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tivity. By highlighting the socio-cultural view of the body as a slowly ailing mechanism that may be too frail for such intensity and that great personal character is required to participate, results, unsurprisingly, show sport involvement falling away. Finally, there is a comprehensive consideration of healthy ageing from late middle age to old age where a lack of engagement becomes the central theme. A weakness of the book is that such a complex topic covering such a wide range of geographical areas has to encompass so many variables that it is impossible to make overarching conclusions. A clarification of terminology might have aided this. Seeing sport, exercise/leisure activities and physical activity as separate and discrete entities may have aided understanding. These differences might be more applicable to different populations at different points in the lifespan. For example, sport has a competitive element that may not be evident in all populations or that middle-aged people are much more likely to partake in leisure activities than sport. UK health promotion is at present acknowledging this and targeting initiatives to specific populations with this in mind. The strength of this book is that it is an ambitious overview that offers a far-reaching and coherent argument about the state of sport participation across Australia, Europe and UK. It offers the reader a wide and comprehensive selection of perspectives from which to understand what is, a ‘big’ topic. It includes subject areas that are not normally included in such a consideration, thus offering an unusual and surprising picture. Together the articles provide a strong justification for the complexity and multi-layered reasons for non-participation in sport across the lifespan and proffers suggestions for future developmental work based on the evidence discussed. However, the scale of the topic undertaken means the book cannot be exhaustive and each chapter offers a particular viewpoint. Readers who have done much research work in one of these age groups might find the depth/relevance of evidence used to be incomplete. However, this is not this book’s intention and there is much work to be found elsewhere that focusses on specific age cohorts. As an overview, this book is suitable for researchers, undergraduate and post-graduate students and public health practitioners, who will all gain useful insights from it.