'Boys Adrift'

Which of us has not noticed the listlessness of many young men in the rising generation, including a lack of interest in anything much beyond playing video gamesfi

In "Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men," Leonard Sax, a physician and research psychologist, discusses what seems to be wrong and what might be done to repair the damage.

The five factors he identifies are: 1) Changes in school which make kindergarten the new first grade, pushing children, especially boys, into hating school because they are asked to learn things they are not ready to learn. 2) Video games, which satisfy boys' "will to power" without requiring them to achieve anything, or to learn the most important attributes of adulthood, such as patience. 3) Medications for ADHD that are prescribed to ameliorate many different behaviors that may or may not really be attention deficit disorder. 4) Endocrine disruptors in the environment (this may be news to most of us) that generally come from eating and drinking from plastic receptacles (or sucking on a binky), which affect boys much more negatively than girls. 5) Loss of the societal rites and rituals of advancing to manhood and the devaluation of manliness in popular culture.

Sax's discussion of a subsequent "failure to launch" will ring true for many parents and other concerned adults, and his final chapter on detoxing the modern environment for boys and girls should provoke both thought and action.

Though Sax's book is written in a conversational tone, his documentation is thorough and impressive. This is an important book, especially for parents and educators, but for anyone who is concerned with the well-being of our society and its young people.

'The Most Noble Adventure'

Greg Behrman's new book, "The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe," sounds like a yawner, but it is anything but.

Behrman's book is, in fact, so well written, so thoroughgoing in its scholarship and grasp of all aspects of the situation that even though we know basically how the Marshall Plan turned out, the book is seriously suspenseful.

Will the plan be formulated and make its way through Congress before rioting Communist workers bring down the governmentfi Will France work past its deep and understandable antipathy to Germany in order to bring that country back into the fold of European progressfi

What is most striking about "The Most Noble Adventure" is the number and quality of the statesmen whose lives and work fill its pages. George Marshall, W. Averill Harriman, Arthur Vandenberg, Paul Hoffman, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, Ernest Bevin, and Jean Monnet -- from both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic -- gave up money, family time, personal ambition and even health to bring Europe back from the brink.

"The Most Noble Adventure" is a heartening book because it so powerfully portrays the good that can be accomplished when citizens put aside their own well-being for the sake of others in a grand cause. It is disheartening because very few good and ambitious projects seem to work that well anymore. Essential reading for students of 20th-century history and a crackling good story.

¢ Laura Wadley is a librarian with the Provo City Library. E-mail her at lauraw@provo.lib.ut.us.