Book Reviews
Encore is one of 2007’s five best “guides to help people prepare for and enjoy life in their 50s and beyond.”
“The five ‘mini’ autobiographies of people who have embraced [encore] careers are alone worth the price of admission.”
--The Wall Street Journal
Encore is the “Best Inspirational Retirement Guide” of 2007.
“This book challenges baby boomers to build a better world through a second career and provides concrete steps to help them find their next job.”
--Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine
“Freedman has written a wonderful…guide for boomers entering their next phase of life…This thoroughly readable book is highly recommended.”
--Library Journal (Starred Review)
“Freedman persuasively argues that later years can offer freedom to work in more flexible, meaningful ways, rather than only a time to be free from work.”
--Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Freedman presents a vision that is inherently optimistic, practical, productive and exciting.”
--Seattle Times
“Another book by Freedman in 2002…foresaw many of the trends others regurgitate now. His latest work may be just as visionary.”
--Tribune Media Services
“At 49, Marc Freedman is a poster boy for the future of America.”
--San Diego Union-Tribune
"If you’re a boomer, particularly a boomer running for president, put Encore at the top of your reading pile. This is the rare book that can change the national conversation."
--Daniel H. Pink
author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation
“Every movement needs a visionary, and baby boomers eager for meaningful second acts are lucky to have Marc Freedman. This remarkable book is as inspiring as it is important, as compelling for individuals as it is for society.”
--Sherry Lansing
CEO, Sherry Lansing Foundation,
former Chairman of Paramount Pictures
“Marc Freedman is a plausible candidate for secular sainthood. For more than a decade, this gifted social activist has worked toward an America in which aging boomers help themselves and their communities through community service—what he calls ‘the encore society.’ This well-crafted book spells out the latest development of his thesis and illustrates it with compelling personal stories.”
--Robert D. Putnam
Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University,
author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
“Sixty-four million baby boomers—forty percent of the current American work force—will begin to hit retirement age by the end of this decade. They will be the largest, healthiest, longest-living and best-educated generation in American history—to do what? Golf? Soldier on in old jobs? Or, adopting
Freedman’s inspirational idea, use their gift and experience to build a better world through an ‘encore career.’ Through a series of moving life stories, Freedman makes a convincing case for a brilliant idea whose time has come.”
--Arlie Hochschild
Author of The Time Bind: When Work is Home and Home is Work and The Commercialization of Intimate Life
“A defining book—Encore is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the changing landscape of work in America, and the opportunities to unleash the talents and aspirations of millions.”
--David Bornstein
Author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
“Many millions of maturing baby boomers will thank Marc Freedman for this warm, wise, compelling, and hopeful book. Encore contains both eye-opening stories and important guidance for policy-makers, to ensure that people can continue to make meaningful contributions throughout their longer lifetimes.”
--Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business School, author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & amp; End
“In Encore, Marc Freedman provocatively confronts the impact Baby Boomers will have on society as they age. This is a very important book for the public, for program planners, and for policy makers alike.”
--Gene D. Cohen, M.D., Ph.D.
Director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at The George Washington University and author of The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain
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Library Journal Reviews
August 15, 2007
Freedman (founding CEO, Civic Ventures: Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America) has written a wonderful summary and guide for boomers entering their next phase of life. In his words, “We need to be liberated from artificial notions such as ‘retirement age’ and the oxymoronic concept ‘working in retirement.’ “
With predictions that one in four U.S. residents will be over age 60 by the year 2030, his book serves as a wake-up call warning that we are using outdated models for viewing the pending surge of retirement-age workers. Rather than approaching retirement as a time for leisure, he argues, boomers should be using their knowledge and experience to pursue fulfilling second careers.
Freedman effectively uses personal accounts of individuals who have successfully bridged careers to find rewarding and meaningful work in later life. He puts retirement into historical perspective and gives a thorough description of current demographics, concluding with a guide to finding your own particular encore career. This thoroughly readable book is highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
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Philanthropy News Digest
September 19, 2007
Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life (New York, NY : PublicAffairs, 2007)
When I was in my twenties, I was a self-confident smarty-pants, a yuppie New Yorker working for a national humor magazine who believed the world was my oyster. My future? Old age was too far off to even think about, of course, but I suppose I imagined myself moving through a succession of gratifying and remunerative jobs, my long and happy career tapering off eventually into a life of comfortable leisure and satisfied self-contemplation.
Well, the joke was on me! In what seemed like the blink of an eye, I found myself nearing the half-century mark in life, unwillingly eased out of employment by a corporate takeover and neither psychologically nor financially prepared for early retirement. Wondering what in the world I was going to do next, I also became aware of a small voice inside my head saying, "What have you really accomplished, anyway — besides earning membership in AARP?"
For baby boomers who find themselves at such a crossroads, whether unexpected or grimly anticipated, Marc Freedman's Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life attempts to answer that most difficult of questions — now what?
Freedman, a social entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, argues that reinventing the concept of retirement is essential if we are to address the employment crisis rapidly confronting the aging baby boomer generation — a population whose lives are likely to stretch twenty or thirty years beyond the end of their primary careers. The vision of retirement as an endless vacation, he argues, is neither practical nor appealing given the economic and demographic characteristics of this population.
Beyond the concerns of individual retirees, the book also addresses the economic and social catastrophe that threatens all of America (and the world) as vast numbers of boomers leave the workforce while expecting the much smaller population of working-age adults to pick up the tab. How serious is the problem? According to Freedman, the United Nations has identified global warming, global terrorism, and global aging as "the top three socioeconomic issues of the twenty-first century."
Freedman dons many hats — historian, social critic, visionary — in addressing these problems, and in so doing paints a complex portrait of aging and working in America. In the chapter "Inventing the Golden Years," for example, he describes the evolution of retirement in America from the "gerontocracy" of Puritan times, when old age was actually esteemed, to the nineteenth century, when older workers were summarily discarded in favor of younger, cheaper replacements via mandatory retirement, to the Depression, when as many as two-thirds of older Americans lived in poverty.
Then came Social Security, originally created with the modest goal of protecting older workers from deprivation during the final years of their lives. With life expectancies steadily rising, however, it became increasingly apparent that the program was evolving into an open-ended meal ticket for a population that refused to die on cue. Retirement grew into decades of forced inactivity, producing the first hints of resentment on the part of younger generations who were asked to foot the bill and frustration on the part of retirees with nothing to do.
The concept of retirement changed again in the 1960s with the development of retirement communities such as Sun City and Leisure World and the redefinition of retirement as "the Golden Years," a blissful time of recreation and travel unencumbered by financial worries. It was an almost utopian vision of retirement, one still frequently seen in Sunday morning television commercials extolling the oxymoronic virtues of an "active life of leisure."
Today, however, that vision is collapsing as more and more retirees discover that they aren't wealthy enough to sustain decades of leisure and/or are psychologically unprepared for a lifestyle defined by the golf course, the shopping mall, and the casino. At the same time, the Social Security system is teetering on the brink of insolvency and the American workforce is facing serious shortages in fields such as education, health care, and public service.
For Freedman, the solution to both problems is to replace the traditional notion of retirement with a phased transition from one career to a second, "encore" career. The first phase, a one- or two-year "gap" devoted to the leisure and recreation formerly relegated to traditional retirement, serves as a transition to a second career in which the skills and experience accumulated in the primary career are directed to a new purpose. True retirement, if it occurs at all, takes place considerably later in life, perhaps in one's mid-seventies.
While Freedman does not rule out the business world as a source of encore careers, it is clear that his vision is for boomers to become "the backbone of education, health care, nonprofits, the government, and other sectors essential to national well-being." He convincingly argues not only that boomers are particularly well-suited for these roles given their life experience, but that labor shortages in crucial fields such as teaching and nursing demand intervention from the boomer generation.
To demonstrate that encore careers are already becoming an attractive alternative to traditional retirement, Freedman intersperses his chapters with personal accounts of individuals who have embraced new careers in later life, including a car salesman turned social entrepreneur, a homemaker turned Episcopal priest, and a truant officer turned critical care nurse.
I immediately identified with Ed Speedling, a health care executive turned advocate for the homeless, who like me mistakenly believed that his past job experience would make him irresistible to nonprofits. "The real problem, I thought," says Speedling, "would be how to choose from the many offers I would receive." Well, the joke was on him!
Unfortunately, Goodman warns, good intentions are not enough to ensure a smooth transition to a new career, and boomers must be prepared to face institutional roadblocks from potential employers as well as financial disincentives from the government. He proposes a number of initiatives to address these problems, including national service programs, increased flexibility at the workplace, and the enactment of an Encore Bill, fashioned roughly after the GI Bill, to remove barriers to employment beyond retirement age. The alternative, he believes, is a population of boomers "left at loose ends, underemployed, lacking purpose, [and] feeling diminished and betrayed."
The book is attractively designed by Jenny Dossin, and portraits of the encore careerists are supplied by photographer Alex Harris, lending a sense of intimacy to their stories. An appendix provides an introductory guide to finding encore careers, and further resources (including those all-important URLs) can be found in the endnotes and reading list. It's an impressive if compact package, and if I were to find myself out of work tomorrow, this book would be my first line of attack in finding a new career.
But no need for that, at least not now! It took longer than I had anticipated, but at the Foundation Center this boomer was eventually lucky enough to find the "what" to my "Now what?" — no joke. And with the help of books like Encore, others can look forward to doing the same.
Chuck Bartelt
Editorial Associate, Grants Processing
Foundation Center
New York, NY
