Aging: Concepts and Controversies

Presenting current research in an innovative text-reader format, Aging: Concepts and Controversies, Ninth Edition encourages students to become involved and take an informed stand on the major aging issues we face as a society. Not simply a summary of research literature, Harry R. Moody and Jennifer R. Sasser’s text focuses on controversies and questions, rather than on assimilating facts or arriving at a single "correct" view about aging and older people. Drawing on their extensive expertise, the authors first provide an overview of aging in three domains: aging over the life course, health care, and the socioeconomic aspects of aging. Each section is followed by a series of edited readings, offering different perspectives from experts and specialists on that subject.

• New readings focus on whether current federal spending on the elderly is sustainable and fair to other groups, how older consumers are reshaping the business landscape, and the challenges of marketing and selling to customers 60 and over.
• More emphasis is placed on how social class and inequality earlier in life can shape our final years and the number of older Americans living in poverty.
• The section on Aging and Health Care has been thoroughly updated to reflect the latest data about chronic diseases that affect the elderly, government spending on health care, and policy changes to programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
• The section on the Social and Economic Outlook for an Aging Society gives the most current picture of the racial and ethnic diversity of older Americans, their participation in the labor force, and their income and wealth.

Harry R. Moody is a graduate of Yale University and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He has taught philosophy at Columbia University, Hunter College, New York University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.  He recently retired as Vice President and Director of Academic Affairs for AARP in Washington, DC.  He is currently Visiting Professor at Tohoku University in Japan, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Fielding Graduate University.  Dr. Moody previously served as Executive Director of the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College and Chairman of the Board of Elderhostel (now Road Scholar). Moody is the author of over 100 scholarly articles, as well as a number of books including: Abundance of Life: Human Development Policies for an Aging Society (Columbia University Press, 1988) and Ethics in an Aging Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). His most recent book, The Five Stages of the Soul, was published by Doubleday Anchor Books and has been translated into seven languages worldwide.  He is the editor of a newsletter, "Human Values in Aging," reaching 10,000 subscribers each month. In 2011 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society on Aging and in 2008 he was named by Utne Reader Magazine as one of  “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”

Jennifer R. Sasser is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, where she coordinates the gerontology program. She joined the Marylhurst faculty in 1997 and since that time has been involved in the design and implementation of many on-campus and Web-based courses and programs for adult learners, including the graduate and undergraduate certificate programs in gerontology. While conducting her doctoral work at Oregon State University, she was a graduate teaching and research fellow, as well as the first recipient of the AARP/Andrus Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Gerontology. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Sasser has studied and written about creativity in later life; older women’s embodiment; critical gerontological theory; and transformational adult learning practices. She served on the Oregon Gerontological Association Board of Directors starting in 2005 and was President of the Board for three years. In 2012, she received a Distinguished Teacher award from the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education.