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New Directions in Childhood Psychopathology is an attempt by the editors to bring up to date their efforts in Childhood Psychopathology, originally published in 1972, to have an anthology of basic readings in child development and child psychopathology. The original volume contained most of the classics in the field. I can remember, as a medical student interested in child psychiatry, finding it invaluable because it provided easy access to most of the papers I was then reading and also because the editors' brief introductions to the articles were very helpful in explaining what made the particular articles so seminal.
New Directions in Childhood Psychopathology, the two-volume companion piece to the original anthology, is a collection of forty-one articles in the field of child development and developmental psychopathology published originally between 1968 and 1977. These articles were selected as key publications in the field in the decade following the compilation of the original anthology. However, unlike the classic articles in the original anthology (which the editors could confidently subtitle an anthology of basic readings), the articles selected in the companion volumes have not stood the test of time and, although there may be fair agreement that some of them are germinal, most of them have been chosen because they are either thought-provoking samples or comprehensive over-views of a particular area of study. For example, on the one hand, there are articles like 'The rarity of reading disability in Japanese children', by Kiyoshi Makita, which presents a novel thesis to explain the epidemiology of reading disabilities. On the other hand there are a number of literature reviews by established leaders in the field such as Michael Rutter's 'Concepts of autism: a review of research'.
Recognizing the impossibility of any effort to bring together both a representative and comprehensive collection of childhood-psychopathology articles covering the period, the