A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife And Beyond in the Inner City
Popular magazines abound with references to the beneficent lives  of Americans in their older years. In this excellent work,  Newman, an urban anthropologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of  Government, contrasts this generalization with the realities of  middle-aged and elderly African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and  Dominican immigrants in New York City. Her basic sources include  the 1995 MacArthur Foundation survey of mid-life development in  the United States, a companion study of aging ethnic and racial  minorities in New York City, and in-depth personal interviews  with a sample of those minority elders. The oral histories of  their life-forming young-adult years reveal consistent  frustrations with in an environment of deteriorating  neighborhoods, vanishing economic opportunities, devastating  invasions of crack cocaine, broken families headed by females,  minimal community support systems, and outmoded public  assistance policies. Newman's research reveals that elderly  Americans in New York City's inner enclaves are generally poor  and stressed, too often overwhelmed by financial and personal  worries and obligations-an unfortunate, though potentially  correctable, aberration to what luckier elders in America accept  as a relatively sanguine time of life. Academic and larger  public libraries will want to purchase this.Suzanne W. Wood,  emerita, SUNY Coll. of Technology at AlfredCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.