Like a kaleidoscope, Philippe Ariès has brilliantly assembled a multitude of colorful illustrations and episodes to demonstrate the discovery of the modern idea of childhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He establishes a familiar rhythm as each chapter traces this discovery from another vantage point: the child as seen in works of art, the child playing games, praying at home, or attending school. Each time he uses the Middle Ages as a starting point where the child received no special attention apart from his elders. The total effect produced by Ariès' sensitive and probing treatment is one of great immediacy, of an actual, lively world in the past that has been very much neglected.