This is the 17th in a series of volumes on Societal Impacts on Aging, all edited by K. Warner Schaie at Pennsylvania State University and based on conference proceedings held at its Gerontology Centre. The co-editor for this volume on historical influences on lives, Glen Elder, is a major pioneer in the development of lifecourse studies in the social sciences, and very well known for his work on three topics relevant to this volume: the influence of the Great Depression of the 1930s on American lives, the personal and family impacts of military and wartime experience, and the effects of rural change and dislocation on the inter-generational dynamics of ageing.

These interests are reflected in some of the topics that are discussed in this volume, in particular the influence of active service during the Second World War and the Korean War on American soldiers, and of the welfare policy changes introduced by President Clinton's administration on low-income adults. In addition, two other broad topics are considered in depth: the effects of major shifts in American history, including the Civil War, and the influence of changing trends in immigration, through which the United States was created. The two remaining topics are interrelated and not American: the transition from communism in the former Soviet Union, and post-service employment among Russian army officers.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire was one of the major world events during the later 20th century, and provided excellent opportunities for study of adaptation to historical disjunction at various stages of the lifecourse. There have been huge implications for older people's sense of identity as members of the generation that defeated Nazism and contributed to the many achievements of post-1945 Soviet society (Coleman and Podolskij Reference Coleman and Podolskij2007). The focus of the chapters in this volume, however, is on young to middle-aged adults, the life careers of a sample of 1983–84 graduates from secondary schools in 15 regions of the Soviet Union that were followed until 1997–99. Another sample was of military personnel who left the Russian armed services early following a drastic downsizing during the 1990s. The data collected from these informants is of considerable interest to students of adult development. In any drastic social change there are likely to be winners and losers. In the case of post-Soviet Union countries, it has generally been the young who have benefited from the new opportunities. Discarding older patterns of thinking has been much harder for middle-aged adults. General Aleksandr Lebed, who made the transition to regional government, is quoted as saying, ‘I was in the military for 26 years. I left five years ago and found myself in another world. I very quickly realised that the world had no need of all the skills and knowledge that I'd acquired in the past and I began to get rid of them one-by-one' (p. 205). The cohort of 1983–84 graduates are of particular interest because of the major disjunction in their subsequent histories, from extreme riches to impoverishment. Education, self-rated abilities, personal goals and self-efficacy all emerge as important variables contributing to success.

The character of the volume, a detailed presentation of a specific topic, followed by two expert commentaries, usually one from the author's discipline and one from another, is an attractive model. British readers will be particularly interested in the American scholars Carolyn Aldwin and Michael Levenson's account of their study of ‘Chelsea Pensioners’ and their 300-year-old ‘hospital’ that provides accommodation mainly for retired non-commissioned officers from a working-class background. Despite high rates of war service disability, the benefits of military service, including emotional maturation and skill increases, impressed the researchers more. They also saw the Royal Hospital Chelsea as a possible model for co-operative elder housing.