Health Issues for Minority Adolescents

Ed Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, Phyllis A Katz, Dalmas A Taylor, Judith H M Vanderryn University of Nebraska Press, £32.95, pp 273 ISBN 0 8032 2732 9

The subject of adolescent health is complex and far reaching, and there is a lack of systematic data. I was therefore not surprised that the contributors to Health Issues for Minority Adolescents had difficulty in obtaining statistics to answer the questions raised by the book—what is health, and how can we design strategies to deal with the problems of adolescent health or ill health?

Poverty is an important factor. The book is based on findings in the United States, where 90% of persistently poor children are black and live in …