Committed Kids

To the Editors:

Edgar Z. Friedenberg’s excellent review, “Kids Without a Country,” is accompanied by a drawing whose source you fail to identify. The two ladder-carrying boys in it are neither without country, nor uncommitted, nor alienated. They are on their way to the unsuccessful plunder of a ravens’ nest.

The cartoonist-poet Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) composed the caption that originally accompanied this first of eleven drawings of his cartoon “Das Rabennest”:

Zwei Knaben jung und heiter,
Die tragen eine Leiter.

Was this illustration meant to imply that Mr. Keniston is as uncritical of contemporary American society as was Wilhelm Busch of the German society of his day—or that he has as little to be critical of?

Herbert J. Spiro

Department of Political Science

University of Pennsylvania