The association of aging with decline is a pervasive story line in American culture. But it distorts the truth of people's experiences, according to Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a resident scholar in the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
Her new book, Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, is a wide-ranging manifesto that calls for a reexamination of damaging misconceptions about such issues as menopause, memory loss, late-life sexuality and end-of-life care.

In books such as Aged by Culture and Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Gullette, 69, has been a fierce critic of the negative messages society sends both men and women as they get older. But, she says, "I had never looked at the sources of ageism, or considered whether the situation was getting worse, or why it had gotten worse."

Mixing the personal with the political, and anger with compassion, Gullette tallies up the costs of America's misconceptions about aging. Among them: the disproportionate, and underreported, devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on older New Orleans residents; the many botched cosmetic surgeries; the belatedly discovered dangers of hormone therapies; and a terror of dementia that blinds us to the remaining capacities of those closest to us.