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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative
92.3  
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December, 2005
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Book Review



The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974: A Political History. By James A. Wooten. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xvi, 415 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-520-24273-4.)

This monograph delivers what it promises: a political history of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) that is, by almost any measure, exhaustive and definitive. To get the story in such depth, the reader must wade through an overwhelming amount of mind-numbing detail. As one of the participants in the original congressional debate over the measure noted, ERISA contains "'provisions as complex as Congress has ever written'" (p. 242). Indeed, such matters as the minimum vesting and funding standards for private pensions do not lend themselves to easy explanation or glib historical narrative. . . .

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