In his cogent review in this journal of the second edition of the Handbook of Theories of Aging edited by Vern Bengtson, Daphna Gans, Norella Putney and Merril Silverstein (Reference Bengtson, Gans, Putney and Silverstein2009), Bill Bytheway characterised the volume as distinctly ethnocentric since 55 of the 67 contributors (including your reviewer) work in the United States of America. Bytheway noted that the book's tripartite structure (biological, psychological, and social science) could have emerged from the platform of the Gerontological Society of America. He expressed disappointment that even the critical gerontologists contributing to the Handbook failed to move the gerontological discourse on: ‘In 2009, old age maintains its grip on the gerontological agenda’ (Bytheway Reference Bytheway and Bengtson2010: 191).

Readers of Ageing & Society should therefore welcome the 15 essays that Ricca Edmondson and Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz have included in Valuing Older People. Ronald Manheimer, who wrote one of the Afterwords, is the only US contributor. The editors place far less emphasis on theory-building than on exploring the variegated ways of searching for and talking about ‘meaning’. With this focus, the editors and their collaborators engage in sustained although not systematic conversations about values and norms. The volume offers the perspectives of scholars trained mainly in the social sciences (but not gerontology) as they grapple with the comments and observations of those whom they interviewed. Valuing Older People is multidisciplinary, to be sure, but it is the multiplicity of late-life experiences, not all processed or understood, that I will remember. Many of the voices and faces in this collection are indeed elderly: Haim Hazan interviewed Jews in the fourth age, and Outi Jolanki's chapter deals solely with nonagenarians in Finland. Still, all the commonalities, contrarieties and contradictions that inhere (but not converge) in the portraits of growing older arise from a lifecourse orientation, and most of the essayists distinguish explicitly between individual and societal ageing.

This approach to Valuing Older People raises and perforce confronts ethical and political issues for ethnographers as well as for the men and women with whom they talk. As Edmondson and von Kondratowitz claim in their Introduction:

Valuing Older People has three sections. Part One addresses ‘Religion, Spirituality, Cultural Resources and Creating Meaning’ across continents and traditional and syncretistic faith traditions, including atheism. Part Two ranges from historical images of ageing, to pension systems and generational solidarity, the ethos of care in long-term residences, and the ethics of biogerontology in considering ‘Norms, Values, and Gerontology’. Part Three presents life stories and older people's views about eldership and wisdom in ‘Ageing and Wisdom? Conflicts and Contested Developments’. The collection merits attention because its editors and contributors cross disciplinary boundaries with no intent of imposing reductionist perspectives as they interpret data. The authors celebrate the various ways that they and their subjects speak about age and ageing. They neither want to nor should seize upon a master narrative that could stifle conversations and impede interactions among the old or across generations. With Bytheway's critique of the Handbook of Theories of Aging in mind, I was struck by how often Edmondson and von Kondratowitz referred to US critical gerontologists (notably Tom Cole and Rick Moody). More than was true a decade ago, such transatlantic reciprocity animates gerontology theory-building. Disciplinary and ethnocentric barriers will fall, in my opinion, as critical gerontology taps more systematically into works by philosophers, historians, and past and present literary critics with only a personal stake in ageing. I wish that the editors and other authors had expanded references to Cicero, and that they had been more self-reflexive about how a ‘democratic tradition’ affects ‘rhetorical communication’.

To refer to how global ageing is rooted in historical contexts is to remind us all of how much remains to be known about the meanings and experiences of growing older in nations that are themselves ageing, institutionally and demographically. Valuing Older People is parochial: except for Mehta's essay on Singapore, and Nichol's cross-cultural analysis of eldership in Guatemala, New Zealand and Somalia, the case studies in this volume are mainly from (often remote) settings in northern Europe. To understand, for instance, how religion and spirituality are transforming the norms and values that older people express and actualise, we must learn the extent to which they are empowered or constrained by ‘foreign’ beliefs and practices which are readily available, on the internet if not present in the next residence. New migration patterns, international media and hitherto distant markets now affect young and old.

Ageing has always been a foreign land, for people of all ages, and all the more so as we perceive ourselves faced with a new sense of collective solidarity thanks to a fragile environment, health and wealth disparities at home and abroad, and a worldwide economic network sensitive to natural and human-made disasters. To this I would argue must be added the scenarios limned by Laura Carstensen (Reference Carstensen2009) in A Long Bright Future. If gains in longevity are going to affect educational, employment and social opportunities at all stages of life, then gerontologists must increasingly embrace a lifecourse perspective. The humanist approach taken in Valuing Older People is a step in the right direction.