The measure of our age : navigating care, safety, money, and meaning later in life /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An expert on elder justice maps the challenges of aging, how things go wrong, and presents powerful tools we can use to forge better long lives for ourselves, our families, and our communities.



As tens of millions of Americans are living longer lives, longevity is creating challenges that cut across race, class, and gender. Caregivers help older relatives for "free," but with high costs to themselves in time, money, jobs, and health. Scammers target countless seniors. The institutions built to protect older people--like nursing homes and guardianship--too often harm them instead. And epidemics of isolation and loneliness make older people vulnerable to all sorts of harm.



In The Measure of Our Age, elder justice expert and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient, M.T. Connolly investigates the systems we count on to protect us as we age. Weaving first-person accounts, her own experience, and shocking investigative reporting, she exposes a reality that has long been hidden and sometimes actively covered up. But her investigation also reveals reasons for hope within everyone's grasp.



Connolly's strategies and action plans for navigating the many challenges of aging will appeal to a wide range of readers--adult children caring for aging parents; policymakers trying to do the right thing; and, should we be so lucky as to live to old age, all of us. This book transforms how we think about aging.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue: The Oxbow and the Ice Floe (1)
• Part I Challenges (11)
• 1 Care (13)
• 2 Health (39)
• 3 Facilities (61)
• 4 Home (85)
• 5 Money (105)
• 6 The Autonomy-Safety Conundrum (143)
• 7 Lagging Norms (167)
• Part II Downstream, Upstream (183)
• 8 Who to Call? (185)
• 9 Forensics (193)
• 10 Parents' Keepers? (207)
• 11 Harm and Healing (227)
• Part III Change (247)
• 12 New Models (249)
• 13 Law (263)
• 14 Movement (273)
• 15 Mystery and Meaning (283)
• Epilogue: Consolations (299)
• Resources (311)
• Author's Note on Names, Terms, and Sources (315)
• Acknowledgments (317)
• Notes (325)
• Bibliography (341)
• Index (351)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

A book about growing old and the indignities--many of them avoidable--that aging entails. Connolly, former head of the U.S. Department of Justice's Elder Justice Initiative, opens with the observation that in the 20th century, Americans added 30 years to their average life spans. Technology has helped, with family connections maintained by Zoom calls, uncooperative hips and knees easily replaced, and so forth, so that "for millions of people, there has never been a better time to be old." People in their 70s report being happier than ever in the lives. Then come the 80s, when, as Connolly observes, some three-quarters of people suffer some "functional disability" that drastically reduces quality of life. Many of the attendant phenomena are structural and can be changed. However, most elder care is provided by unpaid family members, such as spouses and adult children, at an estimated annual loss of $522 billion in potential income. Those caregivers are often untrained, while facilities sometimes prey on patients. Regarding the latter, Connolly urges stronger policing and punishment, and she argues against the common practice of assigning full guardianship to non--family members. As she writes, many of the societal woes that the elderly face are intersectional: Women face both ageism and sexism, while older minority members face racism and economic discrimination--to say nothing of worse institutional care generally, as the demographics of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes attest. Throughout this lucid and thought-provoking treatise, Connolly offers thoughts on ways of improving life for the elderly, ranging from living in mixed-age communities rather than seniors-only retirement enclaves to applying psychotropic drugs to the treatment of anxiety and depression in hopes of finding "ways that mind-altering substances might alter the course of mind-altering diseases." A book that deserves wide attention and discussion among aging readers and those who care for them. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

M. T. Connolly is widely recognized as a leading national expert on elder justice, for which she was honoured with a MacArthur "Genius" award. She was the founding head of the Department of Justice's Elder Justice Initiative; the architect of the Elder Justice Act, the first comprehensive federal law to address the issue; and the lead author of the Elder Justice Roadmap that guides federal, state, and local priorities. She lives in Washington, DC.