The Injured Innocents

Reviews the book, Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear by Robert Coles (see record 1967-08760-000). This book reports the longitudinal study carried by the author on the individuals who were directly affected by desegregation. The author has produced a moving, informative, and convincingly detailed set of portraits of real people caught in a real bind that somehow does not overwhelm them though it threatens to. His documentation of their courage, their persistence, their defiance--ranging from noisily open to quietly hidden--is perceptively chosen from the many hours of interviewing, as are the illustrations of the all-pervading fear that makes new forms of association between whites and Negroes uncomfortable (or worse) for both. The greater part of this book is data, not quite raw, but under-conceptualized. This book is almost journalistic in its plainness and its reliance on direct reporting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)