The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society, By Kenneth Keniston (Harcourt, $8.50). The author, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale Medical School, offers us a study of what he terms the “new alienation.” Feeling that no one of the social sciences can completely illumine the subject, his approach is “interdisciplinary.” His subtitle is too inclusive, for he is dealing not with youth in general in American society, but a very small segment of it—a group of middle and upper middle class students at Harvard; he then employs his findings in a larger consideration of our culture and society. Within that context, his portrait of a certain kind of alienated student today seems complete. It is at any rate absorbing. Professor Keniston has used the term “new alienation” because he finds the forms and origins of his students’ alienation different from those of any place outside American society at any other time. Reading him, one can’t help sensing that he may perhaps be a bit alienated himself. “It is hard to rejoice on learning that God is dead,” he writes. “More understandable is anger and rage at one’s loss, and contempt for those who still believe in His existence.” G. m. pepper
The Manpower Revolution: Its Policy Consequences, ed. by Garth L. Mangum (Doubleday, $6.50). Towards me this dreary world has hiccoughed up yet one more dreary volume: some 500 pages culled from the 3500 pages of testimony gathered during eight months by a Senate subcommittee. The general problem was unemployment, the general solution education, education enough, I hope, to avoid such tragedies as: “The necessary but stultifying neutralization of higher-talent manpower resources into the creation of exotic but effervescent military hardware and defense systems maintained a restraining hand on potential growth rates” and “. . . a clear quantification of
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