About this item
For millions of Americans caregiving is the new normal. For Laura Katz Olson, a respected researcher of long-term care for the aging, "Elder Care Journey" chronicles the disruption of her world and how it is upended by the ever-increasing long-distance needs of her own mother. A healthy, Senior Olympics medal winner, Olson s mother is slowly and steadily incapacitated by Parkinson s disease and a gradual loss of vision. Thrust into a long-distance caregiving role, Olson finds her previous academic notions about assisting a frail parent increasingly at odds with the reality of the lived experience. In a narrative full of ah-ha moments, tears, sighs, and outrage that will be familiar to many, Olson opens a window into the nursing home and home care industries that consume much in the way of taxpayer dollars, but often fail to deliver quality care.
About the Author
Laura Katz Olson is Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University since 1974. She received her bachelor's degree from the City College of New York and her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has published widely in the field of aging, health care and women's studies, her articles addressing social welfare policy, especially the problems of older women and long-term care. To date, she has published eight academic books and a novel: Elder Care Journey: A View from the Front Lines; The Politics of Medicaid; The Handbook of Long-Term Care Administration and Policy; The Not So Golden Years: Caregiving, the Frail Elderly and the Long-Term Care Establishment; Age Through Ethnic Lenses: Caring for the Elderly in a Multicultural Society; The Graying of the World: Who Will Take Care of the Frail Elderly; Aging and Public Policy: The Politics of Growing Old in America; The Political Economy of Aging: The State, Private Power and Social Welfare; and Heart Sounds (her first novel) .She has been a Scholar at the Social Security Administration, a Gerontological Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. She also has lectured throughout Pennsylvania on Social Security, Medicare and Long-term Care policies, funded by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Olson has served as an elected member of the American Political Science Association Council and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Aging Studies and New Political Science.In 2009, she received the Charles A. McCoy Lifetime Achievement Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association and, in 2012, Lehigh University's Williamson Award in Social Research for her book The Politics of Medicaid.Laura enjoys running, bicycling, backpacking, kayaking, canoeing, cross-country skiing, playing the guitar and gardening. In 2004, she published her first novel, Heart Sounds. Her daughter, Alix Olson, is a performance poet, PhD Candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts and mother of her adored grandson, Zinn. She also takes pleasure in grandchildren, Josh and Ellie. Laura lives with her husband George, a blue grass musician and luthier.She still visits her mother every day at Gracedale Nursing Home. Dottie is now 93.
