With a Little Help from Our Friends: Creating Community as We Grow Older - Hardcover

Baker, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826519873 ISBN 13: 9780826519870

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In this book, an award-winning journalist tells the story of people devising innovative ways to live as they approach retirement, options that ensure they are surrounded by a circle of friends, family, and neighbors. Based on visits and interviews at many communities around the country, Beth Baker weaves a rich tapestry of grassroots alternatives, some of them surprisingly affordable:

· a mobile home cooperative in small-town Oregon
· a senior artists colony in Los Angeles
· neighbors helping neighbors in "Villages" or "naturally occurring retirement communities"
· intentional cohousing communities
· best friends moving in together
· multigenerational families that balance togetherness and privacy
· niche communities including such diverse groups as retired postal workers, gays and lesbians, and Zen Buddhists

Drawing on new research showing the importance of social support to healthy aging and the risks associated with loneliness and isolation, the author encourages the reader to plan for a future with strong connections. Baker explores whether individuals in declining health can really stay rooted in their communities through the end of life and concludes by examining the challenge of expanding the home-care workforce and the potential of new technologies like webcams and assistive robots.

This book is the recipient of the annual Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Experiments from across the country with new living arrangements that balance independence and community as one grows older

About the Author:

Beth Baker, a long-time freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, AARP Bulletin, Washingtonian, and Ms. Magazine, is the features editor of BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Baker is the author of Old Age in a New Age: The Promise of Transformative Nursing Homes, also published by Vanderbilt University Press. She and her husband live in a close-knit community in Takoma Park, Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0826519873
• ISBN 13: 9780826519870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256