As a librarian and teen educator, I felt that this work had a lot of value. With the emphasis on media literacy and critical thinking skills in education today, teachers and librarians need to be thinking about appealing ways of presenting information that will engage students into critically examining their culture. Using popular films that star teen characters and/or teen culture would be a good way to accomplish this goal, and Dr. Shary's book would be an excellent and accessible text to use as both a model and as background knowledge in this type of class. Because of the prevalence of cable television in the lives of teens, even the older movies from the 80s are likely to be relatively familiar and useful for discussions about historical trends and changes.

Dr. Shary should be complemented on this excellent, academic work on the image of youth in contemporary film. All college and high school libraries would be recommended to have a copy on hand and use it as a guide for collecting some key films of high quality for their visual collections.