I should declare an interest, in the past I had a professional interest in this topic, so I have met a few of the academics cited, and may even have bumped into the author at some point. There has been a longstanding and growing academic interest in our changing demography including the issue of older workers.I am confident that this book will be required reading for academics in this field, as it brings together the available literature and undertakes a detailed comparison of statistics for the USA and England and Wales. Having said all that, I am reviewing this book as a lay reader. In essence this book is a series of tables of statistical analysis, and much of the text narrates these. Unfortunately for the lay reader these tables largely confirm what you might have guessed. There is some analysis of the overall policy context and policy prescription, the writing is commendably clear and well structured, but the scope of the book is limited.Simply lobbing in a few stories about people you met at a dinner party does not make for an academic analysis, but for most lay readers, some easy hooks would make the story far more engaging. Michael Marmot got a quick mention, but a chapter on the wider issues of inequality, class and how we look at such things, would have been interesting. As it stands the book is resolutely quantitative, with minimal qualitative element, and as a result treats people pretty much as a lump divided into certain analytical categories, a more anthropological view, while impossible to quantify precisely would have added interest.This is a topic that is calling out for a good mid brow popular social sciences book, this is a topic that is impacting on everyone, a lively policy area. I am confident that the analysis in this book would form the bedrock of any such book, but for a wider audience there needs to be more flesh on the bare statistics bones.Just as Richard Wilkinson wrote The Impact of Inequality before the decidedly similar but much more accessible (and better known) Spirit Level, it would be nice to see the author return (perhaps with a co-author) with a more populist book on this topic.