No Country for Old Age

302 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 23 halftones

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8097-2
Published: January 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8096-5
Published: January 2025

Paperback Available January 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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Since the birth of their nation, Americans have acted on the belief that theirs was a land of youth, a place destined to offer a fresh start to an aging world. No Country for Old Age tells this story from the founding period to our present moment, but not without exposing its darker side: rejuvenation has often bred grand expectations that end in division and despair.

Mischa Honeck reveals how Americans of diverse backgrounds have sought not only to feel and look younger but also to breathe new life into their communities. Whether marching under the banners of science, public health, sexual liberation, physical fitness, nation-building, or world peace, these youth seekers have tended to paint their ventures in utopian colors. However, from the founders to today's Silicon Valley elites, anti-aging ventures have repeatedly magnified social inequalities, often projecting visions of society that have been unmistakably classist, racist, misogynist, and ageist. Today we are experiencing rejuvenation's Janus-faced legacy: As transhumanists rhapsodize about cyber-enhancing human bodies, ghastly pandemics, old-age poverty, and shrinking life expectancies are poised to become the new normal for many twenty-first-century Americans.

About the Author

Mischa Honeck is professor of North American history at the University of Kassel, Germany.
For more information about Mischa Honeck, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"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