THE PICTORIAL WORLD OF THE CHILD, by Maureen Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 357 pp., paper.

Scholarly, informative, and impartial are adjectives that spring to mind with respect to Maureen Cox's book, The Pictorial World of the Child, a text principally but not exclusively devoted to the subject of children's drawings and to ways in which children seem to understand pictorial representations as well as create them. Because of its clarity and comprehensiveness, this book seems well-suited for classroom use. Effectively organized into a cogent selection of significant subtopics, it summarizes and presents a vast array of contributions by colleagues whose work Cox surely respects and treats in an admirably evenhanded way. Since, as she states at the beginning of her book, a serious scholarly interest in children's pictures has been with us for over a century, her task is prodigious, and she accomplishes it with grace and precision. It is perhaps to her credit that Cox does not argue passionately on one side or another of a host of thorny issues in her field about which many scholars, teachers, and theorists seem to exhibit strong one-sided views. How should art be taught to young children, for example? Should they be given total freedom or required to perform an ordered set of tasks? In every case, Cox offers her readers a panoply of perspectives and invites them to entertain the spectrum of opinion and then decide for themselves or not.