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A Bittersweet Season: Caring For Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves (2011)

by Jane Gross(Favorite Author)

4.16 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

030727182X (ISBN13: 9780307271822)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: A refreshingly unflinching and unsentimental (rather like the author's mother!) guide whose advice I fortunately have not yet had to put to the test myself. However, it seems like excellent reading both for elderly parent and adult child to help with preparation for difficult conversations and decisions. My main quibble is that as someone with no children herself, and whose sources on this particular topic all seemed to be upper middle class professionals, Jane Gross really should have steered clear of discussing the relative challenges of child- vs. elder-care for working women. She seems to see childcare as something American women rose up en masse and solved in the 1970s! Does she realize that the US is one of the only countries in the world (along with Lesotho, Papua N... moreew Guinea and Swaziland) that has no mandated paid maternity leave? Or that the three years in which she was relatively heavily involved in her mother's care, difficult though they were, pale when compared to the 15+ years many working mothers spend having to figure out what to do about sick children who can't go to school or daycare, babysitters who quit with no notice, exorbitant fees and long waiting lists for high quality daycares, figuring out before/after school care and school holiday camps, transportation to/from extracurriculars, school demands for volunteering and fundraising, etc.? Her frequent references to eldercare being harder than childcare due to the relatively predictable timeline of pregnancy show a limited understanding of what is involved in juggling a career and parenting, and undermine an otherwise excellent book. It also would have been nice to have had a summary at the end of the most important tips she shared since the book was dense with good factual information interspersed with personal reminiscence.
review 2: Jane Gross has combined a self-help book on caring for an aging parent along with a memoir of the last three years that she and her brother spent taking care of their dying mother. The two parts don't always work together very well. I think the memoir portion is more successful. Still, it was a book that gave me much to think about as I, along with many others, have to consider the lives of our aging parents and their care in the future. less

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