Balanced Tensions: A Broad Resource for Exploring Adolescents and Death

Reviews the book, Adolescent encounters with death, bereavement, and coping edited by David E. Balk and Charles A. Corr (see record 2009-04894-000). In recent years, experts who deal with bereavement in both the publishing and clinical realms have been moving away from one-size-fits-all, stepwise models toward understandings of individual variation and mediating factors (Doughty, 2009). More complex models, however, create tension between understanding “typical” behavior and particularity, as well as between the search for answers and the search for better questions. The editors achieve remarkable balance within these tensions in this book. It addresses multiple levels of thought and provides many good questions along with quite a few good answers. Balk and Corr describe this volume “as part of a new effort to provide a broad resource to guide care providers, such as nurses, counselors, social workers, educators, and clergy, who seek to understand and help adolescents as they attempt to cope with death-related issues” (p. xxi). They also provide expanded and updated information, relative to volumes they have previously edited, in areas such as complicated bereavement, new models of bereavement, and cultural diversity (p. xxii). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)