In Inequalities of Aging, Elana Buch provides an intimate portrayal of the daily lives of older adults in need of care and their home care workers, showing how the vulnerabilities each experiences are intertwined. Based on fieldwork traversing domestic and bureaucratic sites of care across Chicago from 2006 to 2008, the book focuses on employees and clients of two home care agencies. Buch does an excellent job in immersing the reader in the lived experiences of the workers and their clients, and the relations that develop through the course of their daily care. In doing so, the book shows how diverse histories of care, immediate needs, training and policies contribute to expectations and experiences of care.

Throughout the book, Buch focuses on older adults’ struggle for independence despite weakening bodies and an increasing need for assistance. She discusses how care relationships operate in practice, and the meanings and consequences of these relationships for those who participate in them. While also emphasising the importance of the independence provided by home care, Buch cautions against neo-liberal narratives of cost-effectiveness, warning that in the home care industry there is a danger that increased independence for older people conflicts with the wellbeing of care-givers. She posits that while considerable resources are spent on medical care, comparatively few resources are provided on improving wages, which places home care workers in positions of financial precarity. As a result, we witness how employment which enables some older adults to live independently also manifests in forms of social inequalities. The book explores the ways these inequalities are experienced by workers who earn low wages and often face a struggle to provide for their families. At the same time, by focusing on home care work in Chicago, Buch draws attention to the ways in which home care workers, primarily women, knit the city together.

The book is structured into several thematic chapters focusing on the relations between the home care workers, their clients and the home care agency supervisors. Drawing on extended life histories and observations, the first chapters show how past experiences of care and kinship shape care. Chapter 1 focuses on three very different older adults, showing how their moral imagination of care, personhood and kinship were formed, which are crucial to how they define care. Drawing on the life histories of two home care workers, the next chapter moves on to show how workers’ care for kin generates forms of moral imagination in which care practices are inextricably linked to notions of obligation, reciprocity and sacrifice. Then, Chapter 3 explores how agencies manage workers and clients, and train staff, highlighting how home care agencies and their supervisors negotiate contradictory demands of care ideologies, economic pressures and legal regulations. The ways in which home care workers engage with their own bodies as the experiential ground for imagining and sustaining older peoples’ lives is the central focus of Chapter 4, while Chapter 5 focuses on the role of home. It shows how homes are invested with history and memories, effectively becoming a material sign of independence. Chapter 6 then explores staff turnover, focusing on how the failure of agency and public policy to recognise the interdependence of older adults, workers and their families contributes to the high turnover. Finally, the concluding chapter suggests routes towards building a caring economy that generates equitable interdependence, including the need ‘to provide the living wages and benefits necessary to sustain their [home care workers’] lives and families’ (p. 209).

Overall, the book's main strengths are in its enlightening and evocative interpretations of the experiences of the older adults and their home care workers. It illustrates how their circumstances, characterised by precarious lives, are inherently linked. It shows that independence has largely been promoted, but regularly at the expense of economic and social wellbeing, providing insightful solutions to improve conditions. However, if you are expecting a book you can dip into to learn more about care experiences you are likely to be disappointed. Rather, it is a highly readable book in which to immerse yourself. Whilst it does not contain the pedagogical features used in some books (key questions, text boxes, core reading, etc.), it is a well-written and informative text. Overall, Inequalities of Aging speaks widely to issues of social inequality, exploring issues of ageing, care, employment, social class, gender and ethnicity. As such, it will be particularly useful for sociologists, social policy scholars, gerontologists and anthropologists for understanding care. It would be a useful addition to any (upper) undergraduate or graduate-level course in these fields.