About this item
Along with Medicare, Social Security is one of the "rites of passage" older Americans experience. After contributing funds to this program their entire working lives, people are anxious to start cashing in on their monthly benefits. Idiot's Guides: Social Security offers simple and clear explanations of the history of the program, the traditional age requirement, disability and survivor benefits, and the future of Social Security. A bonus decision tree helps recipients maximize benefits based on such factors as how and when benefits are filed, marital status, and future plans.
About the Author
Jan Yager, Ph.D. is the author of more than 50 award-winning books, with one or more titles translated into 35 languages. Jan, the former J.L. (Janet Lee) Barkas, has a B.A. in Fine Arts from Hofstra University, an M.A. in Criminal Justice, from Goddard College Graduate Program, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from The City University of New York Graduate Center. She held a pre-doctoral fellowship in Medical Sociology from the National Science Foundation.Jan's master's thesis was on "Victims of Crime and Social Change." She went on to publish a book about crime victims, Victims, one of the first books to look at how victims were treated by the criminal justice system, published back in 1978. It led Edith Surgan, whose daughter had been murdered on a college campus in New York City, to become a victim advocate in her adopted state of New Mexico.Always ahead of her time, Jan's book on vegetarianism, THE VEGETABLE PASSION: A HISTORY OF THE VEGETARIAN STATE OF MIND, her first, published by Scribner's when she was just 26, led to a publication day interview on The Today Show followed by a publication party at a restaurant in Manhattan, which was written up in "Talk of the Town" in The New Yorker. Jan never gave up on her dream of having that book published in India. Emerald Publishing, based in Chennai, India, published her book, with an updated introduction, and the new title, A CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY OF VEGETARIANISM. (One of the many controversies in Jan's book was that she personally confirmed, through interviews in Germany with Albert Speer, Frau Winifred Wagner, Hitler's former secretary, among others, that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.) Besides crime victims and vegetarianism, other topics this prolific sociologist/criminologist/victimologist has explored over the years include how to find a romantic partner (125 WAYS TO MEET THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE) ; time management (WORK LESS, DO MORE; PUT MORE TIME ON YOUR SIDE; HOW TO FINISH EVERYTHING YOU START) ; and friendship (WHEN FRIENDSHIP HURTS; FRIENDGEVITY; and FRIENDSHIFTS) . Jan was just quoted about friendship in THE WASHINGTON POST in November 2021. (Her Ph.D. sociology dissertation was on friendship patterns.) Starting out as a fiction writer and poet, before switching to nonfiction, Jan returned to her fiction routes with the publication of three novels: ON THE RUN; JUST YOUR EVERYDAY PEOPLE and UNTIMELY DEATH. (She and her co-author of UNTIMELY DEATH, husband Fred Yager, went to Sweden for an author tour when the Swedish translation was published.) Jan's dream is to get one of her own full-length plays produced: THE MONARCH BUTTERLY (which Harold Pinter personally read and he praised it during their meeting in London) ; BUT I'M NOT READY TO SAY GOODBYE; and BETWEEN FRIENDS (a finalist in the Utah Shakespeare Playwriting Competition) .Her other dream is to get a movie made based on one of her books as well as a documentary about crime vic
