Awards
- Nominated for James Willard Hurst Prize 2013
- Nominated for Lawrence W. Levine Award 2013
- Nominated for Littleton-Griswold Prize 2012
- Nominated for Merle Curti Award 2013
Overview
We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life's most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation. Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money. From one of the bedrocks of the human condition-the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young-emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.
Full Product Details
Author: Hendrik Hartog
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.80cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.544kg
ISBN: 9780674046887
ISBN 10: 0674046889
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 15 January 2012
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
A page-turner with Dickensian overtones. -- Fred A Bernstein New York Times blog 20120215 Aside from the history of development in this area of law, the book offers a social and cultural history of families caring for their elder members. This book will be of interest not only to those interested in estate law but also students and researchers of gerontology. -- C. Ross Choice 20120701
Author Information
Hendrik Hartog is Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University.
