When I reviewed the new version of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Darity, 2008) for Reference Reviews (RR 2008/298) I noted that, although it is a useful information resource, it is very much shorter than its predecessors. In fact the more I look into it, the more I feel that although libraries can be recommended to buy it, those libraries that are fortunate enough to possess the original Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and/or the subsequent International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences should be recommended to hang onto them if they can, as there is still a lot of meat there – a lot of information that is not adequately covered in more recent reference books. The Macmillan Social Science Library series seems to be making up for this reduction in size by publishing a whole string of specialised encyclopaedias that, although intended to stand alone as reference tools, effectively act as supplements, expanding sections of the main work. We have already noticed the Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (Malti‐Douglas, 2007) (RR 2008/342), the Psychology of Classroom Learning: An Encyclopedia (Anderman, 2009) (RR 2009/355) and the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (Moore, 2008) (RR 2008/262) in these pages. These have now been joined by the Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development. I do not know how many more encyclopaedias Gale/Cengage have in mind to fill out this series, but they already form a solid reference collection in their own right.
One of the problems of publishing in this way, of course, is that it results in an enormous amount of duplication. Thus, the topic of racial inequality in education gets three pages in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. I have not had a chance to check the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism but I assume that it gets extensive coverage there. It gets eight pages or so in the Psychology of Classroom Learning and now six pages here – all by different associate professors at different American state universities, but all saying much the same thing. This multiplication of effort was increased in the encyclopaedia under review by the decision to publish it in three separate volumes, dealing with Childhood and Adolescence, Adulthood, and, Old Age. For some topics this is eminently sensible. Sex has of course an entire encyclopaedia of its own, but having separate entries on sex in adolescence, sex in adulthood, and sex in old age really does make sense here. Other themes such as parent‐child relations could have been more easily treated in a single article looking at both sides of the relationship though, rather than by expecting readers to juggle several different volumes to get at a single topic.
My main concern with segregating the three age groups like this comes from my dislike of age segregation in general. A society in which adults are in cars, adolescents are on street corners and the elderly are in retirement villages is, in my view, an unhealthy one. A book on the life course has to be a study of transitions. There are, it is true, some sharp transitions in the current western life course – leaving school to enter the world of work is one obvious division, and retiring from the world of work is another. These are, however, becoming increasingly blurred. I retired from my job some years ago, and have just passed the legal age of retirement (65) but I am writing this in an office in my former place of work, where I am actually paid to do other things, so I suppose that I fit somewhere between volumes two and three of this book, moving gradually into volume three. My foster‐son (19) finished school a few weeks ago, is nominally living independently but in practice very largely at home, and shows no signs of entering the world of work because, owing to the current recession, there is no world of work for him (and thousands like him, even here in the affluent West) to enter. He is therefore somewhere in the limbo between volumes one and two and, on current predictions will remain in it for some years to come. A book on the life course ought to deal with these different transitional stages in one sequence rather than arbitrarily segregating us like this.
On the other hand, it has to be said that separating out the age groups in this way does bring out the extent to which we have been brought up to regard adulthood as “normal”. Adults have, in recent years, been practically invisible in the developmental literature. The study of child psychology started in the late nineteenth century, and adolescence began in 1904, or at least the term was invented by Stanley Hall then. I suspect that adolescence was really a very short phase up until the generation a few years older than me. Since then, however, the literature on adolescence has expanded exponentially. Having a large enough proportion of the population living long enough to create a major category of older people who are beyond working and beyond child rearing is an even more recent historical phenomenon. From reading Gibbon, for example, one gathers that under ancient Roman law fathers held absolute authority, virtually of life and death, over their sons, even after marriage. A stern prospect. Careful demographic analysis however, shows that the average age of marriage for men in the late republic was 26 and for women 16, while the average age of death was 52 for men and 55 for women. There were, therefore, hardly any men in that invidious position. At most they had to care for widowed mothers for a few years. There is now a sizeable and growing literature on the elderly. Many major publishers produces at least one journal on geriatric psychiatry and one specifically on dementia care, and my professional colleagues are continuously badgered by publishers wanting more. Having an entire volume on adulthood here brings out the identity of this under‐reported group.
All this, of course, relates only to the affluent west and, in particular, to the USA. This really is my biggest criticism of this book. This encyclopaedia has an editor‐in‐chief plus three associate editors. There are two project editors, one technical support editor and nine manuscript editors (whatever they are). All of these are American. There are approximately 300 contributors, of whom, by my count, nine come from other affluent western societies. All the rest are associate professors and the like, mostly from minor American universities. America is, of course, the current social paradigm. Most people in the world would like to live like in the way described here, but very few actually will. This book is written entirely from a current American perspective. The few mentions of conditions in Africa or Asia seem to suggest that these are, somehow, deviations from the norm. All “cross‐cultural” or “ethnic” topics are discussed in terms of different groups within modern North America. This chauvinistic attitude is irritating when applied to any topic, but is most particularly a matter of concern when discussing the human life course, because the current American life course is so very different from the current human norm, and from the norm throughout recorded history. This obviously weakens the value of the book to library users outside North America, but is also worrying when its use within North America is considered. If American children continue to be brought up with the idea that their unsustainable life‐style is “normal”, this does not bode well for the future peace of the world or for the achievement of a more egalitarian society.
The other criticism I would make is to emphasise that this book is part of a “social science” series. The majority of the contributors are sociologists, with a scattering of academics from the other social sciences. There are a few psychologists but no noticeable biologists. The process of human development is governed by changes in human biology. Having four pages on puberty from an assistant professor of sociology at Austin, Texas is useful, but the driving force behind puberty needs an endocrinological explanation. A field biologist's description of how the growing young develop socially among the other great apes might also have been an asset. This encyclopaedia only tells part of the story.
On the plus side, however: there are approximately 300 articles here, ranging from half a page to seven or eight pages in length, arranged in alphabetical order within each volume. All of them are student‐orientated, clearly written by conscientious authors whose main job obviously is to teach what they are writing about. The results should be comprehensible to the average social science or psychology undergraduate, or to trainee teachers, nurses, social workers, etc. All the articles are well referenced to recent and easily‐accessible resources, to encourage further reading. The cross‐referencing is, perhaps, not as good as it might be – thus, for example, there is no cross‐reference in volume one to birth order (currently a topic of some interest), but I found it clearly discussed in a box under the heading Sibling Relationships. This is made up for by the index in the final volume, which is well compiled, and enables the enquirer to follow a topic effectively through all three volumes. The appendices include a useful glossary; an annotated bibliography of the most influential works on the development of life course studies – supplementing the references in each article; and, an excellent lengthy essay on relevant social science research methods.
University libraries in Western Anglophone societies can be recommended to buy this as a useful reference source on the current American life course. Their students will certainly find it helpful, though I would like to stick a large warning label on every volume saying “Remember. America is not the World”. Although the book is very clearly student‐orientated, there is considerable general public interest in the topic of human development, so public reference libraries may find it worth considering, as, indeed, they may find it worth looking at the other encyclopaedias in this burgeoning reference series.
