?[Editors Browne and Olson] and nine other authors, mostly academics, attempt to fill the gap [a neglect of the political dimensions of aging issues] with ten well-documented chapters, analyzing aging programs and policies of recent decades. ... The overall theme is that, although older Americans have emerged as a distinctive political force, the fragmentation of the special interest groups that affect to speak for them, when set against the fragmented nature of the American political system, results in complex, widely divergent, and little understood political repercussions on which research is in its infancy. The evaluation and prognoses of the Binstock school are both realistic and pessimistic, seeing present programs as deficient and bound to worsen in a continuing climate of fiscal constraints. Intended as an introduction for readers new to the field of aging, this collection has many merits.?-Choice