Linking consumer culture and later life is not, according to this book, a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the over-60s, far from being relics of a bygone pre-consumption era, are precisely those who grew up and matured with mass consumption. This short book is a welcome addition to the expanding field of cultural gerontology. Its thesis is underpinned by a UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded analysis of eight years of Great Britain Family Expenditure Survey (FES) data taken at five-year intervals between 1968 and 2001. What makes this book distinctive is that it presents the extensive statistical findings alongside conceptual, theoretical and historical discussion, more the better to reprise and elaborate ideas expounded in the authors' previous writing. What emerges is a thoughtful contribution to debates about the structural and cultural position of ‘baby-boomers’ in relation to consumption. What indeed is at stake and why should it matter?

The book first grapples with the cohort and generation nomenclature which often dogs attempts to chart social change. This clarification has to be done to justify the hypothesis that consumption among the over-60s has changed in significant ways: they consume more than their predecessors but may not be very different from other consumers. Here the authors pay their respects to the Third Age theorists, primarily Laslett (Reference Laslett1996), who celebrated the appearance of new modalities of ageing. The authors argue, however, that we need a conceptual frame which captures the evolving historical conditions in which lives are begun, the wider structural and material changes which intersect with them as they unspool, the cultural transformations that these lives help bring about, yielding aspirations and actual practices which may allow for distinctive cultural groups, such as Third Agers, to emerge and consolidate. The authors apply Bourdieu's concepts to capture the reality and contingency of cultural distinction, using ‘generational habitus’ to denote the potential for distinctive patterns of social action and dispositions based on the historical location of particular cohorts, and ‘cultural field’ to denote the space in which these patterns are expressed, the authors embark on their analysis.

Over the last 30 years in the United Kingdom, the over-60s have increasingly been living in single-generational households and the authors systematically expose their consumption practices. Some key themes emerge: they are better off, as reflected in what they consume. Over time their consumption patterns have become more similar to those of young-adult consumers. They spend less of their income on goods that are deemed to be necessities and more of it on others such as computers, cars, fridges and washing machines. There are nonetheless many inequalities in the consumption of certain goods: gender, housing tenure, whether people derive their incomes from the UK state pension only and age all structure what is consumed. Their analysis leads the authors to conclude that it is no longer sustainable to equate later life with poverty.

The section on health-care consumption is a critique of the neoliberal turn and of the attempt to reconstruct the use of health and welfare services as acts of consumption in a quasi-market that offers empowerment through choice. The available evidence suggests that in reality this market is highly regulated and this reconstruction owes more to the rhetoric of state retrenchment than the actual presence of infinite and unrestricted choice. The authors anticipate that the uncertain viability of current pension arrangements may give rise to intergenerational conflict: we may be facing a future of age inequalities but not necessarily in the expected direction. Clearly the attempt to install consumption as the route to citizenship is fraught with dangers. It may work today but not tomorrow and we will have to think hard about how we finance the old age of subsequent cohorts.

The book demonstrates well that consumption is a normal and even normative part of growing older in late capitalism and has shadowed the shift to neoliberal government in the health and welfare sector. It shows effectively how and what people consume (within the parameters of the FES dataset). What the analysis cannot convey is a sense of the lived experience of consuming; nor does it illuminate the micro-patterns of consumption which would undoubtedly reveal the competition for distinction in which different groups of late-life consumers engage, and how these reflect their habitus. To this end, it might be more fruitful to conceptualise consumption in more differentiated ways, rather than as a single ‘social’ field. Indeed it is through consumption among other things that people express and manifest their distinctiveness. The ability to ‘read’ and anticipate high social and cultural value in particular goods and acts of consumption is what confers cultural capital. This in turn mirrors the amount of economic, and by extension symbolic, capital that people have at their disposal, to say nothing of their physical capital. Be that as it may, the above should not detract from the quality of the analysis presented in the book, which makes it essential reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural gerontology. As a pioneer, it is the starting point for a programme of research on micro-consumption practices.