My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades After 50
by Abigail Trafford
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Book Summary Information
Author: Abigail TraffordEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2005-01-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 273
Book Reviews of My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades After 50
Book Review: Worth Reading, But Missing Key Aspects
Summary: 3 Stars
I was (and am) a big admirer of Trafford's earlier book on divorce, "Crazy Time." Also, I was a long-time reader of her Washington Post health care column. I am a Baby Boomer, in my middle fifties, and I was delighted to find that Trafford had written a book about the "Second Adolescence."
But I have some concerns about "My Time." The people used as examples in this book are not Baby Boomers (who are the people currently entering their forties and fifties) -- the people in "My Time" are, as shown from details in their life histories, members of the preceeding generation, the Silent Generation. They are mostly talking to Trafford while they are in their 60s and 70s about how they experienced their 50s.
Now their "looking back on it" perspective provides much useful advice to those of us now entering our 50s or in our 50s. But their life stories are so different from those of Baby Boomers that there is not enough help for us on key issues.
For example, everyone in this book -- typical Silent Generation folks -- settled down to careers and married and had children very young. Nearly all the women in the book were traditional homemakers with children who did not start careers until much later in life. Nearly all the men went directly from college to jobs as lawyers and doctors.
So their "My Time" experiences are very different from those of Baby Boomers.
Her focus on the Silent Generation also ignores the major issues Baby Boomers face as we enter our fifties -- her interviewees all have secure pensions, paid-off homes, built-in medical insurance, and their worst problem is losing too much money from their 401ks during stock market crashes.
Baby Boomers have lost their social safety nets -- many of us will have to continue working the rest of our lives because we have been deprived of secure pension plans, and unlike the Silent Generation, we will have to fight for medical care and Social Security.
Which brings me to another problem with this book -- nearly everyone in it, even the people who were born into the working class -- are now upperclass professionals, and mostly white.
Where are the middle class and the poor? where are the racial minorities? where are the gay people? where are the Asians? where is everybody else? Not everyone reaches their fifties married, white, with kids, and well-off.
I kept feeling like Trafford and I were living on different planets.
Sure, there were a few -- maybe two -- interviews with people who had started out poor -- and who also happened to be African-American/Latino -- but that made the enormous "whiteness" and "moneyied" aspects of the other interviewees glaringly apparent.
Also, while her interviewees have a few problems, they don't seem to have nearly as many as the rest of the population. Her interviewees had some divorces -- a few cases of alcoholism -- but where were the druggie kids? the people with chronic illnesses? the people in wheelchairs? the mentally retarded or autistic children? The families all seem to have perfect, college-educated, married offspring who are producing grandchildren. Most of the people who become ill in Trafford's book don't linger -- they die quickly, within about two paragraphs.
Trafford mentions her mother's and siblings' illnesses -- but almost everyone else in this book -- until they drop dead of a heart attack -- seems set to keep playing tennis forever in, say, the wealthy Georgetown area of DC.
So why should Baby Boomers buy this book? I am reading it because it has useful discussions of the emotional turbulence that set in during the fifties, a second adolescence, and how Trafford's interviewees entered and left relationships, moved to new cities, coped with (a few) deaths in their families, and started new careers.
While Boomer life trajectories and problems are very different from those of her Silent Generation interviewees, we can learn from some of their coping stratgies.
Those aspects of the book were extremely helpful, and why I have given the book three stars instead of one.
So please, Ms. Trafford, if you see this review, please rewrite the book for its second edition, and include the Baby Boomers, and include people in dire straits where things aren't working out neatly -- people who have serious chronic illnesses, or are still workingclass, etc. I'm a big fan of the rest of your work!
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