The Development of the Person. By L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson, and W. Andrew Collins. NY: Guilford. 2005

If you want to be informed on the most up to date, profound thinking about development, this is the one book that should be read. It provides a truly comprehensive view of human development through its presentation of the Minnesota Study, a groundbreaking 30 year longitudinal study of families living in urban poverty. The majority of the book provides a rich and detailed narrative of the planning, implementation, and results of this study, but it is much more than simply a recounting of the study's findings. With the Minnesota Study as backdrop, woven throughout the book is a presentation of the cutting edge theoretical perspective on development. This perspective captures the complexities of human developmental processes through an integration of ideas from a broad range of developmental theory as well as developmental concepts from the biological sciences. The research presented in this book draws on this detailed conceptual blueprint of development, and represents a seamless integration of theory into a program of research, with theory and data mutually informing at every step. …