Kate Moss wears an invitingly sexual pout in a Calvin Klein ad. The urban teens in Larry Clark’s acclaimed film Kids have unsafe sex, use illegal drugs, and steal from their parents. Dangerous Minds tells us that South L.A. students of color can only be saved by an angelic, blow-dried Michelle Pfeiffer. Curt Cobain’s suicide is held aloft as the archetypal example of teen alienation. What truth, if any, is contained in these depictions of today’s youth? What message about our children is being transmitted?Surfing from one channel of communication to the next, cultural theorist Henry Giroux builds a fascinating, complex web of associations among film characters, tarnished real-life teen idols, and sexualized presentations of young clothing models. He goes on to show how this barrage of media images sends a message that sells our children short by damning them to the preconceived role of alienated outcast. Channel Surfing, Henry Giroux’s most fascinating and intriguing book yet, is sure to create controversy and debate at the same time that it calls for a more ethical approach to representations of our children and their future.

span style=""font-weight: bold;"">Henry A. Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communications at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of many books, including span style=""font-style: italic;"">Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9/11 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), span style=""font-style: italic;"">The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (Palgrave, 2003), and span style=""font-style: italic;"">Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Palgrave, 2004).

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