Different Shade of Gray

In this intelligent study, Newman, a Harvard urban studies professor and the author of No Shame in My Game, contends that aging, for a large population of minorities and working poor in inner city neighborhoods, is an experience fraught with insecurity, inadequate health care, penury and hard work. Her book is strongest when it employs individual experiences to explore larger themes, such as how the gradual deterioration of some city neighborhoods has affected a generation of middle class African-American women and their children. Newman does not shy away from touchy subjects, and devotes an entire chapter to exploring perceived resentments among different minority groups. Rather than focus on an ""experience of discrimination and hostility ""in her discussion of anti-Semitism in the African-American community, Newman explores how African Americans view other immigrant groups' rise to success against their own history of achievement. No discussion of race, class and the comparative advantages of different ethnic groups will yield easy answers, but Newman does an admirable job of fleshing out the various big-picture issues, ultimately calling for more awareness on the part of policy makers about the plight of the aging poor. ""If we have a commitment to seeing that the elder years are among the best years of any American's life, we must finish the job,"" she concludes. Her thoughtful volume is all the proof necessary.