The Experience of Retirement »

Retirement brings with it the promises of leisure and freedom as well as the risks of boredom and isolation. When retirees rid their schedules of anything resembling the kinds of obligations that once had been imposed by work, they will experience a sometimes-uncomfortable absence of structure. In The Experience of Retirement, the distinguished sociologist Robert S. Weiss provides a detailed description of how some people plan their retirement, what life in retirement is like, and what makes for a fulfilling retirement. His engaging book can thus serve as a most useful guide. Weiss shows us both retirement's benefits and its possible costs, both the relief retirees can feel once free of work's stresses and constraints and the discomfort that can be caused by loss of the positive aspects of working life.

The book is based on extensive interviews with eighty-nine men and women before and after their retirement from middle-income careers. Weiss makes vivid their experiences by presenting, in their own words, their descriptions of leaving their careers, considering what to do with their time, confronting issues of income in retirement, dealing-sometimes-with social isolation, and reorganizing their lives. The interviews reveal the way in which retirement affects marriages and other familial relationships. Weiss concludes by presenting advice about retirement based on the actual experiences of retirees. For anyone approaching the age of retirement or already retired and looking for a more satisfying post-career life, for personnel managers, health care professionals, and all those who provide services for the retired, The Experience of Retirement will be an illuminating guidebook to this phase of life.

Author Bio:Robert S. Weiss is a Senior Fellow in the Gerontology Institute and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Marital Separation, Learning from Strangers, and Staying the Course.

Publishers Weekly

In this sympathetic but hardly groundbreaking study, Weiss captures the middle-class transition to retirement, a stage that proves less golden than complicated, conflicted and diverse. Based on interviews with 89 retirees from professional careers who live in the Boston suburbs, the book presents much of the data in the interviewees' own words. This gives the book emotional and textual immediacy, as the retirees voice their feelings of obsolescence and social isolation and their difficulties missing the daily structure previously provided by the workplace. However, Weiss notes that volunteerism, part-time jobs, hobbies and, for some, a strong marriage can at least partially offset the social connections and sense of identity many people lose when they stop working. He contextualizes the confessional passages with sociological analysis, concluding that retirement planning requires more than just financial forethought. Preparation for the psychological and sociological toll is just as important for professionals exiting the workforce. Weiss provides no magic formulas for retirement planning, just a better understanding of the emotional pitfalls that future retirees can anticipate, and that their family, friends and colleagues can help them combat. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.