Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age
Coming in paperback from Vintage Books in February 2012
Susan Jacoby, an unsparing chronicler of unreason in American culture in the New York Times bestseller The Age of American Unreason and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, now offers an impassioned, toughminded critique of the myth that a radically new old age—unmarred by physical or mental deterioration, financial problems or intimate loneliness—awaits the huge baby boom generation just beginning to turn 65. Combining historical, social and economic analysis with personal experience of love and loss, Jacoby turns a caustic eye not only on the modern fiction that old age can be “defied” but also on the sentimental image of a past in which American supposedly revered their elders.
This book unmasks the fallacies promoted by 21st-century hucksters of longevity—including health gurus claiming that boomers can stay “forever young” if they only live right; self-promoting biomedical businessmen predicting that 90 may soon become the new 50 and that a “cure” for the “disease” of aging is just around the corner; and wishful thinkers asserting that older means wiser.
The author offers powerful evidence that America has always been a “youth culture” and that the plight of the neglected old dates from the early years of the republic. Today, it is urgent to distinguish between marketing hype and realistic hope about what lies ahead for more than 70 million Americans who will be over 65 in just twenty years. This wide-ranging reappraisal examines the explosion of Alzheimer’s cases, the uncertain economic future of aging boomers in a shaky economy, the predicament of women who make up an overwhelming majority of the oldest—and poorest—old; and the absence of control over dying in a society that devotes a huge proportion of its health care resources to medical intervention in the last year of life—even when there is no hope that the person will ever recover.
Susan Jacoby raises the fundamental question of whether living longer is a good thing unless it means living better. This book speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing that oldest of delusions, the foundation of youth. The author applies the same standards of reason to aging as she did to the dumbing-down of American culture in The Age of American Unreason.
Susan Jacoby is the author of
ten books, a frequent contributor to national magazines and newspapers, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2001 appointment as a fellow of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers.
An outspoken advocate of reason, she writes "The Spirited Atheist"
column for On Faith at The Washington Post. She is also
program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a
rationalist think tank, and a member of the advisory boards of the
Secular Coalition for America and the Freedom from Religion
Foundation.
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
New In An Updated Paperback Edition From Vintage Books
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history—a New York Times bestseller in 2008—paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. The author examines the challenges posed by the current anti-rational landscape--personified by the rise of the Tea Party--for the administration of Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to restore reason and science in public policy-making. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
Finally, the author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.
