Using an innovative interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the construction and experience of (old-age) burden and dependency in depression-era America and beyond. Fourteen scholars from a range of disciplines came together over two years to read and discuss the same materials and to create, largely successfully, ‘a new [interdisciplinary] object which belongs to no one’ (p. 20). At its heart are the records of the Luella Hannan Memorial Home (LHMH), a charitable trust which distributed financial assistance to the ‘deserving’ old people of Detroit from 1929. However, the book aims to go beyond the experiences of the LHMH clients, to point towards resonances across the decades and to advance current-day policies and discourses of old age. Social class forms a key point of analysis, as two different funds were administered by the LHMH: one to aid those who were considered ‘high types’ culturally and socially, and one for everyone else. A close reading of 14 of over 800 case files forms the bulk of the analysis.

Even with a multiplicity of perspectives, the book achieves coherence, with many connections across the chapters and an overarching desire to investigate, problematise and overcome discourses of burden and their effects. Most contributions are united in mobilising a feminist approach to gerontological work, which both of the editors have been influential in advancing. When a disciplinary disconnect occasionally emerges (e.g. the ambiguous difference between the anthropologists' ‘personhood’ in Chapter 4 and communication scholars' ‘social identity’ in Chapter 5), this serves as a reminder of the divisions that these collaborators have generally overcome.

Of the four main sections, the first covers the historical context of the LHMH case files. Next, the contributors present ‘brief biographical sketches’ of the people whose cases they will be analysing. Some of the salient points in this second section are repeated verbatim in the analytical chapters that follow. However, its inclusion is central to the theoretical commitments of the volume (drawing on Virginia Oleson's feminist qualitative research): to see each person in their entirety, not just as a ‘case’, and to highlight the diversity of old people's experiences.

The interdisciplinary richness emerges in the third section, as collaborators each analyse a small number of individual cases in terms of their own particular interests and disciplinary tools. The negotiations made by the clients of the LHMH are the focus of Chapters 5, 6 and 7, each emphasising their agency in the face of deprivation and the bureaucratic norms of the charity. Donyale Griffey and Shu-hui Sophy Cheng show how three women resisted dependency and attempted to avoid the social marginalisation which came with the status of ‘little old lady’. In Chapter 6, Chastity Bailey-Fakhiury and Heather Dillaway look at two particularly privileged women on the LHMH books, who mobilised their considerable social capital in negotiations with the visitors and the board. In Chapter 7, anthropologists Sherylyn Briller and Mary Durocher focus on material culture, highlighting how two sisters used ‘objects and things’ to maintain their sense of identity under changing circumstances. Toni Calasanti and Jill Harrison pick up the theme of privilege in Chapter 8, exploring how position within the social formation affects people's ability to negotiate with authorities. Focusing on the only two black clients of the LHMH, they show clearly how race and gender impacted on the perceptions of their ‘deservingness’. By illustrating how the outcomes of black clients differed from those of whites, they show how the construction of deservingness can have serious material consequences.

Finally, Section Four looks to the future. Elizabeth Edson Chapelski's chapter could stand alone, and would make a good addition to an undergraduate reading list as a brief historical survey of gerontological enquiry and ageism in the 20th century. The two editors then consider how the problems of age and dependency in the 1920s and 1930s might be mitigated in the future. Calasanti argues for policies which reject neoliberal cultural values of personal responsibility and recognise the realities of interdependence and the benefits of pooled risk. Ray argues for a collective ethic of care.

While this volume deals with the past, it is not exactly a work of history, as noted in the introduction. Many historians would feel somewhat squeamish about mobilising the past to serve the present in such a direct way, but historians do not have a monopoly on the records of the past and this book benefits from the multiplicity of analyses brought to these resources. The only caveat is that we should be vigilant in considering always how far back such present-centric projects can tenably look. This is a book of wide relevance, not just for social gerontologists in their many guises, but to anyone seeking a model of how deep and coherent interdisciplinary work can be managed.