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"Elana D. Buch's "Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care" focuses on the topic of American home care and explores various contradictions and points of tension within the industry. It also raises awareness of the problematic inequality that exists in the American home care industry and argues for the creation of a more sustainable system."--

In concert with lengthening life spans, emerging forms of care in later life reflect complex and diverse social changes. Embracing a polysemic understanding of care as simultaneously resource and relational practice, this review works across scales of social life and theoretical approaches to care to highlight connections and fissures between global political-economic transformations and the most intimate aspects of daily life. Arguing for analyses of care that account for the kinds of projects, stakes, and obstacles that emerge as people engage in social reproduction in later life, this review traces the circulation of care across aging bodies, everyday practices, families, and nations. Care in later life never exclusively impacts the lives of the old; it is thus a critical site for understanding the diverse ways that increased longevity is shaping the meanings, experiences, and consequences of life itself.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-first- Century Obsession / Lamb, Sarah / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica / Corwin, Anna I. -- PART I. Gender, Sexuality, and the Allure of Anti-Aging -- 1. Successful Aging, Ageism, and the Maintenance of Age and Gender Relations / Calasanti, Toni / King, Neal -- 2. Opting In or Opting Out? North American Women Share Strategies for Aging Successfully with (and without) Cosmetic Intervention / Brooks, Abigail T. -- 3. Aging Out: Ageism, Heterosexism, and Racism among Aging African American Lesbians and Gay Men / Woody, Imani -- 4. Erectile Dysfunction as Successful Aging in Mexico / Wentzell, Emily -- PART II. Ideals of Independence, Interdependence, and Intimate Sociality in Later Life -- 5. Beyond Independence: Older Chicagoans Living Valued Lives / Buch, Elana D. -- 6. Growing Old with God: An Alternative Vision of Successful Aging among Catholic Nuns / Corwin, Anna I. -- 7. Aspiring to Activity: Universities of the Third Age, Gardening, and Other Forms of Living in Postsocialist Poland / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica -- 8. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? Friendship in the Face of Dementia / Taylor, Janelle S. -- PART III. National Policies and Everyday Practices: Individual and Collective Projects of Aging Well -- 9. Getting Old and Keeping Going: The Motivation Technologies of Active Aging in Denmark / Lassen, Aske Juul / Pernille Jespersen, Astrid -- 10. Foolish Vitality: Humor, Risk, and Success in Japan / Danely, Jason -- 11. Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing / Farquhar, Judith / Zhang, Qicheng -- 12. Depreciating Age, Disintegrating Ties: On Being Old in a Century of Declining Elderhood in Kenya / Mcintosh, Janet -- PART IV. Medicine, Morality, and Self: Lessons from Life's Ends -- 13. Successful Selves? Heroic Tales of Alzheimer's Disease and Personhood in Brazil / Leibing, Annette -- 14. Comfortable Aging: Lessons for Living from Eighty-five and Beyond / Loe, Meika -- 15. Ageless Aging or Meaningful Decline? Aspirations of Aging and Dying in the United States and India / Lamb, Sarah -- Epilogue: Successful Aging and Desired Interdependence / Reynolds Whyte, Susan -- Notes on Contributors -- Index