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Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America

August 29, 2008

Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America This “inspiring, informative, mind-opening book” (New York Times) provides a new vision on aging, retirement, and the role of older Americans in the 21st century. Over the next three decades, the number of Americans over fifty will double, swelling to more than a quarter of the population. Already we are living thirty years longer than a century ago, with further gains expected in the coming years. The end result is a new stage of life, one as long or longer than childhood or middle age in duration, and one spent in unprecedented good health. Yet, as individuals, and as a society, we’ve shown little imagination or wisdom in using this great gift of a third age. Marc Freedman identifies the new longevity as not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be seized-provided we can engage the experience, talent, and idealism of older Americans. At a juncture when the middle-generation faces a time-famine, struggling to simultaneously raise kids and work long hours on the job, the older generation is awash in free time, poised to succeed women as the trustees of civic life in this country. In the process they stand to find new meaning and purpose in their lives, and abandon the limbo-like state unfulfilling for so many older individuals. Freedman argues that the aging phenomenon, the massive transformation that many portray as our downfall, may in fact be our best hope for renewal as a nation.
Customer Review: Just the message we need
The aging of America is upon us. Boomers will start turning 60 on January 1, 2006.

To read the papers, you would think that this event is going to be the start of a long gray sunset in which older adults suck the money out of the federal treasury and life out of our communities. Freedman’s lively book suggests a different and much more optimistic view in which people who have finished their midlife careers can make great new contributions.

We have plenty of problems that need solving in our communities and in our country. Freedman shows us how older adults might play a huge role in meeting those challenges, and at the same time have an enriching experience in doing so.

A must read for anyone who is interested in what our society will look like over the next few decades.
Customer Review: It’s about time!
Freedman is a refreshing voice who puts a welcome human face on the aging of our society–a topic most often dealt with through dire statistical predictions and paranoia. Prime Time illustrates that, while the demographic revolution is real, a negative whammy on America doesn’t have to be the result. The profiles of everyday heroes reveal the classic American values of ingenuity and social concern applied through a new generation of retirement-age people. The perspective on the formation of the notion of “golden years” is informative. The succinct reporting of the prevailing social value attached to older Americans from the Puritan era (revered sources of wisdom) to more recent decades (keepers of leisure time) is important. And the telling of the selling of Sun City is a hoot–an “only in America” tale that provides lots of context for understanding society’s ambivalence and confusion in dealing with the opportunity and challenges inherent in an aging population. This is a good book for anyone interested in new visions for an older country.

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