A vital, applicable examination of how to fight inaccurate or unfair assumptions about growing old.
A study highlighting the enduring issue of age bias and discrimination in society.
Gendron, the chair of the gerontology department at Virginia Commonwealth University, has spent her career advocating for older adults. Combining her vast experience with relevant research, the author first exposes the roots of ageism and how modern culture, in its vapid quest for eternal youthfulness, frames the process of aging in condescending stereotypes. Gendron shows how preconceived notions about elderly populations as irrelevant, out of touch with modern society, and predominantly frail have persevered since ancient Greece, where “old age was conceptualized as a sad, downward slope of decrepitude.” While clinical and technological advancements have improved these situations, general attitudes, social determinants, and a systemic devaluing of older people remain unchanged. The author delves into discriminatory treatment and forced retirement situations in corporate environments as well as the more current conundrum of “COVID ageism,” and she shares stories about her own parents’ retirement “life stage” scenarios. Her examples illuminate a problem endemic in cultures across the globe, and the need for change is crucial. She points out some methods to create incremental change (some readers may wish for more proactive tips), including fighting the personal stigma of internalized oppression about growing old or being called old by others. While her prose is crisp, declarative, and scholarly, it is also accessible and accented with personality and wit; the inclusion of her own personal reflections about aging add a great amount of relatability and narrative connection. Readers concerned with aging will find Gendron’s discussion on the expectations of getting older, as well as the challenges many face with aging, refreshingly helpful. Also crucial is the author’s optimistic perspective about appreciating and embracing the aging process, which can promote better mental health, opportunities for productivity, personal development, and overall happiness.
A vital, applicable examination of how to fight inaccurate or unfair assumptions about growing old.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-58642-322-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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