A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife And Beyond in the Inner City [Paperback]

Katherine S. Newman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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 Alfred
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Forbes '41 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is the author of several books on urban poverty, including No Shame in My Game, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Prize and the Sidney Hillman Book Award in 2000, and Chutes and Ladders. She lives in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Paperback: 306 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The; 1 edition (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595580816
• ISBN-13: 978-1595580818
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #608,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Katherine Newman is professor of sociology and James Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Author of ten books on middle-class economic instability, urban poverty, and the sociology of inequality, Newman has taught at the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton.

Customer Reviews

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very helpful in understanding racial disparities among elders, January 13, 2008

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B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife And Beyond in the Inner City (Paperback)

Katherine Newman is a scholar who actually writes readable books, including A Different Shade of Gray, which is a presentation of research she did on racial and class disparities of the aging experience in America. In an earlier book, No Shame in My Game, Newman explored the experiences of young, low-wage workers in Harlem. That too was a highly readable and interesting book, this one about economic inequities among poor people of color. Both books amply demonstrate that there is a group of gainfully employed urban dwellers, mostly black and Hispanic, who are poor even though they are hard workers who, for the most part, do the right things. Yet they fail to get ahead because of multiple structural and attitudinal barriers within American society.

I read A Different Shade of Gray so that I could better understand why some racial and social groups in our incredibly wealthy nation experience a sad and impoverished old age. Not surprisingly, Newman identifies an underfunded public education system as one of the major barriers that keep the urban poor from working their way out of poverty by the time they retire. But there are a number of other roadblocks that tend to push elders,particularly women, into poverty. One of these is the failure to acquire assets during their working years because low-income women often must curtail work hours, or quit work altogether, to care for ill family members or for children.

Newman describes an entire generation of elder black women who are now raising grandchildren because their own daughters fell prey to the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Having responsibilities for grandkids, as well as themselves and perhaps others in their extended families, has wiped out the modest retirement savings of these women and exposed them and their grandchildren to lives that demand they make tough choices every day, choices such as whether to buy medicine or food.

Most interesting is that the elders who Newman interviewed and tracked for her study do not place blame for their situations on anyone's shoulders but their own. While they recognize the structural barriers to the success of themselves and others in their neighborhoods, they seem to hold those values that many Americans share -- respect for hard work, commitment to their communities and a clear belief that they are responsible for their own success or failure. While perhaps admirable, this is sad because surely many of these people have invested a great deal of time and energy in their families, their work and their communities and it seems to me they deserve a better shake than they have gotten from the world. With some relatively minor changes in public policy -- changes that Newman outlines in the final chapter of A Different Shade of Gray -- many urban retirees would be able to experience a small slice of the American Dream that they did indeed work for, and do indeed deserve.