An unedifying yet essential reference on dealing with aging.
Valuable advice about the second half of life.
Getting old is not for the faint of heart, but this lucid guide by Whitman, chief public policy officer for the AARP, will help many readers along the path. Of course, physical and mental health is likely readers’ leading worry, so the author starts there. According to a recent Harvard study, women live an extra 14 years, and men 12, if they adhered to “five healthy habits—a good diet, exercise, a healthy body weight, no smoking, and very limited alcohol intake.” As the author notes, dementia is now more feared than cancer. Following her recommended habits reduces the risk modestly, but it’s best to start young. Whitman’s discussions on paying for old age and managing dying are frighteningly illuminating. American retirement rests on three systems: pensions, Social Security, and savings. Pensions are nearly nonexistent in today’s business world; Social Security will continue (that it will go bankrupt is a myth), but it cannot serve as someone’s sole source of income. Savings are essential, but poor people are not able to save adequately, and poverty rates have been rising since the 1980s. Almost everyone wants to die at home, but the work involved is grueling and expensive. Although enormously helpful, hospice and palliative care services are underfunded and enmeshed in bureaucracy; furthermore, doctors are often slow to get involved. Whitman’s concluding summary is sensible but sober. Most readers are aware that poverty levels, income disparities, and lack of social service support place the U.S. in a precarious position, and no big changes are in the works. Straining to find good news, the author describes state programs to assist the elderly and imaginative “grassroots innovation” that may or may not catch on. Alas, no one expects action from Washington, D.C.
An unedifying yet essential reference on dealing with aging.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780393867657
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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