Abstract

Midway in Martha Holstein’s article, these words occur: “[P]eople [should] get the help they need, when they need it, in the way that they would like to receive it, without exploiting family members or imperiling their dignity or self-respect” (24). In an essay that brims over with worrisome news, that this seemingly anodyne sentence appears in the section devoted to utopian thinking is perhaps the most dispiriting thought it conveys. Not that there isn’t keen competition for the role. Holstein reminds her readers that the roots of the present and building crisis in long-term care sink deeply into an ideology especially entrenched in the United States; she suggests, as well, that the pernicious norms..