Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, Tattered Tom and Ben the Luggage Boy—those brave little ragamuffins of a century ago—have long since petrified into pillars of the community. Sweet were their uses of adversity, as they parlayed pants patches into stock certificates…. [Today, one hundred years after Alger, rags] have become the symbol of riches. Youthful outcries against the system, the Establishment and middle-class consuming have become so persistent and eloquent that moral outrage itself threatens to become a lucrative commodity.

The new triumph over adversity, as Nat Hentoff programs it in I'm Really Dragged but Nothing Gets Me Down, is going from resentment to resistance. The book is an attempt to put a little chest hair on that artificial category of literature known as "young-adult novels." Hentoff injects such themes as Viet Nam, racism, generation gap, civil rights, drugs, black rage, white guilt and, for old times'...