There's No Place like A Nursing Home: 4 Powerful Steps That Will Change Your Life
Author: Karen S Shoff
Four powerful steps begun in one's middle years will allow readers to avoid a future nursing home placement. This plan preserves assets and removes the burden of caregiving from loved ones. All will be able to receive the highest level of care in dignity at home.
What People Are Saying
Lenore J. Weitzman
This exciting book could save your life! We all know about the potential crises of aging, but few of us know how to avoid them, or how to cope when we - or our parents - face an unexpected emergency and are told that a nursing home is the only answer. But Karen Shoff shows us how to cope, how to plan, and how to stay in control. It is easy to read, optimistic and sensible, and full of loving, caring, life-affirming help.
— Robinson Professor of Sociology and Law, George Mason University and author of The Marriage Contract and The Divorce Revolution
Michael Medved
Only a person who has seen Karen Shoff in action can truly appreciate her enthusiasm for life and her dedication to others. Karen advised and guided our family through the tangle of detail involved in caring for our mother in her own home during her final illness. I have rarely met a person so completely concerned for the dignity and well-being of others. She is one of today's leading experts on aging and long-term care issues. This book is indispensable for anyone who is aging - and that is all of us.
— Nationally syndicated radio host and best-selling author
Steven H. Zarit
There's No Place Like (a Nursing) Home gives a tour of the hard realities of long term care in America today. Karen Shoff combines the talents of a skilled geriatric social worker with extensive knowledge of ho to plan and pay for long term care.. The message of the book is to face the challenges of old age with a plan, so that you can have control over what happens to you or your loved ones. This is a book that everyone with an older parent or who is growing older themselves should read.
— Professor of Human Development and Assistant Director of the Gerontology Center, The Pennsylvania State University
William J. Goode
Karen Shoff's book throws a lifeline to America's adult population.
— Professor emeritus, Stanford University former president of the American Sociological Association and author of World Revolution in Family Patterns
Nelson, Hannah
There's No Place Like (a Nursing) Home is the quintessential primer on long-term care - a map with a moral compass on how to navigate the treacherous highways of growing old, ill or infirm, while still staying in the driver's seat for the distance. Karen Shoff's knowledge is matched by her compassion: ingredients that make this book an authoritative and balanced expert presentation. Indeed, the author is an 'inside expert' on a subject that every one of us needs to master. This is not a title that will stay on the shelf: It contains seminal information for consumers and professionals alike. "This book is a wake-up call - it will make you think seriously about how you want to manage your life after age 55. As so many of our financial assumptions are overturned by changes in the economy, it becomes imperative to take charge of our affairs. There's No Place Like (a Nursing) Home walks you through the realities of the average nursing home experience, providing a graphic and chilling factual explanation of why nursing homes represent the most restrictive environment for care (and poor economic value, to boot!). "In happy contrast, the author offers hope by debunking the myths of home care and long term care insurance, giving you all the information you need to make informed decisions about what is best for you. It is very much a book about self-determination and empowerment. Autonomy in your senior years? Now it's possible. "I salute Karen Shoff's courage in writing a vital book whose time has come, and for her generosity in sharing her encyclopedic fund of knowledge with the public.
— Chief of Staff Jacobi Medical Center, New York
Feinstein, Eben
I wholeheartedly endorse Karen Shoff's empowering and confident approach to long term care planning. In today's health care environment, it is crucial that individuals plan ahead and take control of their decision making. This book should be read by all internists and family practice physicians caring for patients, who will some day benefit from the excellent ideas presented in this book.
— Chairman, Department of Medicine Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles, California
Pierce-Miller, Sandra
In her book, There's No Place Like (a Nursing) Home, Ms. Shoff has applied a special talent for writing along with her personal experience with long-term care and long-term care insurance, to provide people with tools that will help them remain in their homes when they need long-term care. Especially appealing is that Ms. Shoff has gone beyond sharing important information on long-term care insurance, and provided sound, vital advice that will help people ensure that they and their loved ones receive the care they need from caregivers that they can trust.
— State of California Department of Health Services Director, California Partnership for Long-Term Care
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Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension
Author: Stephen S Hall
Regenerative medicine and human life extension are among the most cutting-edge pursuits in science, and potentially among the most profitable. In Merchants of Immortality, Stephen S. Hall offers both an expose<acute accent> of this fascinating science and a case study of the billion-dollar industry that has grown up around it. At the center of the field are stem cell research and cloning -- topics of continuous ethical debate -- and the stem cell legislation that has unintentionally created a strange and thriving private-sector business niche. Merchants of Immortality is a captivating, incisive account of a new frontier at the intersection of biology and business.
The New York Times
This ultimate scientific quest -- this attack on the ravages of aging, potentially on mortality itself, and the lengths to which we are now taking it -- is what brings Hall here. The full tale spills out in a daunting number of directions. … It is a measure of Hall's skill as a science writer … that he manages to navigate through all this as lucidly as he does. — Atul Gawande
The Washington Post
Merchants of Immortality is a highly readable and important book. Hall, the author of two previous books about science and medicine, is an expert explicator, able to make the most difficult biology easy to understand. But he is at his best when describing the cast of characters involved in the science and politics and when chronicling recent events. — Shannon Brownlee
Publishers Weekly
Drawing on scores of original interviews and contemporary source material, Hall, a contributing writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine (Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene), gives a timely and engrossing account of the high-stakes science of life extension. The author kicks off with the minence grise of the field, Leonard Hayflick, and his human cell line called WI-38, which opened the gates for biotech research and showed that our cells may have built-in limitations on longevity. His WI-38 strain, taken from aborted fetus cells used to develop a polio vaccine, also became an ethical flash point that, as the author shows, has steered the course of biomedical research in aging, cancer, stem cells and cloning. Here, too, are the repeated rise and fall of entrepreneur Michael West, the idiosyncratic "lapsed creationist, born-again Darwinist," who merges his spiritual belief in immortality with big money science. Hall aims to show how the Clinton administration's decision not to support therapeutic cloning and regenerative medicine represented government held hostage by "heavy-handed, ideological fundamentalism, enforced by anonymous thuggery." The book wraps with President George W. Bush's decision in 2001 to allow stem-cell research to proceed, but only using already existing cell lines. Among Hall's conclusions: distrust of science is the subtext of the debate over embryonic stem cells and research cloning, and regenerative medicine is inevitably yoked to health-care limitations in access, affordability, timeliness and, Hall writes, "simply, good medicine." He says the notion of "victory over mortality" is a canard, but we may be able to slow the aging process. This is top-drawer journalism. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (June 18) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The average human life span has increased by almost 30 years since 1900. How far can life expectancy be pushed? Some leading researchers are so bold as to propose "practical immortality." Hall, a well-respected science writer (A Commotion in the Blood: Life, Death and the Immune System), handles a subject too often prone to sensationalism by focusing on the hard science behind life-extension research. He also animates the technical material with vivid profiles of major players in the field, such as Leonard Hayflick, whose career has encompassed some monumental highs and lows, and Michael West, a former adherent to creationism who now heads a private company dedicated to the study of human aging. Clearly, this is a topic that has age-old appeal and is also on the frontier of advanced science. For example, stem-cell research is one of the field's hot-button issues. There are plenty of self-help guides giving advice on how to live longer, but anybody who really wants to understand how this might happen and what wondrous benefits might result, as well as face up to the possibly dire pitfalls of circumventing mortality, will find this book fascinating. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Gregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Immortality? Perhaps not, but life extension is already a reality. Science writer Hall (A Commotion in the Blood, 1997, etc.) explores just how much more time we can expect. He begins with Leonard Hayflick, who in the late 1950s found that living cells lose their ability to keep dividing after about 50 generations. There was soon evidence tying this "Hayflick limit" to telomeres, repetitive DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes that grow shorter with each division. On the reasonable theory that preserving these sequences might help stave off senescence, biochemists began searching for the enzyme that creates telomeres. Entrepreneurs were close on their heels, among them Michael West, who has been a highly visible pitchman for the effort to extend human life through biotechnology. His early company, Geron, was founded to explore the potential of telomerase to slow aging; later, the company looked at its application to cancer. When telomere research was slow to bear fruit, West and his colleagues moved on to newer and more promising areas, notably the undifferentiated cells that form early in the growth of an embryo. These stem cells have the ability to mutate into any bodily tissue, from bone to nerve to heart muscle; their potential for medical use may be boundless. But their derivation from embryonic material set off a raging political debate, culminating in the Bush administration's perhaps ill-advised decision to restrict stem-cell research to those lines already in existence as of August 2001. Hall gives the reader a fair summary of the arguments on all sides, while making clear his own view that politicians ought to tread very carefully when intruding into scientific questions thatnot even the scientists have entirely sorted out. A carefully documented examination of how society deals with life-and-death matters. Author tour
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