Youth Violence

Book excerpt: This bibliography comprises a selection of Library of Congress catalog records for some 1,500 books, periodicals, and websites related to youth violence. Anyone wanting such a bibliography could probably compile it from the Library of Congress web site, and the deficiencies in conception and design of this "product" defy understanding. A brief preface sounds an alarm--"...no one should be surprised that youth violence lurks behind every school house door"--but sets forth no criteria for selection of citations (no indication of time frame, purpose, or audience). Entries are arranged alphabetically by title within chapters on school violence, guns and youth, gangs, campus violence, dating and violence, and periodicals and Web sites. Unforgivably primitive alphabetic sorting puts all titles beginning with The together (the same with other articles); and, in addition, those titles are indexed together! Though the title indicates the presence of "abstracts," there are none except the summaries supplied by Library of Congress for juvenile titles (of which there are many). Cross-referencing and indexing (except by title) are absent. The compiler's credentials, motivation, and orientation are not cited. Furthermore, with better design, the contents would have consumed half the number of pages, and a few typeface variations would have eased scanning. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR