It is, I suppose, a sign of advancing age, like having more silver on your head than in your pocket or the feeling that policemen and school‐teachers all look much too young for the job, when you think of yourself as having recently reviewed a book and got it safely out of the way, and then all of a sudden a new edition appears. Was it really way back in 2006 when I reviewed the first edition of this massive four‐volume work for Reference Reviews (RR 2006/210)? Knowing from bitter experience how long it can be getting a large multi‐authored book from conception to publication, it seems to me that work must have started on the update more or less as soon as the first edition hit the bookshops. The book now has a new editor, Jacqueline Longe, replacing Kristine Krapp and Jeffrey Wilson, but this makes very little difference as they are all professional Gale encyclopedists – indeed Longe and Krapp collaborated together on the five‐volume Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health (Longe et al., 2006) (RR 2007/389) and on various other broadly medical‐related reference works. There are 36 people named in the “contributors” list, many of whom also worked on the first edition. I did find this list slightly puzzling, as quite a number of the entries are signed by people whose names are not on the list of contributors, so I am not really sure how many people really worked on the book, or what their professional positions are. Virtually all of those actually listed as contributors are given as medical or scientific writers rather than as clinical professionals. Professional writers are, I presume, more used to working to deadlines than doctors are, making the editor's job somewhat easier.
The pros and cons of having a book written by professional writers rather than by experts have been weighed up in this journal on various occasions. My personal preference is for having books written by people with first‐hand knowledge of their subject. Physicians are admittedly notoriously bad at communicating, and it is harder to get them to achieve balance, or to reach deadlines, but on the other hand compiled books inevitably have a slightly dead, second‐hand, feel to them. On the whole the writers here have managed reasonably well.
I reviewed the first edition of this book at inordinate length, including spending a considerable amount of time in the libraries of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, King's College Hospital, the Institute of Child Health at Great Ormond Street and finally Blackheath public library, looking at child‐related encyclopedias. I unearthed an astonishing number of them then, and their ranks have been further swollen in the last five years. Penny Dade looked at some of the more recent specimens when reviewing the Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development (Goldstein and Naglieri, 2011) for this journal (RR 2011/255). I would, perhaps, have added the Encyclopedia of the Life Course and Human Development (Carr, 2009) (RR 2010/058) and the Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development (Haith and Benson, 2008) to her list – a couple of sturdy three‐volume works worth noting for reference purposes. Between us Penny and I dredged up enough child‐related encyclopedias to fill a sizeable library on their own. You would think that nothing more needs to be said about children – their conception, birth, development, health, education and social relations. And all this even before starting to look online. Once a parent starts seriously looking on the internet for information on child health and development, the chances of the actual child ever getting a fair slice of parental attention again are pretty slim.
All the suggestions for further reading throughout the book have been scrupulously updated – nearly all the references are to currently working websites or to readily available books, etc published within the last five years. This makes them handy for parents and other general readers, but less useful for scholars or practitioners, who really should be able to go back to original texts. The entries themselves show rather less sign of updating. There are quite a number of new entries, and some entries that seem to have been substantially rewritten, but I am not convinced that there have been enough major breakthroughs and exciting new developments in child health over the last five years to justify any drastic re‐writing of the bulk of the text.
All the contributors and editors are American, as before, and the book is entirely American‐orientated. For straightforward disease descriptions this does not matter of course, but it weakens the relevance of the book to those users in other countries who are concerned with social, economic or cultural matters. The UN currently estimates that there are 80 million children abandoned or in orphanages around the world, for example. The unchanged entry here on abandonment concentrates entirely on the 10,000 or so of them running loose in the US – a, understandable but rather unbalanced view.
There are nearly 800 entries in the set, ranging from one to ten pages in length, covering a very wide range of childhood diseases, conditions, procedures, drugs and developmental issues. As I said of the first edition when comparing the book with its numerous rivals: I cannot see any serious omissions. All the articles I have read appear to be clear, well laid‐out and comprehensible to the reasonably well‐educated general reader. All the technical terms are clearly explained or are cross‐referenced to clear explanations. I have not come across any factual errors in those entries where I have sufficient expertise to judge, or any entries which disagree markedly with any of the other recent reference books I have examined. As with all the child‐related encyclopedias and websites I have looked at, I would like to add warning stickers all over this one:
“Most children are alright.”
“Most children do not get any of the diseases described here”.
“All theories of child care have something going for them, but not much: children bring themselves up anyway, whatever you do”.
And, above all, “Do not use this encyclopedia for diagnosis. Get a doctor to make the diagnosis, then use this as a source of further information”.
Information is presented here in a calm and level‐headed fashion, but there is still enough material to make any hypochondriac parent anxious.
On the whole therefore, this book can be recommended to any public reference library, most particularly in America, but still well worth having in the rest of the world, unless the library already has an adequate stock of reference tools on the subject – there really is no shortage, and there is nothing original or unique here. Some libraries may simply have enough. Clinical, nursing, education or academic libraries might wish to consider it as a supplementary tool, but would probably prefer a selection of more practitioner‐orientated reference works. Again, there is no shortage of them. Libraries that possess the first edition of this encyclopedia may not feel the need to upgrade to this edition – there really have not been any major breakthroughs in the past five years, though there has been a regular flow of new developments. I assume that some members of the Gale encyclopedia editing team have already started working on the third edition, which, on current rates of progress, will come out in 2017 or thereabouts. If they have, I hope that they will pay a little more attention to what happens outside their national borders than previous editors, while maintaining the existing clarity.
