60 on up

Lillian B. Rubin60 on Up: The Truth About Aging in AmericaA penetrating look at the profound changes — personal and societal — that come with the new longevity, for those living it now and the boomers behind themThe "golden years" can be anything but. With refreshing candor, best-selling author Dr. Lillian Rubin digs down under the statistics about our graying population. In tackling the subject of aging over a broad swath of the population, cutting across class, gender, and physical status, Rubin reveals that no one is exempt from the issues raised by the new longevity — not the forty- and fifty-year olds who are squeezed between their dependent kids and increasingly dependent parents; not the sixty- and seventy-year-olds who are still caring for their parents, maybe still helping kids who haven’t quite "launched", and desperately wondering, When is it my turn to retire? Will my parents have spent my inheritance by then?The burning issues that mark aging in our times are all addressed here: What happens to sex and how has it changed in the post-Viagra world? What do retirees experience when they’ve lost their work identities and still have two, possibly three decades to live? What happens to family life when adult children have to care for their aged parents? What is a good death and how can we have one? And, more generally, the very important question: What happens to a society when people routinely live into their nineties, when they tout that "sixty is the new forty" and thirty is too young to settle down and start a family?