Medical Sociology and Old Age is a timely conversation between social gerontology, medical sociology and critical inquiry. Authors Paul Higgs and Ian Rees Jones explore the intersections between these fields to create a new thought space about their integration. With seven clearly written and tightly argued chapters, their book is a primer on how ‘later life and health need to be understood in the context of social change’ (p. x); more precisely, how the overlapping demographic, cultural, biopolitical, economic and health dimensions of social change are materialised, negotiated and embodied in the lives of older people today. The first five chapters outline the scientific, professional, historical and cultural background to our understanding of the ageing process. Chapter 1 examines the neglect of ageing in medical sociology's two most progressive orbits of research: social health inequalities and chronic illnesses. Chapter 2 similarly castigates social gerontology for side-stepping the new worlds of ageing lifestyles, retirement cultures and late-life consumerism, in favour of the field's emphases on dependency and the problems of ageing cohorts. The third chapter tackles the sub-field of the sociology of the body and its status today, especially given the symbolic load with which the body has been burdened in our ‘somatic society’. Sociologists such as Erving Goffman, Bryan Turner, Chris Shilling and Michel Foucault are reviewed here at a rather dizzying pace, along with the authors' commentary about the consequences of new biomedical ‘enhancement’ technologies and anti-ageing cultures for older individuals, who must negotiate ‘successful ageing’ identities. The chapter's conclusion about critical realist perspectives, which neither neglect, naturalise nor moralise the biological realities of ageing, return debates about identity, ageing and the body to sensible ground.

Chapters 4 and 5 consider recent theoretical work in gerontology. Chapter 4 is a helpful overview of the global forces and neoliberal trends restructuring national pension and eldercare programmes. The authors argue that, as political reform centres on privatisation and decentralisation, emergent cultural narratives are limited either to a celebration of third-age wellness or a condemnation of dependency as personal failure. As the chapter turns to feminist, post-modern and cultural gerontology, the writing advances the critical vocabulary introduced earlier about ageing within a ‘second modernity’, a time of blurring between traditional chronological boundaries, loosening of ageing identities, and embracing post-human bodily technologies. This second modernity is also identified as the inspiration for post-modern models, whereby ageing is ‘conceived as multilayered and plastic with “old age” becoming almost meaningless’ (pp. 61–2). Chapter 5, curiously entitled ‘The death of old age: critical approaches as undertakers’, focuses on themes of the anti-ageing marketisation of the body, life extension and the place of death, thereby strengthening the book's objective to fill in medical sociology's conceptual vacancies about later life.

Chapter 6, ‘The birth of a new sociology of health in later life’, sketches five agendas for medical sociological research: the somatic society at later ages, the ‘arc of acquiescence’, anti-ageing medicine and technologies, boundaries between third and fourth ages, and death and immortality. While each are a concise cluster of questions addressed to medical sociologists, the discussion of the boundaries between the third and fourth ages is particularly insightful, explaining how the fourth age (deep old age) has become depicted as ‘a point of no return’ and the ‘black hole’ of ageing in relation to the agential and ‘active’ third age. These areas, along with the assemblage of theoretical and critical ideas from earlier chapters, are drawn together in the concluding Chapter 7, which asks how we should be thinking about ageing today and what, if anything, is meant by ‘normal’ in ageing research. If, ‘gone are certainties about time, nature and bodily boundaries that helped set limits to the self’ (p. 105), along with the stability of traditional lifecourses themselves, then the ‘longevity revolution’ is a far deeper and dynamic set of problems than the static models of gerontology present.

Medical Sociology and Old Age is a valuable critical exercise that will appeal to readers from many professional backgrounds. There is some imbalance between the length of the text and the amount packed into it. This creates disjointedness between the chapters, which do not flow as naturally from one to the other as they might if the exposition had been more expansive. As well, some of the authors and researchers that Higgs and Jones critique will undoubtedly disagree with the authors' assessment of their thinking as short-sighted or unimaginative. However, few would argue with the book's overall message, that our elders, who worked so hard to build welfare states to protect them from the vagaries of the market, are now being consumed by them instead.