Customer Reviews

The Journey of Adulthood (4th Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Unlike most textbooks, this one is almost fun to read. The writer uses her own experiences to highlight some of the information. I would recommend that you tell your teacher to order a desk copy to review.

easy to read/ follow. Enjoyable to read because personal connection to author. real life examples.

It is fairly difficult to rate a text book. It was fairly standard as far as textbooks are concerned. I found the author would admit her biases so it was a fairly fair textbook. It was straight forward and easy to understand.

I understand most people buying this textbook do not really have a choice when it comes to choosing which textbooks to purchase. So I would like to say that if you are suppose to buy the newer 7th edition this edition works just fine. Even the statistics such as percentage of adults who do this...

My class required the 7th edition. I purchased this used to save myself over $100. The pages were a little off buy considering the figure number / image number and chapters are the same I have no trouble at all using this instead.

I recommend using this edition to save money.

Hellen Bee is able to carry one through the years of adulthood through many avenues. Using scientific studies she interprets the data in meaningful ways. Inclusion of personal accounts and her conversational style make the reading interesting. The book continually ties previous ideas to new concepts giving a nice continuity. I especially enjoyed her occasional insertions of the not-so-scientific spiritual aspects of the adult experience, which I was not expecting in a textbook. My ideas of what it means to grow old were challenged and changed during the reading of this book. Some myths of adulthood are adeptly smashed making the thought of aging not such a frightful one. The only criticism I would include is that occasionally the point being made was not clear to me and a few conclusions seem to have contradictory statements in following chapters. That may be expected in the field of psychology, however.

Reading through this for a psychology course on adult development and aging has been a difficult task. There is a bit of unnecessary rambling through out the book, making it difficult to keep focused on the actual topic being discussed. As others have mentioned the typo's are frequent as well as the gramatical mistakes, I find myself reading some sentences three or four times before giving up on understanding what they were trying to say. The other problem with the book is the absolute reliance on statistics, the book is filled with mostly meaningless statistics that anyone short of the rain man would struggle to ever remember which further adds to the difficulty of the content as you are bombarded with statistical figures that you try to remember you tend to forget the real content and issues being discussed.

And then as others have stated there is the jaded feminist viewpoint of the book. Every concept in the book is qualified with some remark or statistic showing the difference between men and women, and while in many cases there are indeed differences in how men and women act and react and age in their life time there are many cases where this difference is pointed out and it is irrelevant or the statistical difference is insignificant.

I am glad I got this from a library and didn't have to throw away $110 of my own money on it.

If you are interested in knowing the stages adults go through in life this is the book for you. My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and the class I took to help understand her better along with this textbook helped me understand her a little more.

This textbook is very well written and enjoyable to read. The author uses her life experiences to help demonstrate the concepts she is expploring.

Although the book did come a day late for class, which WAS my fault for ordering it late, it was a good buy. The book was in pretty much excellent shape with very very little writing.

The book was in excellent condition, few marking (highlightening), cover in good condition, and binding was in good shape. Would definitely order from seller again.

I ordered this book on April 2, 2010. I did not receive any updates other that "it shipped." I did not receive the book until April 20th. It took more time than expected.