As obessively neurotic as I'd become about the subject, it was refreshing to read about a culture that seemed both relatively free of hang-ups and liberal as regards youthful erotic behavior. The book was not at all as sexy as I'd hoped, but it was informative. The third, the tropical setting, was just iceing on the cake.

The first two topics had been interesting me more and more over the last few years. Indeed, a perusal of this particular title suggested a lot of material about girls and sex on some tropical island. However, as I grew older and explored more and more of the adult books in the resident collection, they became less intimidating. Initially, of course, is seemed too grown-up. Consequently, I depended a lot on the books at the house or brought up by guests.Ĭoming of Age in Samoa had been in the living room bookshelf as long as I could remember. But even at a penny per cigarette butt collected from around the house, earning enough for a fifty cent paperback took a while, especially after the grounds had been scoured a couple of times. Some of the books I obtained myself with money earned from doing chores. The 'civilized' world, she taught us had much to learn from the 'primitive.' Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.ĭuring childhood summers spent at grandmother's cottage in SW Michigan there was little to do but go on walks with the dog, play solitaire, knit, assemble puzzles or read. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. When they do - as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example - they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead