Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.  When they do — as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example — they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa.   It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork.  Here, f…