Extract

At first glance, Jack Levin's book, Blurring the Boundaries: The Declining Significance of Age, promises to be a brief monograph about the growing irrelevance of chronological age as a meaningful “yardstick” that guides the unfolding of our lives. Life course research has had its ear to the growth of age irrelevance for a while now—many researchers attending to the relationship between social location and the timing of particular events and transitions. Blurring the Boundaries, however, covers a broader range of territory than the title suggests. Levin's book provides an analysis of how a variety of normative behaviors and transitions, some associated with certain chronological ages and particular stages of life, have shifted over the past five decades. A secondary yet powerful theme attends to the role of the early baby boomers (i.e., those born between 1946 and 1955) as harbingers of these changes. Levin interweaves personal vignettes throughout his narrative, which focuses primarily on the behaviors and transitions associated with children and young adults. This book is an appealing selection for scholars of aging and the life course because Levin's analyses incorporate several dimensions of age, including chronological age, period, cohort, and life stage.

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