In Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana: What to Name Your Baby Now, baby name authorities (and mothers) Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran aim to answer these unusual but practical questions about names. Using piles of statistics from State Departments of Health along with personal accounts, the authors have created a baby-naming manual that goes beyond a laundry list of names and delves into the nitty-gritty of naming.

The first edition was published in 1988, and since then, these two moms published two smaller revisions before completely overhauling the book for their fourth edition in 1999. This edition is broken down into five reader-friendly sections: style, popularity, image, tradition and family.

Rosenkrantz and Satran go beyond linguistics and tackle the cultural and social issues surrounding the struggle to name a baby, including handling issues of class and religious tradition. They offer advice on what to do when someone in your family has used 'your' baby name before you did, how to choose a meaningful middle name and how to name siblings so that they sound like they belong together in a family. The book also offers a fresh selection of new names for old categories. If you've always liked "Day Names" like April and May, why not try Spring or August? Instead of "Nature Names" like River, Lily and Rose, consider Canyon, Frost or Indigo. Do you like "Biblical Names" like Benjamin and Adam? Well, Amos, Nathaniel and Reuben might be the next big thing.

Using the index, you can hunt and peck for a particular name to see what they say about it (Gertrude, although a royal family name, will probably never come back in style). Another option is to jump around and read sections that interest you, such as "No-Nickname Names," "Unisex Names" and "African-American Names."

Although this is a baby-naming guide, the authors' narrative is so witty and personal you could read this book from cover to cover and discover, as they have, how names evolve in popularity and how your name choice may affect your baby's future.

Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana: What to Name Your Baby Now is shelved on the first floor of the Library in the non-fiction section of the Recreational Reading Collection.