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BOOK REVIEW |
Widener University Chester, PA 19087
Encyclopedia of Retirement and Finance, edited by Lois A. Vitt. 2003. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2003, 2 volumes, 869 pp., $149.95 (cloth).
The new Encyclopedia of Retirement and Finance, edited by Lois A. Vitt, is a substantially expanded two-volume second edition of Vitt's and Jurg K. Siegenthaler's Encyclopedia of Financial Gerontology (Vitt & Siegenthaler, 1996). (This reviewer was consulting editor to the first edition and a contributor to the second edition.) How does one review an encyclopedia that includes more than 175 separate articles and authors? Unlike A. J. Jacobs (2004), who recently published The Know-It-All—a book-length review of the Encyclopedia Britannica after reading all 32 volumes and their entire assemblage of 65,000 articles—this review is more modest. While the subject is more limited than the Britannica, the breadth of content in these 175 articles is nonetheless encyclopedic.
The aim of this review, consequently, is to characterize the nature of the content generally, the manner in which the editor and her staff of consulting and associate editors have presented the content, and the audiences who will find this resource of value. My conclusion is that even at a publisher's list price of $150, this reference tool is a bargain for teachers, researchers, practitioners, and students.
As a start, it should be noted that the editor herself is a subject-matter specialist in the area of aging, retirement, and finance. Currently, Vitt is the Founding Director of the Institute for Socio-Financial Studies in Middleburg, Virginia. Following work as an investment banker and real estate syndicator, she earned an MBA and a doctorate in sociology in which she developed the subfield of financial sociology. After all, she would no doubt argue, many of the central topics of sociology—such as family, marriage and divorce, childhood and development, and work and socioeconomic status—have money and finance as core issues. Of course, the sociology of middle age, adulthood, retirement, and old age also have fundamental financial dimensions—which led to her evolving interest in financial gerontology. In short, the editor provides strong content guidance, which is clearly evident in both the breadth and the value of the collection of articles.
Because it is an encyclopedia, the articles are, of course, organized alphabetically, from accelerated death benefits to investor education in Volume One, from Keogh plans to zoning in Volume Two. The articles are generally brief, two to five pages in length, aiming to provide a conceptual, factual, and bibliographical introduction to the topic. While the articles cannot be characterized as state-of-the-art literature reviews, as in the Handbooks on Aging series (e.g., Binstock & George, 2001), many of them do include substantial reference lists.
In this regard, a word about the 175 authors also conveys the focused and detailed nature of the articles. More than half the articles are written by a PhD or JD, who are specialists in their field, and most are academics who are also involved in the applied side of their gerontology, health, finance, and law specialties.
In these days of interactive CD-ROMs and the Google-enhanced Internet, one wonders about the role of a stand-alone reference volume. This Encyclopedia, however, is much more than just a collection of concise and well-written, alphabetically-arranged articles. Vitt and her editorial staff have invested in a number of enhancements that make the Encyclopedia especially useful as a highly accessible reference and teaching resource. The first of these is the traditional index, which at 38 double-column pages, is a comprehensive and detailed search tool. Speaking from experience both as a textbook writer and textbook user, this reviewer knows that all indices are not created equal, and this detailed index is an excellent tool for exploring and finding information.
But a major key to the Encyclopedia's value are two additional search-and-reference tools which make the 830 pages of text more accessible and therefore more useful to the teacher, the researcher, the practitioner, and the student. First and foremost is a six-page listing in the front of Volume One that is modestly titled "Core Topics." The University of Chicago's 50-volume collection of The Great Books published by the Britannica in the 1950s had as its most impressive value-added attribute Dr. Mortimer Adler's (2002) marvelous two-volume Syntopicon. Literally meaning "collection of topics," the Syntopicon gave the reader a tool for tracing any one of a hundred great ideas across the 443 separate works by 76 authors that comprised The Great Books content (see Macdonald, 1952).
In similar fashion, Vitt's "collection of topics" allocates the 175 articles into nine broad areas: Advisors, Advice, and Support; Economic and Income Security; Employment, Work, and Retirement; Family and Intergenerational Relations; Financial Investments and Insurance; Health Care and Health Coverage; Housing and Housing Finance; Legal Issues; and Quality of Life and Well-Being. In this way, alphabetization as obstacle to both browsing and continuity of investigation is overcome.
For gerontology faculty, this list of "Core Topics" is especially valuable as a teaching tool. The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) has recently established a Task Force on Business and Aging, one goal of which is to integrate business and finance content into introductory and other general gerontology courses. In this context, instructors interested in creating a topic-specific module for a more general course, but who may not be familiar with business materials, can use the "Core Topics" to identify readings for their course development.
A second valuable research tool is Appendix C, the 14-page listing of financial, gerontological, legal, health, and social service organizations and institutions. In the context of access to Internet resources, what makes this listing especially valuable is that for each of the 200 organizations identified, the entry includes the official organizational name, postal address, telephone number (often including an 800 number), and the internet URL address. The entries are for larger and smaller, national and regional organizations, ranging, for example, from AARP to the American Institute of Financial Gerontology; from the Foster Grandparent Program to the Mental Health Policy Resource Center; from the National Institute on Aging's Alzheimer's Disease Education and Referral Center (ADEAR) to the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER). Although the two volumes are a traditional "ink-on-paper" resource, this compendium of organizations and their web addresses represents in a very real sense a "mega-website." Indeed, if Vitt were to add this listing to her Institute's website [www.isfs.org] as a set of clickable links, the resource would be even more valuable.
There are some additional "tools" that should be mentioned. Appendix A is a useful chronological summary of all pension, tax, and related social benefits legislation of the past three decades, from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Each law or amendment is summarized as a set of bullet points. The list would be more useful, however, if it had been cross-referenced to the articles in the Encyclopedia.
As a final reference tool, we can return to the question of the role of a printed book in the Google era. Each of the articles ends with a set of keywords which are, initially, cross-references to other articles in the Encyclopedia. At the same time, however, these keywords become search terms that, through Google and other search engines, extend both the content and the currency of the articles.
In sum, as far as desktop encyclopedias go, the Encyclopedia of Retirement and Finance is highly recommended for a broad array of finance and gerontology audiences.
References
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