Aging and Generational Relations: Life-Course and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.

This volume features some of the papers prepared by international scholars for a 1991 conference on "aging and generational relations over the life course" at the University of Delaware. An historical sensibility informs this cross-cultural survey. Virtually all the chapters in the volume under review examine continuities and changes over the life course of at least two generations in contemporary times. Thus Aging and Generational Relations demonstrates what historians such as Peter Laslett have been asserting for more than two decades: some of the most dramatic shifts in attitudes toward the elderly, work and retirement, health status, politics, and family relations have taken shape during this century.

The lead essay by Hareven and Kathleen Adams, which compares the ways that two successive cohorts assist their aging parents, sets the tone for the rest of the volume. Although both generations are influenced by their parents' example, the younger cohort is more ambivalent in honoring traditional values. Glen Elder and his collaborators investigate the occupational and familial links between fathers and sons in rural Iowa, which has a large proportion of elders. Dennis Hogan and associates hypothesize that changes in health status and care of the very old is bound to delay transitions in intergenerational relations. James Jackson, Rukmalie Jayakody, and Toni Antonucci draw race-specific comparisons in studying changes in familial environment over three generations. Douglas Wolf, Beth Soldo, and Vicki Freeman emphasize that children within a single generation prove to be a heterogeneous resource in dealing with parents' healthcare problems.

Two essays in Aging and Generational Relations focus largely on western Europe. Marzio Barbagli delineates differences in ecological setting (within Italy and across nations) in the timing of an historical shift from bilateral to multilateral family relationships. With an eye to the U.S. debate over generational equity, Anne-Marie Guillemard stresses that age-based politics do not invariably follow the same trajectory. People's lives may have become more individualized in the postwar era (because major life events are less predictable), but at the same time, freedom of choice varies by income, health status, and gender.

Four fine papers on east Asia accentuate the variability in recent trends. Albert Hermalin and associates note major differences in fertility, educational attainments, and gender status among native Taiwanese and those who came from mainland China after 1949. John Knodel and his collaborators emphasize life-course developments among children in order to understand residential patterns among the old. Peter Uhlenberg offers a fascinating glimpse of trends in Sri Lanka. Coresidence patterns in Japan decline from 53% to 42% in the 1980s, according to Kiyoni Morioka, but there still are more aging parents and adult children living together in Japan than in other advanced industrial nations.

Matilda and John Riley's essay on the future of generational relations builds on the couple's longstanding interest in age and structural change. Kin connections, they assert, "hold high promise of modulating, rather than exacerbating, whatever intergenerational strains, conflicts, or perceived inequalities the future may bring." The Rileys' prediction gains plausibility from a volume that demonstrates continuities across generations in which lives are linked. That said, the case studies in Aging and Generational Relations offer enough variability and unpredictability to make any sweeping assertion about future trends seem unwarranted.

W. Andrew Achenbaum University of Michigan