On farms and in factories, Americans once had little choice but to work until death. As the nation prospered, a new idea was born: the right to a dignified and secure old age. That project has benefited millions, but it remains incomplete—and today it's under siege. Historian James Chappel shows how old age first emerged as a distinct stage of life and how it evolved over the last century, shaped by politicians' choices, activists' demands, medical advancements, and cultural models from utopian novels to The Golden Girls.
Chappel delves into statistics and academic conferences more than he does the psychology of old age, which he can’t quite bring to life. He’s what you’d call a big-picture guy, writing about a subject whose pathos is all in the close-ups. Even so, there’s a profound loneliness skulking around his book.
A lucid, comprehensive examination of a complex issue, and readers can be excused if, by the time they’ve turned the last of the book’s fact-and-analysis-crammed pages, they feel as if they’ve aged a few years ... The reader finishes Golden Years with a fuller understanding of all the nettlesome issues involved in the aging of America—and a fresh awareness of one’s own mortality.
This is sober history, in the sense that it is no fun at all to read. Golden Years is related in baked-potato, hold-the-butter-and-salt prose. While reading it I felt my life slipping away more rapidly than usual ... Chappel makes me want to revisit The Golden Girls. But I wish his book had taken us closer to the present day
