The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life

An expert on elder justice maps the challenges of aging, how things go wrong, and presents powerful tools we can use to forge better long lives for ourselves, our families, and our communities.

As tens of millions of Americans are living longer lives, longevity is creating challenges that cut across race, class, and gender. Caregivers help older relatives for ＂free,＂ but with high costs to themselves in time, money, jobs, and health. Scammers target countless seniors. The institutions built to protect older people--like nursing homes and guardianship--too often harm them instead. And epidemics of isolation and loneliness make older people vulnerable to all sorts of harm.

In The Measure of Our Age, elder justice expert and MacArthur ＂genius＂ grant recipient, M.T. Connolly investigates the systems we count on to protect us as we age. Weaving first-person accounts, her own experience, and shocking investigative reporting, she exposes a reality that has long been hidden and sometimes actively covered up. But her investigation also reveals reasons for hope within everyone’s grasp.

Connolly’s strategies and action plans for navigating the many challenges of aging will appeal to a wide range of readers--adult children caring for aging parents; policymakers trying to do the right thing; and, should we be so lucky as to live to old age, all of us. This book transforms how we think about aging.

M. T. Connolly is widely recognized as the nation’s expert on elder justice, for which she was honored with the renowned MacArthur ＂Genius＂ Award. As head of the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative, she shaped new strategies to prosecute nursing home abuses. She conceived of and was the architect of the Elder Justice Act, the first federal law to address the issue specifically, and was the lead author of the Elder Justice Roadmap that still guides federal, state and local priorities. She lives in Washington, DC.