BEFORE THEIR TIME: Four Generations of Teenage...

BEFORE THEIR TIME: Four Generations of Teenage Mothers by Joelle Sander (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $9.95; 194 pp.). Sander probes the origins of the crisis of teen-age pregnancy in these interviews with four generations of black women from a single family--all of whom became mothers in their teens. Each woman emerges as an interesting individual who simply wasn’t ready to assume the responsibilities of child-rearing. Their immaturity and lack of preparation resulted in a tangle of inter-generational conflicts that led each daughter to seek escape through premature parenthood. Reflecting on her unhappy life, Leticia Johnson, the youngest of the women, wistfully explains, “You have the baby, someone to love, someone who’ll love you, someone to talk to. This was going to be my child. Nobody could ever take him away from me. So I made my decision to have my baby.”