In this book, Kriste Lindenmeyer surveys a broader cohort of Depression youth than any previous historian. Probing the Depression's impact on infants, toddlers, children in the primary and secondary grades, dropouts, transients, the ill, youth on the farm, in school, and in work ranging from the street trades to the mills, she then turns the question around and asks how the responses of young people helped recast their social identities and roles. Writing with exceptional clarity, she maintains that government and children together in “the 1930s established the legal and cultural infrastructure for the ideal of American childhood that proliferated in the postwar years” (p. 5). Decorated with individual stories and dramatic anecdotes, hers is the most accessible survey yet of a sprawling generation conventionally studied only in its constituent parts. The definitions of 1930s social activists and political leaders and the methodologies of historians were responsible for the analytical partitioning of children and youth from which Lindenmeyer deviates. When reformers spoke or wrote of “the youth problem,” they meant the quandaries of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-five. When they targeted children in the primary and secondary grades, they looked to the Children's Bureau or state legislatures. They hoped that the New Deal for the adult unemployed would somehow provide unintended benefits for children and youth. It did, Lindenmeyer shows, in passages that become a major subtext of the book. Historians, respectful of their own professional obligation to understand the perspectives of the past and accustomed to writing separate monographs about the Civil Conservation Corps, National Youth Agency, Children's Bureau and the like, generally adopted the same tact of studying children and youth in isolation from one another. Taking down the partitions, Lindenmeyer convincingly argues that our age's definition of the entire group of young people (from birth to young adulthood) as a protected class whose most appropriate place was in school originated during the Depression. If Lindenmeyer's modern holistic approach occasionally also leads her to somewhat unfairly measure the New Deal against such values of the present as full gender equality, the benefits seem to substantially outweigh the costs.