When disaster strikes, children are a particularly vulnerable group requiring special attention. This book addresses the needs of this specific population by examining the impact of major disasters on the mental health and emotional functioning of children.

When densely populated urban areas face severe crises--natural disasters, epidemics, sudden unemployment, massive immigration--they often find that established mechanisms cannot respond adequately to the problems. Carl Maida argues that solutions to these problems tend to be developed within the affected communities themselves. In Pathways through Crisis, he draws on his two decades of work in ethnography and with crisis centers in the Los Angeles area to study the kinds of informal organizations that arise at the grass-roots level in order to deal with severe crises. This ground-breaking...