in areas not under its control than in areas which are--""paradoxical."" Thus, while the data assembled here is valuable, and mostly unavailable elsewhere in book form, the promised analysis is next to useless. Never, even for the space of a paragraph, does Mr. Cornell allow a glimpse of the basic whys and wherefores implicit in the title. Youthful fascination with left-wing extremism is older than Marxism, and disenchantment with any given status quo is a condition of adolescence everywhere. These topics deserve a serious, imaginative examination, and the material provided here could have been an excellent basis for the same. Instead, we have been served with nothing but tepid scholarly porridge.