No Country for Old Age

“A groundbreaking study on the discourse and culture of aging and youth in the United States. . . . [The book] offers a highly convincing historical account of the shifting contours of aging and rejuvenation in American society beyond the boundary of academia and medicine.”—Technology and Culture

“Honeck . . . demonstrates in his monograph No Country for Old Age that the United States of America has always claimed to be young . . . [and] provide[s] a version of US history that can certainly help us understand the current development of this not-so-young democracy.”—H-Soz-Kult

“An important entry in the growing field of ‘age studies.’ . . . Honeck’s book is a welcome reminder that those debates [about youth] will be inevitably tied to others: debates about gender, sexuality, race, and empire.”—Journal of Social History

“Honeck’s tracing of rejuvenation schemes upsets and contributes to the historiography in important ways. But a history of rejuvenation is not a history of old age or youth. The questions provoked by the book might push scholars in the direction of exploring how we imagine the entire life course.”—Isis

“An insightful and readable history of rejuvenation as a medical practice and cultural concept that pushes analytical boundaries to show how age functions as a vector of power. Original and new in its scope and method, Honeck’s work gives us a global and intersectional analysis of rejuvenation available nowhere else.”—Corinne T. Field, University of Virginia

“Mischa Honeck’s No Country for Old Age is meticulously researched, a compelling read, and an important contribution to our understanding of the politics of aging in American culture. Honeck’s sophisticated use of age and aging as historical analytics allows us to rethink the past and future of our bodies, the technologies that maintain and modify them, the social meanings they bear, and the political work they do.”—Gabriel Rosenberg, Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

“In a tour de force, Mischa Honeck presents a fresh look on American history through the lens of America’s struggle against fading youth. In elegant prose, amusing anecdotes, and sharp analyses, No Country for Old Age takes its readers from George Washington to Jane Fonda and from Valley Forge to Silicon Valley’s transhumanist hopes of the twenty-first century. The book is a page-turner.”—Jürgen Martschukat, Erfurt University