Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging Book

I have read a lot of books on aging and am working on writing my own, but I would say Margaret Cruikshank's is the best that there is. Atul Gawande's On Being Mortal was powerful for me in that he pulled forth a lot of evidence on how important it is to involve older people in active discussions on the choices they want to make and not assume what is "best" for them. That point was driven home clearly and persuasively, but Cruikshank's book has a wider scope. While she uses a feminist lens to examine various facets of aging, her approach can best be wrapped up in a term that she introduces later in the book, "critical gerontology," which "not only questions conventional ways of thinking about age but also the discipline of gerontology itself" by advocating for bringing the humanities together with economics and social sciences to better understand our society's often misguided sensibility surrounding age. Among the countless insights I took from this book was how our culture's infatuation with "self-reliance" negatively impacts older people who feel they are not living up to the myth of individualism if they need help. She also supplies a healthy does of skepticism to slogans like "successful aging" as they ignore barriers many face that impede this lofty goal and put emphasis on the individual rather than social structures to do all the heavy lifting. I could go on and on, but I will end on one particular gem that is from the second to last chapter: "Each human who reaches eighty is a model of regeneration and adaptation." This statement is followed by quote from Andrew Weil, asking us to think of "wrinkles and white hair as "banners of survivorship."