Don Rowland is a Reader in Population Studies at the Australian National University, where he teaches courses on demographic methods, population trends and social changes. He has published monographs, and numerous papers in academic journals and books, focussing on migration, the family, ageing, and national population changes. His research has included many studies undertaken for Australian and international organisations, including the Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography (CICRED), the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and the United Nations. Like many demographers, his research and teaching is undertaken in an interdisciplinary setting; interests in family sociology and social gerontology supplement his formal academic qualifications in geography and demography.

"Are you looking for a demography text that is amusing, literate, and comprehensive? Do you want a CD with wonderfully constructed graphs that run the demographic transition through before your very eyes for the country of your choice; that let you build population pyramids; that project populations with different mortality, fertility, and migration assumptions; that illustrate the stages of epidemiologic transition and much more? If yes, your wishes can now be fulfilled."--Katherine Bates, People and Place, vol. 11, no. 3, 2003

"So self-contained, so thorough, and so elementary (in the best sense of the term!) is the book that it induces a guilty pleasure on the part of this reader."--Herbert L. Smith, University of Pennsylvania