James Chappel's "Golden Years"

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. The author of Catholic Modern, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic.

Chappel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book is about the birth of “retirement communities” after World War II. It describes especially those neighborhoods that were known as ARCs, or “age-restricted communities.” These came into being for the first time in this era. It also describes other forms of congregate living for senior citizens that sprang up in the 1960s, including some sponsored by the federal government. Lastly, it describes some research, undertaken then and since, that indicates that age restriction of this sort has many benefits for older people.

This is a fun page, I think! It definitely brings the reader into the mind-set of the book as a whole. After all, the main questions of the book are: why did America decide that “older people” are a class apart, and how has that changed over time, and what have been the costs and benefits of such a decision? The book talks a great deal about social policy and popular culture—those are probably the two main throughlines of the book. But another thread concerns housing, which after all is one of the most important issues facing older people, and younger ones, today.

The issue of housing does not have a chapter of its own, but it crops up in every single chapter. Basically, the early parts of the book, about the early twentieth century, show how older people used to live, primarily, with family members. The middle parts of the book, from which page 99 are drawn, show how senior citizens participated in the vogue for independent, single-family homes after World War II. Now, they parritipated somewhat uncomfortably in this vogue, because an older couple without resident children is not really a “single family,” as the term is usually understood. Other forms of senior housing therefore developed, of which the ARCs and retirement communities were one. The last part of the book shows the crisis that has been wrought by that drive for independent housing, which creates crises in the care economy and also in the housing market. It describes new experiments in assisted living facilities, and the return of intergenerational living.

Learn more about Golden Years at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue